Good morning, my friends. I was up way too early this morning. It was during the 3:00 a.m. hour when my eyes popped open. I tried going back to sleep, but no dice. I had too many things on my mind. I'll tell you what happened next, but let's back up to yesterday first.
It was another day of getting up close and personal with my heating pad. I'm happy to report that my shoulder is nearly 100% today. I'm still being careful with it, but it's feeling much better. I expect I'll forget all about it by tomorrow. But all of that to say that spending time on my heating pad gave me lots of time for slow stitching. When I'd finished yesterday's session, I moved my hoop. And if you look at this, you can see that it's mostly finished. The most densely stitched parts are done. The rest shouldn't take more than a few days.
So now I've moved my hoop up to encompass the trees and most of the roof. I expect when I've finished today's stitching, I'll be moving my hoop to the lower right corner to finish the rest of the bridge.
Probably I had some lunch and a nap at some point, but when I went back to my stitching, I stitched around two more corners of the Barnyard quilt.
I might have finished it, but I was getting tired of sewing by then.
If you've been paying attention to the cat comings and goings, you might have noticed that Sadie hasn't been doing a lot of sewing lately. With weather turning more fall-like, she's discovered the luxury of flannel.
Part of what was keeping me awake in the early morning hours was thinking about this new project I'll start on today. This is the Fantastic Felines pattern/panel. I already had the panel, but I purchased a pattern that went with it recently.
Mainly, I wanted the pattern to figure out the math without having to engage my brain. I'm sure you understand the advantage that comes with letting someone else do the math. Yesterday afternoon, I opened the pattern and took a look. It includes two settings for the blocks. This one, that uses all six of the large blocks in the panel and all five of the small blocks.
For the other setting, they cut the block you see in the lower right in the image above into quarters, and then used it for the cornerstones in the image below. This one uses only 4 of the remaining 5 blocks. I want to use all the blocks, but I like what they did with the cornerstones. I'll probably do that too.
Also, I'm trying to use three different panels in this quilt, and so the picture from the pattern below is only a guide. My quilt is going to end up much larger. I was keeping myself awake trying to figure out how to arrange the blocks to make it look right.
Yesterday, I pawed through my stash of cat fabrics and other fabrics trying to decide what to use. Sadie helped me with that, having risen from her beautiful sleep.
She really likes how this combination shows off her beautiful furs.
So I've tentatively decided to use the cat fabric in the outer borders. Probably I have enough for the back as well. I'll use that orange one in the pieced blocks along with the dotted black fabric at the bottom of the image below.
And I'm still mulling over how I'll set the blocks. Probably I'll just make all of them first and then lay them out to see what I have when I'm ready to sew it all together.
So that was the end of my sewing day yesterday. Smitty was glad to have the afternoon off from being a sewing cat. I found him flaked out on the couch.
And that brings me to my early morning. It seemed as good a time as any to finish off the quilt binding. It ends up at 68 x 54 inches. I started this quilt in November of 2022, and the blocks were made using the color of the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I'll link up there today.
Here's how it looks from the back.
Knowing I'll be finishing the final block for Grandpa's Bridges soon, I asked Mr. Random to choose a new project to fill in the open space on my embroidery dance card. Mr. Random chose this Tiny Treasures project from Kathy Schmitz. Probably I bought this book when I was stitching along with Crabapple Hill's stitched inchies for International Embroidery Month in February. I enjoyed those projects so much, and this one appealed to me.
Kathy Schmitz set all her little stitcheries in the hexie style pictured below.
I'm going to do mine differently, but I'll have to figure that out when they're all stitched. There are 72 "tiny treasures" to stitch, each one measuring about 1-1/2 inches.
I'm planning to take a whole cloth and draw a grid...probably 2-1/2 inches for each segment, and then trace 12 designs at a time for each go-round. At that pace, it'll take me six go-rounds to finish all of them. When they're all stitched, I'll decide how to sew them into a quilt.
Okay, so that's all I have for you this morning. On today's agenda will be to mop the floor. I'm afraid I've run out of reasons to procrastinate on that. In the sewing room, I'll get busy on the Fantastic Feline project. I'll want to make all the pieced blocks first and then see how I can lay them out into some sort of a finished quilt top. And with such an early start to my morning, I expect I'll get in a nap sometime today as well.
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