Cats and Kits

Good morning, my friends. It was another busy day yesterday. I got a late start after sleeping in later than usual, but I still managed to cross off the things on my list. I wanted to get busy with the Peppermint Bark before I did anything else. It's very easy to make. The hardest part of the whole thing is getting the dratted paper off the candy canes. Mike helped with that. When it was finished, it looked like this.

This stuff is addictive. Once you take a bite, it's hard to stop.

So, it was late in the day before I made my way to the sewing room. Sadie was my helper cat. She washed her paws first. You never want to leave paw prints on the fabric.

After that, she snoopervised everything I did, pointing out any errors in thinking...like, isn't it time for some treats?

When I quit yesterday, I was getting ready to do the cutting for the Tulip Time quilt. There was a surprising amount of cutting to do for such a small quilt. These are all the pieces I'll need. The tulips are all pinned together and labeled for size.

Now, it has it's own project bag.

So I committed to kitting up four projects when I set my goal for December's 

Here they are. I'll link up when the party starts at the end of the month.

Since making that commitment, I've added more to the list, starting with this Sashiko kit I purchased on a previous visit to southern California. This came from a quilt shop that specialized in Hawaiian prints.

It's all self-contained, which makes it a good take-along project. The fabric is pre-printed with the design.

I bought the fabric below to finish it off while visiting the same shop with my dear friend, Debi. I'm looking forward to seeing Debi next month.

Okay, and I decided to take along one project to work on block-by-block. When we're at home, I have a list of five embroidery projects I rotate through. For traveling, nothing says I can't work on the whole thing one block after another. Desperate times, you know. Last time, I took along all the Raggedy & Friends embroidery sections. This time, I'm going to take this Snowmen & Reindeer pattern from Bird Brain Designs. 

Looking at what I needed, it listed two balls of Perle cotton #311. So,  I checked my embroidery floss stash and, well, lookie there! It's almost as if it were meant to be. The one on the left is partially used, but in my experience, these balls last a long time. Probably I have enough. Certainly it will last for the whole trip.

I'll be taking my lightbox along and tracing these on the road. So, I cut background fabric squares for all 12 blocks, and I also cut iron-on stablizer for each one.

 I've added a pen for tracing the designs and four safety pins so that I can pin back the excess fabric outside the embroidery hoop. Also, I included some needles with larger eyes. In my experience, the Perle cotton is sometimes harder to thread the needle. This kit is ready to go now.

That was as far as I got yesterday. I still want to do the cutting to make the remaining blocks for the Raggedy & Friends project. (The embroidered sections are already traced.) Also, I want to cut fabrics to make the remaining 10 blocks for the Gumballs project...this one...

These last two will take longer than the others have, and so I'll probably do one today and one tomorrow. 

And that will free me up to work on two more blocks for the Northern Wilderness project.

If I can finish two more blocks before we go, I'll be back to the first section of my white board, which would mean I'll be ready to quilt the Painted Ladies.

No word yet on the return of my machine. I have a feeling this probably won't even get started until next spring. Oh well. No hurry. On the other hand, I'd really like to get my machine back before we go. 

So that's all I have for you today. We had dinner out last night. It was kind of fun to see all the Christmas lights. Some people have a lot of energy for that sort of thing. How are your Christmas preparations going?