A Little Sewing

Good morning, my friends. I was able to make it into the sewing room for a while yesterday. First, I needed to pick a bucket o' weeds. Check. I've only managed about 10% of the way around the house, and so there will be many more weed-picking days to come. Today is a grocery shopping day, and I'll have to wait and see if I'm up for more weeds today. Probably, yes. A bucketful is a reasonable amount.

Before the weeding, though, I finished off the 9th embroidered section for the Raggedy & Friends project.

There are 12 pieced blocks in this quilt. Most of them have two embroidered sections. The one above is only the first of two sections for the fifth pieced block. I'll finish the second one before moving along to the next project on my embroidery dance card. 

As for the sewing room, I went to work sewing the first block together for this project. These are all the pieces I would need.

Sadie protested being the helper cat for the second day in a row. 

I reminded her that Smitty's feet were still dirty from a day of hunting, and so she consented, grudgingly.

Smitty, for his part, spent his afternoon on the catio. Everyone is happy to be home.

Meanwhile, I sewed the first block together. It took much longer than expected. There was an error in the pattern, and that meant I had to unsew, recut, and resew the two black strips on the right and left. 

There are other errors in this pattern that were corrected during the time when the BOM blocks were being posted. If you're interested in making this quilt, you can find links to all of the blocks in the right sidebar of The Painted Quilt blog right here.

There should be time for sewing today, and so I'll get started on (and, hopefully, finish) the second block today. These are the two embroidered sections I'll be working with.

One other issue with this pattern is that the embroidered sections are trimmed so close to the running stitch frames that I'm having to fudge a little on the trimming. You can see in the first pieced block posted above that the lower embroidered section is stitched right to the edge of the embroidery...and that was with some fudging when I sewed it together. It will work if I used a scant 1/4-inch seam allowance...so far, at least. 

Okay, and so it's a grocery shopping day. Our list is long, with lots of fresh produce included. It's been a while since I've been to my "regular" grocery store, and so I'm curious to see if the produce section will be well-stocked. We expected limited supplies of fresh produce while traveling in Alaska. Here, in Oregon, I'm not sure what we'll find. With ICE rounding up the folks who pick our produce, it seems it will show up in the supply eventually. Time will tell. 

Breakfast is next, and then I'll probably spend a little time with the 10th Raggedy embroidered section before we take off. Our fellow shoppers are more likely to survive our return to the grocery store if I first steel myself with a little slow-stitching.