Progress on Two Fronts

Good morning, my friends. Our good sewing weather continues. Read that: It's raining. It means plenty of time in the sewing room, for sure. We had our usual bout of Sunday evening cabin fever, and so we went out for dinner last night. If it weren't for grocery shopping and Sunday evenings out, we might become complete shut-ins.

Yesterday's morning stitching had me finishing up the first of twelve Tiny Treasures. This one has stem stitch, lazy daisy, and French knots.

From there, I took a walk on the treadmill, and did a little bit of housework. After that, I turned my attention to the quilting. These are the four blocks I did today. These bright colors are easy on the eyes when a glance outside yields only shades of gray.

I really like that blue bird. He makes several appearances on the quilt.

If I'm remembering right, the yellow bird appears more than once too.

For this one, I didn't want to cut threads for every one of those little flower buds, and so I did a little loop between each one.

That brings me to the top row of blocks. I left it needle down, and I'll start here today. Tomorrow, I'll start working on the sashings.

After lunch, Smitty joined me in the sewing room where we went to work sewing together the Merry, Merry Snowmen quilt top.

There are nine blocks in this quilt. They're sewn together unconventionally. The top row is as you'd expect.

The remaining six blocks are sewn together in columns, rather than rows. Starting on the left...

Moving to the middle...

And then finishing up with the final two on the right.

Sewing them in columns like that meant just one very long seam. I sewed the bottom three columns together before sewing it all to the top row. I'm going to remember this for quilts in the future. Generally, I sew them together in rows. If there's no sashing between them, then any quilt could be sewn together like this. The fewer long seams the better, if you ask me.

There was still time left in the day to sew on the inner border.

Now there's just one more border  with cornerstones, and I'll have a finished quilt top. I'm hoping to have time to finish this today. I'll be using the fabrics you see below.

Today will look a lot like yesterday, except for dinner out. I'll get back to my quilting, and I'm hoping to finish the quilt top. Right now, I'll get to work on another Tiny Treasure. They're fun to stitch. It's a good way to start the day.