A Finish and a Start

Good morning, my friends. Finally...writing at a leisurely pace. I can write slow through the weekend, but then it'll start back up again next week. We're taking the truck in Monday to have the air conditioner fixed. It's a little late for the hot weather, but oh well. On Tuesday, I'm getting my hair cut and colored. It's badly needed. But, hey...we have groceries to get us through the first part of next week, and that's always a good thing.

Before we left home yesterday morning, I was just a few stitches away from finishing the first block for "Home is Where my Flock Is." When we got home, I finished it off.

Since the floss for my "Sashiko" piece still has not arrived, I'll get to work on the next two embroidered sections for the Raggedy & Friends quilt. These are the two I'll stitch next. This is the picture from the pattern.

Sadie was there to help me with the switcheroo on my project boxes, but she wasn't at all sure it was safe. Was that bad man from the day before still here? And since the doors to her clubhouse were closed, she felt as if she needed to turn her lasers on low beam.

Thankfully, Smitty was there to reassure her that the coast was clear.

But we didn't spend much time in the sewing room yesterday. We had quilting to do in my office upstairs. It was time to turn my attention to the Stitching Wisdom quilt. It's been awaiting its turn under my needle for quite some time.

I spent some time sorting through my thread boxes looking for something I liked for the top and bobbin threads. After settling on something, I took the cover off the machine and discovered it was already loaded with a perfectly acceptable thread, and a nearly-full bobbin. So, I'll stick with that. It's a 50-weight Essential thread. I have the same thread in the bobbin.

From there, I spent quite a bit of time perusing my Pinterest files trying to decide how to quilt it. It's hard to decide on these embroidered quilts. I don't want to get too carried away because I don't want the quilting to compete for attention with the hand embroidery. Everything I looked at left me feeling pretty meh, and so I went to the Bird Brain Designs website to see how they'd done it. They used a kind of half feather design around the outer edges of the embroidered blocks, and that was what I had in mind too.

Okay, so I was ready to start. Next, I flipped the excess backing fabric over to the top to check my tension. That looks pretty good.

The back looks good too.

For functionality, I did a little meander in the block center, and then outlined the design with the half feather.

Here's how that looks from the back.

My plan is to quilt a row of blocks each day, and then work on the sashings and borders. If I do that, I can have the quilting finished in about a week. So I continued on with the next two blocks in that row. I'm letting the embroidery tell me what kind of a meander I should do in the middle.

For this next one, I went around the heart.

And that was enough for the day. It's a little hard to see the stitching on the back. I've messed with the contrast and brightness in this next image. I'm hoping you can see it.

And then I left it needle down on the next row of blocks. That's where I'll pick it up today.

Also today I'm making dinner in the morning. It's going to be hot today, and so a pasta salad and a watermelon salad will be a nice cool dinner. (I like it when dinner time arrives, and dinner is already made.) When that's finished, I'll get back to my quilting. Hopefully, I'll have time today to start sewing together the Cats in Pajamas. All the pieces are cut. It's just a matter of sewing it all together.

Just as I was getting ready to publish this post, we spotted a barred owl in our field. He was in the grass, going after one the mice Smitty and Sadie haven't caught yet. The mouse must have gotten away because he's sitting on the bird feeder right now...lying in wait.

Okay...since the day is supposed to be a hot one, I'll commence trying to stay cool right now. What are you doing to stay cool?