Block House

Good morning, my friends. It rained, and rained, and rained yesterday, which is nothing new for November in Oregon. It made for a stay-in-the-house-all-day day. And, of course, there's no better weather for sewing. Unless you want to sew outside. Then not. It's looking a little less rainy today. Cloudy, but so far, none of the wet stuff. I'm probably going to make a quick trip into town today. I need to pick up some white chocolate bars for holiday baking this week. Probably, I'll pick up whatever else is on the list too. There's a smaller store in town, well-stocked, but less busy. I'm hoping I can find what I need there and avoid the madness of our usual megamart.

As for yesterday's sewing, Smitty was my helper cat for the day.

He read the instructions for the new Shop Hop blocks out loud to me so that I could figure out how large to cut the pieces for the embroidered quilt shop names and places. The piece I'm using will be 3" x 10" which created a bit of a problem. To cut the piece to size, it would not fit for hooping in my smallest embroidery hoop. I needed to cut a fabric piece large enough to hoop, but in a size that would allow me to use the trimmed off portions for other parts of the block. (I hope that makes sense.) 

So with Smitty manning the calculator, we figured to measure one inch down from the top of the fabric, and line up the top of the capital letters there. With that measured out, I could trace the names onto the fabric. When the block is sewn together, the name and place will be just a tad above center.

It left me barely enough room to capture it in my hoop, but I can work with this.

I'll be making this quilt two blocks per go-round, and so I needed a quilt name and place traced for the second block. These won't get made probably until next week sometime, but the embroidery will need to be finished first.

The next task was to make up another block for Grandpa's Bridges. When I opened the project box, I found this one all ready to go. If I'm remembering correctly, I made up several of these when we were traveling. This was the last one that was already made. It'll be next for stitching when I've finished the five snowmen for Snow Happens.

Yesterday evening, I had a brain storm about this quilt. I remembered these two fabric panels I picked up at a West Virginia quilt shop.

I think when I'm ready to sew this quilt together (in about five years), I'll be able to use these panels in the quilt. I need to get them out and look at them again, but this has great potential.

With that ready to go, it was time to turn my attention to the Merry, Merry Snowmen. Again, and for reference, this is the block I'm making this time around.

I needed to make the bottom row of pieces first, starting with the peeking snowman. He'll need some hand embroidery for his face.

And I needed two square-in-a-square blocks.

And then I could sew the bottom row together.

Then, I added the remaining pieces, and the background was finished.

From there, I could begin the applique. The right side of the piece is ready for top-stitching now, but I'll be adding a snowman and a Christmas tree to the left side of the block today. It's a large block at 20 inches square.

I was getting kind of tired of sewing by then, and it was getting late in the day. Upstairs, I spent some more time finishing off the fourth snowman for Snow Happens. Lately, I've been starting and finishing each day with a little slow-stitching. I like to stitch while we watch the news and the weather.

And here's my gang of snowmen. Have you noticed my life is crowded with snowmen just now? I wonder if it's some kind of premonition about our coming winter weather. Hmmmm.

There's just one more to do now. I'll probably have the embroidery for this piece finished by tomorrow.

So, there's one housekeeping chore on my calendar today, and I'm going to make that trip into town a little later. I'll give the grocer a couple of hours to restock the shelves before I head in...but not too late. Maybe I can avoid the crowds if I time it carefully. And, hopefully, they haven't been bought out of the items I'm looking for.

After that, I'll get back to work on the Merry, Merry Snowmen. I should be able to finish the applique today, and then I'll get a start on the topstitching and hand embroidery.