Next Steps

Good morning, my friends. It was a good day of sewing yesterday. I've taken two projects to the next step in the process. Of course, no day of sewing is complete without first spending some time with my slow-stitching in the morning. I'm nearing a finish of the Catmint piece.

Next up, I finished quilting the remaining blocks in the Domestic Affairs quilt.

It's hard to see the quilting on the back, but here's a peek.

Whenever I'm working on a quilt, I think of it as a learning experience. If my goal is to learn something, then I can always be successful because there is no end to learning. This quilt has helped me to learn to fill in the available spaces and turn corners with the feathering. 

Recently, my friend, Kathy, told me she was hoping to master feathers. It reminded me of the moment I had them figured out. If you've been following for a long time, you might remember when I made this baby quilt for a friend. The baby's father was a firefighter, and she requested a quilt with that theme. I made this quilt called "To the Rescue" almost (gulp) ten years ago.

The quilt contained two blocks that looked like this:

Apparently, I didn't take detailed pictures at the time, but I quilted the water coming from the hose as I've tried to diagram it on the right below. (It's kind of hard to do that in Photoshop using a mouse, so I apologize for the primitive drawing.)

When I'd finished it, I realized it looked like a feather, and somehow from that moment on, the muscle memory of the design was magically embedded into my feeble brain. And I'm certainly no expert when it comes to quilting feathers, but I can attack them with a modicum of confidence these days.

If you're hoping to do more of this with your own feather quilting, I can also recommend this book from Patsy Thompson:

It has some beautiful designs within, and I'm often paging through it for ideas.

So that was my quilting limit for the day. From there, I headed into the sewing room to work on the Shop Hop 3.0 quilt. Smitty was waiting for me.

Knowing I'd be wanting another embroidery project soon, I decided to ready the 8th block for Grandpa's Bridges. All the blocks are printed onto Sticky Fabri-Solvy. I took this along as a travel project last year, and having the blocks already printed is helpful when we're traveling. It means packing less equipment. So here's the next block for this quilt. I'll stitch the next places and names for the Shop Hop 4.0 quilt first, but then I'll get started on this one.

And then I went to work sewing the remaining book blocks into rows. 

Row 3:

Row 4:

And Row Five.

The rows are 47 inches wide, and so I made the four horizontal sashings I'll need to finish them off. 

That will be my goal for the day. Probably, I'll have enough time to sew a border around them, and I'm hoping to have a finished quilt top by day's end.

Before I do any more on the Shop Hop quilt, I'll get to work quilting the sashings and cornerstones for Domestic Affairs today. I'm hoping to can get at least half the quilt finished, but I'm always being careful of my wrist. It's in my best interest to set a timer and limit my quilting time to one hour. Will I act in my best interest? It's anyone's guess. Sometimes it's hard to stop once I get started. 

We've already had our breakfast this morning. I'm going to do some slow-stitching, and then I'm going to make a Bacon and Pea Salad for tonight's dinner. I have some diced pancetta left over from another dish, and it'll be a good way to use that up. I'm also trying a recipe for "Sweet Glazed Chicken Thighs." It's another one I snagged off the Cooking Light Diet website before it was shut down. (Sniff.) If it's good, I'll tell you all about it in tomorrow's post.

And with that...I'm off. But then, you already knew that.