Fresh Start

Good morning, my friends. It was a good day of sewing yesterday. I was able to finish off the Circus piece. It just needs the binding hand-sewn now. Today's sewing will probably be mostly hand-sewing, although I'm going to make good on my threat to sew the Kittens blocks into a finished quilt top.

There still is no plan for these. I've been mulling it over, and I have a couple of ideas. We'll all just have to wait and see what my hands do with them. It's unlikely that I can finish it today, but I'll get it started. 

We have a little bit of a busy day ahead. We're going to attend a town hall with one of our Oregon senators, Senator Jeff Merkley. I've never been to a town hall before, but it seems like a good time to go. That will take most of the afternoon, and so there isn't going to be much time for sewing today.

Backing up to yesterday, I made a little more progress on March's block for A Year in the Garden. I wanted to stitch some at the top so that I could move my hoop down to encompass the entire fence at the bottom.

And now, it's just a matter of stitching, stitching, stitching until it's all finished. That will be a few days from now. This being Sunday, I'll be linking up to

The rest of the afternoon was spent finishing off my "Circus" piece. I needed to do some thread painting. When I was satisfied I'd done enough, I added the quilt back and did a little more light quilting. When it was ready for binding...yeah...just a peek for you:

Be glad it's nearly finished. After my next post, you won't see it again until I can reveal it on May 1st. (By then, it'll be just a few more weeks until we leave for Alaska!)

Okay, but I still needed to select a binding fabric. I'd selected a dark gray solid originally. It was one I used when I made this Halloween costume for Erik way back when he was in kindergarten. 

He's 45 now, so you do the math.

So I was going to use that, but when I opened it up, I realized it was a heavy twill. I was afraid it was too heavy to use as a quilt binding, and so I selected something else. Sadie brought her shadow self as back-up. She was lobbying for the same red from the quilt top.

A few other fabrics were auditioned, but in the end, I went with Sadie's choice. 

And now it just needs hand sewing, and my quilt will be finished. Yay! I'm never sure I can pull off these collage quilts created from photographs. This one worked out. They all have, when I think about it. Still, it's always forbidding to start one.

Okay, so we've had our breakfast. I'm going to get to work on the quilt binding. The quilt ends up at 25 x 19 inches, so it's a little less than 100 inches around. Possibly, I can do it in one sitting. We'll need to leave home around 2:00 for the town hall today. There's no time like the present. Hopefully, I'll learn something reassuring today. If so, I'll share it with you in tomorrow's post.