Marathon Stitching

Good morning, my friends. It was a beautiful day of weather yesterday. It looks like we're in for another pretty day today. It's a grocery shopping day, and so a dry day is always appreciated. The sky was pretty this morning, treating us to some pink and blue stripes of sky.

My day yesterday was spent hand-stitching...almost the whole day. Smitty was only too happy to help.

I was working on the embroidered portion of my Project Quilting 16.1 challenge...Mythological Creatures. I'll show this to you when I have it finished, but for now, I'm only giving you peeks. 

All that stitching paid off because I'm down to just borders, quilting, and binding now. I stitched through an entire skein of DMC black, and started on a new skein before I was finished. 

Mid day, I took a break from hand-stitching and went into the sewing room to sandwich the baby quilt for quilting. When I did, I noticed Smitty had taken up a position on his new kitty pole. They're still sniffing around it. Kitties are 'spicious about things that are new. You wouldn't want to end up getting carted off to the vet, and so it's important to resist the urge to engage in too much 'sploring. (Also, have you noticed how kitties have a habit of cutting off the first syllable of their words? Weird, huh?)

 

So, downstairs, the quilt was very well behaved. It laid flat, as it should, and I found a piece of scrap batting just the right size right away. I'm calling this quilt "Bear Necessities."

Back up two floors, I went to work on the quilting. I decided on a slightly variegated mint green for the top thread. This is an Aurifil 50 weight thread.

In the bobbin, another 50 weight Aurifil. (These threads brought to you by my quilting fairy godmother, Ila. Thank you, Ila.)

Usually I quilt this pattern using a straight-line diagonal grid. For this quilt, I decided to do something a little less industrial with this dot-to-dot pattern. I don't always add the petals in the center, but I'm doing it for this quilt. And, actually, this design is even easier than quilting with straight lines. No rulers required. I'll admit that I use a Hera marker and a ruler to crease the solid blocks, turning them into four-patches for quilting purposes.

Before stopping for the day, I had half the rows finished.

It's a little hard to see from the back, but here you go anyway. What I love about this design is that it's so pretty on the back.

And then, I left it needle down. Here's where I'll start next.

So, as I mentioned, we have grocery shopping to do, with two other stops along the way. I should have most of the afternoon to get back to my sewing. It's a hard choice because I'm enjoying both projects. I believe I'll give the Project Quilting piece first priority since there is a deadline to meet. I'm going to try doing a faced binding for the first time, and so I'm hoping I can get it at least to binding stage today. My thanks go to my friend, Wendy, who shared this excellent tutorial on faced bindings quite some time ago.

On the other hand, I'm kind of wanting to finish off the baby quilt too. I'll have to see which I want more when I'm able to get back to sewing. It's every quilter's dilemma, I think. What should I do next? Check back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.