January Last

Good morning, my friends. We're just about to say hello to February. We're another month closer to the departure date for our Fifty-Fifty trip to Alaska (that's our 50th state during our 50th year of marriage). I keep reminding myself it will be on us before we know it. I've made reservations for the first several days of our trip, and the rest will remain open. For this trip, we'll play it a little looser than usual and keep the length of our stay in any given place more flexible. It's a little too early to get excited about it, but the tension is starting to build.

My yesterday was a little slower than expected. I blame the cold and dark mornings. Generally, nature calls me to rise sometime during the four o'clock or five o'clock hour, and that usually wakes up my brain too much to get any more sleep. Lately, it's been so cold and dark, it's been easy to get back under the covers and fall back asleep until a more civilized hour. And that means I don't really start my day until it's almost lunch time. I still wanted to get in a walk on the treadmill, and I wanted to do my one small housekeeping chore. I threw in some laundry too. When all was said and done it was nearly 3:00 p.m. before I could get any sewing done.

There was quite a bit of cutting for this background. 

Before I could sew the background together, I wanted to fuse the peeking snowman into the corner. I like to catch the corner part in the seam allowance.

I'm also trying to choose fabrics that match the picture on the pattern as much as possible. Here's the pattern picture:

When I had it sewn together, it looked like this:

From there I could start on the applique. Smitty was standing by. He wanted to do the tracing. Sadly, the lack of thumbs makes it difficult for him to hold a pen in his paw.

Getting such a late start meant I didn't get very far. When I turned off the lights, I had it this far along. 

When I started on this, I made the mistake of not reversing the pattern, and so my first snowman ended up facing the wrong direction. (He's the one at the bottom.) Happily, he's identical to the one above, and so I can still use him when I make the lower cup. The rest of the applique should be pretty quick, and then I'll be ready to do the top-stitching. The snowman faces and buttons will need to be hand-stitched, but I think I can do the rest of the embroidery by machine. I expect to have this finished today.

So tomorrow is February 1st. For the last six years, I've participated in the "Stitched Inchies" to celebrate International Embroidery Month. These are the quilts I've made, and they have been so much fun:

As you may or may not know, Meg Hawkey of Crabapple Hill Studios, is retiring. She isn't doing a stitch-along this year, but she announced a free download yesterday and invited us to stitch it during the month of February. This is a screenshot of her announcement on Facebook:

So, I've downloaded the patterns (one download for both), and I'll add "Choose Kindness" to my list of short embroidery projects to be stitched whenever Mr. Random chooses its number. I only mention this for those of you who might enjoy stitching along during the month of February. You can find the free download right here.

In other news, February 1st (tomorrow) will be the reveal of my art quilt for the "Mosaic" challenge. I'll probably still assail you with other news from the sewing room, but if you've been waiting on tenterhooks to see the "Mosaic" quilt, then be sure to come back tomorrow for a look at the whole thing.

Finally, there will be another prompt announced Sunday for Project Quilting 16.3. So there's plenty to keep me busy over the next week. I'll get back to the Merry, Merry Snowmen today, and then I'll make another five blocks for the Duckworth quilt I started recently.

We're expecting snow at our place, probably starting tomorrow evening and continuing on through next Thursday. Our local weatherman was poo-pooing the idea of snow to the valley floor, minimizing the amount expected. But we're at 1,400 feet here at the Three Cats Ranch. We get snow when nobody else does. So, it's about to get interesting here. Stay tuned.