Nearing a Finish

Good morning, my friends. I'm writing fast this morning. My morning starts early today. I have to drive into downtown Portland for a little meet-up with my dentist. I like my dentist, but on the other hand, I hate the dentist. As we've already established in a previous post, a visit with the dentist is the only thing I dislike more than taking the kitties to the vet.

Smitty is just glad he's not the one packing up (or being packed up) to go this morning. He's enjoying the one tiny patch of sunlight on our deck.

Mike and I indulged in a morning of sloth yesterday. It seems as if we both need to take a day now and then. For all my talk about the things I was going to do in yesterday's post, the only thing I was able to get finished was the quilt top for the Beach Bum ladies. The kitties haven't been around much for this project. Sadie gave it a good once over.

Smitty, I think my tail end is better than any of these, don't you?

You could be right about that Sadie. Certainly, your tail is more compact than theirs.

Take a look at that, ladies. Gaze upon it and weep!

Let me just say that the ladies were unmoved. We just went ahead and gave them some palm fronds. I think they need it, don't you? With all that pale skin showing, I'm hoping they wore some sunscreen to this little tete-ta-tete. 

The palm fronds took much longer than expected. Tracing and cutting them probably took the better part of an hour. Then positioning them was tricky too. They were hard to move around once the backing was removed...all floppy and leggy.

When they were positioned and pressed down, the top was finished.

From there, I cut and pieced a back to size. This backing was left over from when I made the Strips & Stripes quilt.

Also, I had some scrap binding and enough fabric left to cut binding strips from this fabric.

It still needs to be sandwiched, and then it will be ready for quilting. I won't get to that right away. There are a few projects in line ahead of it, but I'll probably have it finished before the end of the year.

Assuming the dentist doesn't kill me this morning (and there's no reason to think he will, but, you know...it's good to plan ahead), I'll get the borders sewn onto my two "Joy in the Ordinary" blocks today. After that, I'll get a start on quilting the Shop Hop 2.0 quilt. I'm still mulling over what to do there. Sometimes I just have to wait and see where my hands take me.

Okay...so I must hurry off. Wish me luck. If you never hear from me again, you can assume it was a deadly day of dentistry.