A Small Finished Top

Good morning, my friends. It was a busy day yesterday, and I was a pooped pup by day's end. My mornings tend to be slow, as yesterday's was. Once I got going, I didn't sit down for the rest of the day. When it was time to make dinner, I was seriously considering asking Mike if he wanted to go out. We didn't, though. I had some chicken I needed to use, and so I powered on through. 

So, let's start with the slow part of the day and work our way up. I finished off Tiny Treasure #20. This one took two days to stitch.

There are four more of these. Probably I should trace the next block I'll be working on when they're finished. 

Here, you can insert a Bowflex workout, starting laundry, vacuuming and dusting, lunch, and a nap. (Okay, so I did sit down for the nap.) Finally, I could make my way to the sewing room. The kitties negotiated a shift schedule for the work ahead.

Smitty agreed to help with the quilt top. 

I was working with small quantities of fabric. Everything has been used in other quilts...many quilts for some...and so I was doing a lot of thinking, measuring, and consulting with my cat. We agreed the best approach was to first trim the embroidered blocks to 4-1/2 inches square.

From there, I gave each a brown border.

I went back and forth about which of the two fabrics below to use for the top and which to save for the back. I remember now that these fabrics were a gift from my friend, Tracy, who passed away last year. I wish she'd lived long enough to see me put these fabrics to work. Looking at them more closely, I realized they appear to be the same fabric in different colorways.

I liked how the brown block borders looked with the black fabric, and so I used that on the top. First, I sashed the blocks together.

With the scale of the fabric, I wanted a wider border to show it off. When the borders were added, the top was finished. It ends up at 27-1/2 inches square.

Sadie joined me then. She agreed to help with the quilt back.

You might recall I was trying to figure out a way to use these sewing machine panel blocks. With nine embroidered blocks and five sewing machine blocks, the math didn't work out to use them all on the top. I thought about sewing them together for a back, but I realized they would end up at the edges of the quilt. When I go to square it up, I didn't want to be cutting them off at the edges.

So I used just two of them and pieced together this back. I'll put the other three away for another time.

There was enough of the brown left to cut binding strips. And now this one will go into the "Small Quilts to be Quilted" pile. It won't have to wait very long, but I don't expect I'll finish it before we head south for the winter. 

As I'm writing this, I'm thinking I could sandwich it ahead of time and quilt it on the road. We'll see. I have other ideas for take-along projects too. More about that later.

Okay, so today will look a lot like yesterday. If I can make my way to the sewing room this afternoon, I'll be starting on my list of WIP's. First on the list will be to make another row of blocks for the Stair Steps quilt. It will probably take me a couple of days at least to make the next row of blocks. These are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

The rest of the week is going to be very busy. I'm starting my Thanksgiving cooking today with making some whole-berry cranberry sauce. We have the jellied kind too because (a) we like it, and (b) the people who can't eat seeds can have it.

We picked up a can at the grocery store last week, and so that part of the dinner is finished! Although...and you can probably relate...I still need to get the jellied ones out of the can. It's tricky.

Tomorrow, I'll be making our sweet potatoes and a classic green bean casserole. Everything else will happen Thanksgiving day. Mike is smoking the turkey on our Traeger. We'll put it in the brine tomorrow, and then I'll make stuffing and stuff it on Thursday morning. I love Thanksgiving. Getting everything on the table hot, and at the same time, is always a challenge. 

So with that, I'm off. How are your Thanksgiving plans coming along?