Good morning, my friends. How is everyone doing out there? Many of us here in the USA are sitting on pins and needles waiting for our election season to end. Without diving into the political divide, I'll just say that I, for one, am glad to be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. And I have lots of tunnels to use as examples. Here's one now...
Take heart, my friends. Just one more week, and we'll be on the other side of all of this. And may the best candidate win.
My yesterday started with slow-stitching, as you might guess. It saves my sanity in difficult times. This is the 20th of 25 blocks for The Story of My Day quilt. This is the "Perfect Day" block.
With that finished, I went to work on the top shelf of my pantry. There isn't much progress to see there. A few things ended up in the Goodwill box, and I put away a small fan I no longer use. It was fine sitting there on the shelf, but its new home in the closet will keep it from getting so dusty.
Today, I'll start on the shelf below. It's all home-canned pasta sauce, salsa, pie fillings, and chutneys. This won't change much...possibly a little rearranging...but mostly, I'll just dust off the shelf and the tops of the jars. If you're wondering about the two hooks hanging from the bottom there, I use those to hang my
Roul-Pat. I use it for rolling pie crusts and cookie dough. When I'm finished, I run it under water and then hang it to dry before rolling it up and storing it in an old cardboard paper towel tube.
I had some housekeeping chores to do in between, but I made it into the sewing room shortly after lunch. Smitty followed me and professed to be helping. He was actually just there for the catnip. After he'd snuffled down his fill, he left to take a nap.
I was busy sandwiching Phenology for quilting. This will get quilted fairly soon. I'm still waiting for my wrist to feel better. It improves every day, but certain movements still cause me to wince in pain. Until it's completely healed, I need to hold off on any quilting.
That took just a few minutes, and then I was ready to sew borders on the two latest blocks for The Story of My Day. These are a bit of a puzzle to put together. Sadie spent some time reading the instructions.
But then she felt she could best be helpful by laying her furry body right where I was measuring and cutting. And let me just tell you, good sewing helpers like Sadie are hard to find.
With her help, I added the border to Block 19: Time to Day Dream.
And then Block 20: Perfect Day.
Each one took about an hour. (See "puzzle" and "Sadie" above.) Here are the 20 blocks I have for this quilt so far. I need to make five more before it will be ready to be sewn into a finished quilt top.
There wasn't much time left in the day to spend with Ruth's Legacy. I did select out the two blocks with the biggest horizontal and vertical dimensions. The one on the left is 18 inches wide. The one on the right is 19 inches tall.
I have in mind to give each block a one-inch stop border using one of the colors in the block, but also seen in the fabric below. I have two yards of this pretty batik. It should be enough to sash the blocks together somehow.
The book,
When Quilters Gather,
suggests making a scene. The one pictured in the book seemed too busy to me. I want to do something similar with my blocks, but I want to try to make it a little easier for my eyes to find a place to rest. The first step will be to add a stop border to all the blocks, and then I'll try to figure out how to place them into some sort of cohesive whole. I'm afraid it will be a tall order.
But I'll just finish up here by saying it's not a tall order to honor your furry friends. It's National Cat Day today. Here are some handy guidelines I found in my Facebook scrolling.
The cats in our lives have just three words for the day:
I don't know about you, but I have my work cut out for me today. If I'm not dispensing cat treats, you can find me doling out catnip. It's going to be a busy day.
4 comments:
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much. ~ Mark Twain
Your kitty helpers are pretty entraining. Thankfully, Queenie limited herself to just p;laying with the tape measure and stayed off the table. That patchwork Batik is really pretty. I'm looking forward to seeing how your Maker blocks go together.
Your borders on Phenology are just so clever. The little narrow piece works great for separation, and the colors pick up on the pretty colors in the embroidery. Well done!
Somehow I have my doubts that just one more week will settle it. I suspect there's going to be a lot of scary stuff to come.
Enjoying watching your shelf organizing because I'm in the throes of that too, only we're doing the entire apartment. Don't know if you knew that two days before we went away we had to move everything out of the cupboards and off shelves, plus pull furniture out from the walls so we could be sprayed for cockroaches. Preventative in our case - but we know they're in the building (I know...yewwww). We left everything in a huge mess and went away for 2 weeks and have had to face putting everything back once we got home. We decided to do a whole-scale clearing of the entire place while we were at it. Won't tell you how much has found it's way outta here but it's a lot. Currently working on my sewing room which I expect will take me at least a week.
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