Scrappy

Good morning, my friends. It's foggy and bright outside. Probably we'll get some sunshine when the fog burns off. For now, it seems as if we're sitting inside a cloud. A new day starts. What's on tap for the day's activities? Well, let's just back up and see what happened yesterday. As you might guess, it was terribly exciting. Read that: "Boring." And that's my kind of excitement.

Sadie was my helper cat the day before, and so Smitty took a turn helping me finish off the new Duckworth quilt I'm calling "Land and Sea."

I only needed to add a few more strips to bring them to the 10-1/2 inch size I wanted. When they were trimmed, they looked like this.

That completes what will be the first of six rows for this quilt.

Smitty was completely worn out after that. He retired to his office in HR (He Rests).

Thankfully, Sadie showed up right on time for her shift. She helped me clean up my mess of green scraps.

I went back and forth, deciding what to do next. There are still a few days of work left on the "Bicycles and Lace" piece, but it seemed like a good time to trace out the next "short" project. I'll be doing the Catmint block which is a part of the Twilight Garden quilt pattern from Crabapple Hill Studios. It was released as a BOM a while back. I didn't want to make the whole quilt...actually, I did, but you know...UFO's. When this block was released, I decided to add it to my list of "short" embroidery projects.

Recently, I asked Mr. Random to choose my next project, and he just kept choosing the wrong thing. I finally stepped in and selected this block. Also, I picked out some floss colors from my vast embroidery floss stash.

And since I was kind of worn out on picking through scraps, I gave myself a little break by tracing out this stitchery.

The instructions would have had me color this with colored pencil. Since people often ask me about this, I'll say that (in my opinion), pencil gives a better result, but crayon is a less involved process. I've done both, and I prefer to use crayon, which is what I did here. (And if you click on those links, you can see how each is done.)

Okay, so that was pretty quick. Now it's ready for stitching, but it will be a few days before I start on it.

Instead, I took a look at the Lightframe quilt. I'm making this quilt one row at a time. Each row starts with six half square triangles. Those were pretty quick to make.

This is another scrappy quilt and, frankly, I was picked out when it came to picking through more scraps. I decided to stop for the day there. It was a good thing because tracing out the cat completely wore Sadie out. When I turned off the lights, she was snoring away on her sewing room quilt.

So, today I'll get to work making the next row for the Lightframe quilt. This is what I have so far:

Adding another row will put me over the halfway mark and on the downhill side.

If I can get that finished today, I'll make two more pieced blocks for the Girls' Getaway quilt. I've already stitched the centers for the next blocks.

Also, we've eaten our morning snack muffins, and so I'll make some more muffins this morning. Mike is often up very early in the morning, and the muffins tide him over until I can get up and join him for breakfast. Besides, I like the muffins too.

Okay, so we've already had our breakfast this morning. My next stop is for slow-stitching. I'm coming down the home stretch on my current project. Now that I've traced the next one, I want to finish the Bicycles and move along.