Ready for Binding

Good morning, my friends. I'm writing fast again this morning. Poor Smitty has to go to the vet. It's his annual check-up, and he's due for some vaccines. We'll load him up in a little while. He won't be a happy camper. I've also noticed he's kind of lethargic on a day when he has his vaccines. Poor guy. Except for being alive, he did nothing to deserve such harsh treatment.

Before heading out to the grocery store yesterday, I took the first stitches on July's block for A Year in the Garden. My fellow shoppers fare better when I do a little slow-stitching first.

It was a good day of sewing yesterday. It was after lunch time when I was able to make my way to the quilting machine, and so I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped. Still, I have one quilt ready for hand-stitching the binding, and that's probably how I'll spend a good part of my afternoon.

There were the two outer borders to quilt. I spent some time perusing Pinterest, but ended up using my usual go-to motif. This is a motif Lori Kennedy calls "Paperclip." Sometimes I'll leave a narrow border unquilted. When it's wider than one inch, as this one is, I feel as if it needs something there. The paperclip motif is an easy one for me to do, and it works well in a narrow border like this one. 

I had an idea how I wanted to do the outer border. I had in mind to make little houses. When I tried drawing them out myself, they ended up looking like upward-pointing arrows. So, I referred to this book, also by Lori Kennedy.

Within its pages, I found exactly what I was looking for. I like her way of showing each step of quilting a motif. It's good for people like me who can't draw worth beans. This is one of the images from her book.

I didn't end up going over hill and dale like it shows above. Mine were quilted straight across, although I did make my houses different sizes. Also, I added in a tree here and there. Here's how that looks.

As usual, it's easier to see it from the back.

In a little over an hour, it was finished.

Then, I took it downstairs and squared it up for binding.

Around a half-hour later, it was ready for hand-stitching.

So, I didn't make any more progress on Autumn's Harvest Pumpkin, but I'm fairly certain I'll have time for that today.

Okay, so my work is cut out for me. I'll have a lot of hand-sewing on today's agenda, and I'm hoping to get the pumpkin to binding stage before the day is over. Just now, I'm going to go round up the cat for his torture treatment. Hopefully, this can happen with no bloodshed. Wish us luck.