Five Fabulous Fannies

Good morning, my friends. The busy weekend is over, and it's a new day. The sky was pretty this morning.

We had a really nice visit with the kids yesterday evening. We were celebrating Erik's birthday from last week, but mainly, we were just visiting. Time spent listening to the things they're doing is always enjoyable.

There was a lot to do yesterday morning, but I took some time to stitch the first stitches on the 6th of Grandpa's Bridges.

From there, I went straight to work, baking some cookies. These were just a present for Erik. He's not big on sweets, but he likes these cookies. These Chocolate-chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries are so good, they're the only cookie I make any more. As I've noted at the link I've given you, they can also be made with dried cranberries and white chocolate chips to make them more of a Christmas cookie. (It's closer than you think.) 

While those baked, I went to work preparing an apple crisp. I'm riffing off the recipe from the Quaker Oats website.

After that, I did my Bow-flex workout and then headed outside to check in on the Fuzzy Wuzzy dahlia. It's made a little progress, but it still has a long way to go. We're expecting heavy rain later in the week, so I'm really hoping it will open before then. 

And then I could get to my sewing, finishing off the fifth lady. 

Here they are all sitting together. Looks like a good party, no?

Today I'll add some palm fronds on both sides, and it will be ready for top-stitching. As I've been fusing the applique, I've been thinking about the top-stitching. Some of the pieces are small. The flip-flop straps are a good example of what I'm talking about. They're less than an eighth of an inch in some spots. Usually, I'll top-stitch applique using the blanket stitch on my sewing machine. In this case, even if I narrow the stitch, I still think it will be too much for those little pieces.

Instead, I'm going to sandwich this for quilting, and then straight stitch all around the pieces. The top-stitching will also serve as the quilting. I did the two McKenna Ryan quilts I've made the same way, and it works out well. When passing from one motif to the next, I don't cut threads, but leave a long jump thread to be trimmed away when it's finished. It ends up looking pretty from the back. You can see what I'm talking about at this post here.

It was tempting to finish off the palm fronds yesterday, but I was getting close to the time I wanted to make some Sangria. I have a couple of different versions of this. Sangria is Spanish, and so I used a Spanish red wine called Garnacha, which is recommended for Sangria. It was good. I used this large jug with a spigot for serving, and I set it on a frozen gel pack to keep it cold.

This is the recipe I'm using:

So that was a full day and a busy weekend. I'm happy to say there's absolutely nothing on my to-do list today. I'm still going to take a walk on the treadmill, but after that it's going to be NBS. (Nothing but sewing.) I'll finish off my Beach Bums ladies, and I'll probably sandwich them for quilting. The quilting won't happen right away. I'll add them to the "Small Quilts for Quilting" portion of my white board and take them in their turn. 

Other sewing I want to accomplish today will include adding borders to the two Joy in the Ordinary blocks I've finished recently. These two:

And that will bring me back to the beginning of my white board work flow. Next up will be to start quilting Shop Hop 2.0. It's been lounging over Eliza for several weeks, allowing its wrinkles to relax out. 

Probably I'm going to do some kind of dot-to-dot quilting on this, Angela Walters style, but I haven't got it all worked out yet. You'll be the first to know when I do.

There's been no kitty help for the past couple of days. All the activity over the weekend made them nervous. In my experience, nothing brings a kitty around faster than starting a free-motion quilting project. They're all about controlling the speed. So, my friends, it's going to be a good day of doing only what I feel like doing. And when one is expecting a good day, it's makes sense to get started on it as soon as possible.