Settling in for Slow-Stitching

Good morning, my friends. Two projects made it to the next step yesterday. I'll tell you about that in a minute. First, I want to show you this morning's pretty sky. We're expecting rain by tomorrow, and so we're enjoying the blue sky while we can.

I'll tell you what else we're enjoying while we can...the last gasp of flowers. Things are Autumn pretty around town right now with so many colorful leaves on the trees. On closer inspection one can still find flowers. I found these Black-eyed Susans at the salon where I get my pedicure yesterday.

Sadie hasn't given up her Smitty vigil yet. Now she's guarding him from beneath. She's cleared all invaders to the front and back, but nobody is sneaking up from below either.

Okay, so before I left yesterday, I had time to finish up this sixth block for Grandpa's Bridges. While I was getting ready, I threw it in the washer to rinse out the Sticky Fabri-Solvy and then hung it to dry. It was ready for pressing when I arrived home again.

These are the six blocks I have for this quilt so far.

When I got home, it was time to square up the Shop Hop quilt for binding. That was my first step.

Then I sewed the binding strips together end to end and sewed them to the quilt.

Now, it's awaiting my arrival downstairs to get going on the hand-stitching. Smitty was rather put out that I interrupted his nap.

Before I left the sewing room, I took a look at my next project. I want to add borders to the Phenology piece and get it ready for quilting. I have in mind to use a fabric representative of each season. The fabrics were selected last week. Just looking at this, I'll want to add a narrow stop border coordinating with each fabric. I'm planning to do mitered corners on this, and so I'll have to re-teach myself to do that. It's been a long time. I'm not sure if I'll get to this today, but I'll get to work on it tomorrow for sure.

The only other thing I did yesterday was to work on the middle shelf in the image below. It was mostly condiments. It made sense to move the oats to the upper shelf beside the other cereals. It made a little more room for condiments, although I don't really need more room there. Mainly, I just organized the jars a little bit and dusted off the shelf. These shelves are terribly dusty after years of neglect, and so it's nice to clean them up some. Today, I'll focus on the shelf at the bottom of the image. It's all home-canned goods. There are more jars, but it will mostly be another day of moving things to one side or the other and dusting off the shelf. The tops of the jars can use a going-over too.

So the day is mainly going to be about slow-stitching. Fortunately, hand-stitching doesn't bother my wrist. It's still pretty painful, but I'm using the splint less and less. I want to get in another walk on the treadmill, and I'm going to need to run an errand in town either today or tomorrow. Also, I'm ready to bake some breakfast cookies for our morning snack, but that will probably have to wait for tomorrow.