Quilting and Sewing

Good morning, my friends. It was a pretty lackluster day yesterday. The weather was nice enough, but the rain set in late in the day, and it will be with us for a while. No matter. It's too cold to be outside anyway. Watching the weather through my window as I'm quilting is enough for me.

My morning started with the first stitches for "Making a Daisy Chain." I expect I'll finish this today.

Knowing I'd be needing something new to stitch, I traced the next block for A Year in the Garden. This is February's block. This was a free pattern from Jenny of Elefantz way back in 2018. It's available in her Etsy shop now.

I'm barely started on the blocks for this quilt. Here's January's block, completed last month.

I wanted to work on my quilting while it was still light outside, and so that was my next stop. I quilted the two pieced blocks at the left edge of the quilt.

And then I went to work outlining and pebbling in the "Toad Warts" bottle. About halfway through, I needed to rewind my bobbin. That took longer than expected. The thin lightweight Bottom Line thread wants to jump out of the tension disks on my bobbin winder. It took me a while to remember that I need to wrap it around the tension disks twice before attempting to wind the bobbin. I had a couple of false starts, but eventually got on my way again. And that was all the quilting I did yesterday. When the pebbling was finished, my one-hour was up.

So far, so good with my wrist. I believe I've found the safe combination for getting through a big quilting project.

From there, I returned to the sewing room. No progress can be made sewing the "Seasons" quilt into a quilt top until the pieced blocks are finished. I did spring's block yesterday. These were the pieces I needed. Fortunately, I have plenty of fabric leftover from the stitchery backgrounds, and so I'll use that for any background pieces in these blocks.

When it was all finished, it looked like this. It ends up at 12-1/2 inches, which is the size I was expecting. You can find the tutorial for these tulips right here.

That was all I had time for yesterday. If there's sewing time today, I'll start on the paper-pieced sun block. I selected these fabrics before I turned off the light for the day.

And I'm sorry for the poor quality of this next photo. My flash failed to fire for some reason. Sadie spent her sewing time snuggled up next to the fireplace. She's a heat-seeking cat.

So, today will be much like yesterday...stitching, quilting, and sewing. I have just one small housekeeping chore to complete, and I want to get in a Bowflex workout. Tomorrow will be a grocery shopping day. We want to get an early start, and so I'll probably be late checking in with y'all tomorrow morning. In the meantime, stay out of trouble, okay?