Lucky Finds

Good morning, my friends. It's a grocery shopping day, but there's no rush. As I'm writing it's still dark as night outside. We'll at least wait for the sun to come up.

It was a lucky day of sewing yesterday. It was my day to add the thread work to the "Mosaic" quilt. My hope was that the thread work would bring definition to the main subject of my quilt, and in that, I was successful. It worked out better than expected. And how could I go wrong when I had so many kitty helpers. Smitty took the high road.

Sadie, fresh off her kill of the feather toy behind her, took the low road. She needed to rest after her epic battle.

It was time to sandwich the Mosaic quilt. I decided to add the back from the get-go. Here's where I got lucky. I'd pulled a backing fabric the day before. When I opened it up, I found a scrap exactly the size I needed for my quilt back. And then, I opened up my bin of scrap batting. Right on top was a piece exactly the size I needed. How many times in a year does that happen? So...ready to go. 

Using the photograph as a guide, I drew in lines to demarcate the sections of the main subject. It was a pretty quick task since I was sewing to the edges of the quilt and could cut threads without the need to bury them. When it was finished, I was happy with what I'd done. It still needed squaring up. While it was tempting to cut those corners off prior to quilting, the book I was working from suggested leaving them until the end. If I'd cut them, I would have been working with bias edges, and those would be prone to stretching.

Then I squared it up. Here's your peek.

I found a perfect binding in my bag of scrap bindings. It was only about half the length I needed, but I found some more of the same fabric in one of my smaller scrap bins. I always love it when I can use one of those cut-off ends of bindings from an earlier quilt.

Now, it's clipped and ready for me to go to work hand-sewing it. I don't expect that will take very long. It ends up at 12 x 18 inches.

By rights, I should be moving on to my list of WIPs today, starting with Block 3 for the Merry, Merry Snowmen.

I'll get to that soon enough, but I have a baby quilt on my agenda today. My friend Sue's oldest son presented her with her first grandchild this month, a boy. His name is Corbin. I've been perusing my baby quilt patterns, considering what I could make for little Corbin. When we get home today, I'll start looking into my fabrics to see what might work best. No decisions are made yet, but I expect I'll have something in the works by this afternoon. 

That's all I have for you today. The day holds a finish and a start for me. No rest for the weary. But then...quilts. Whoever gets weary from making quilts?