Lots of Sewing

Good morning, my friends. I can see clearly now because I have clean windows. With window washer man here yesterday, I spent most of my day in the windowless sewing room staying out of his way. It's an excellent strategy, if I do say so myself. And I do. 

Kitties are not fond of Mans in their house, and so I had plenty of help in the sewing room. I had to run a couple of errands in town early, and window washer man was hard at work by the time I got home. I wasted no time heading into the sewing room. When I arrived, I found Smitty excited to get started.

As I'm sure I've mentioned before, Smitty is an excellent helper cat. If there were any justice in the world, he would have been awarded the Purrlitzer Prize for Quilting Cats by now.

He was helping me finish snowballing those sashing strips, but eventually tired of sewing so many little 1-1/2 inch squares to corners, trimming, flipping, and pressing. He realized his talents could be put to better use keeping the quilt blocks warm.

All the while I was stitching, trimming, flipping, and pressing...124 times. Finally I had both the horizontal and vertical sashings ready.

Sadie decided to take over at that point.

With his quilting cat expurrtise, he's been showing her the ropes of being a quilting cat. Obviously, she's taking his instruction to heart. She knows exactly where to stand in order to provide the most effective assistance.

And we weren't finished with all those little squares. We still needed 18 flying geese. No one was any happier than I was when these were finished.

Finally, I could start sewing the blocks together. So I sewed the first row, including the stop border on each end of the row.

I decided to add the top row of sashing to see how those starts would look.

It was getting late in the day, and I was ready to quit, but I was curious to finish off the tops of the stars. I added the stop border at the top, which included the flying geese serving as the tops of the stars.

And, whoa! Lookie there. I'm liking how this is going so far. That's where I left it for the night, and now I'm excited to get back to it and finish it off. I'm fairly certain I can get all the blocks and the stop border finished today. There will still be one border to add around the outside. Possibly, if I'm very energetic, I can having that finished today too.

The only other sewing I did yesterday was to stitch some more on Grandpa's Bridges. I stitched far enough to decide to move my hoop.

With all those long vertical lines, I want to be able to stitch the entire length. This piece is done mostly in stem stitch, and I like it better if there's no interruption to a line of stitching. So I moved my hoop to encompass the opening to the covered bridge where I can stitch those lines from start to finish.

I stitched a little more while we watched the news last night, but there's still a lot to do on this. 

Today I want to do battle with some more of the frozen zucchini. We like having a little sweet snack bread or muffin or cookie to have with our morning coffee. Today I'm going to bake some muffins. We're going to do our grocery shopping tomorrow, and so I need to make up a list. There's one small housekeeping chore on the day's to-do list. Also, I'll take a walk on the treadmill, and so the morning will be filled with all of that. Nevertheless, I'll have plenty of sewing time this afternoon. I'm excited to see how it's going to look when it's all finished.

So...onward. There's plenty to keep me busy today. Breakfast is next. Have a nice day, everybody!