Stitching Fast and Slow

Good morning, my friends. It was all sewing all the time yesterday...except for the three loads of laundry I did. Aside from that sewing, and more sewing. I had just one more kit that I brought from home...this "Carrot Top" kit.

It's a free pattern from The Sewing Loft. Okay, well just now I went to link to the free pattern, but it hasn't been free since 2019. You can purchase it right here. I forget when I came by it, but apparently it was sometime before 2019. I probably saw it on Pinterest. It's intended to be a single block for a larger quilt, but I liked it just the way it is.

It was a pretty simple block to sew together. I started by sewing together six strips.

Those were cut into two pieces. Those will make up the edible part of the carrot.

From there, I added some corners to make the carrot shape.

Then, I made four half square triangles. These were trimmed to two inches.

And then, I made two flying geese.

I added a piece to each end of the flying geese. This will be the tippy top of the carrot.

And then I sewed the 2-inch HST's to the rest of the carrot greenery.

Then those two pieces were sewn together to make the top of the carrot.

And then I sewed the tops to the bottoms.

And then, just one more seam to finish it off. There are two sizes for this block. Mine finishes at 12-1/2 inches square. I'm calling this little quilt "Bunny Bait."

When we get home, I'll give it a border and quilt it and make a little table topper or a wall-hanging from it. 

The only machine sewing I have left are some huge zip-lock bags of bonus triangles and cut-off bits, bobs, and orphan blocks.

Possibly, I'll start on these before we leave Pahrump, but probably not. I'm thinking of starting to sew them together as leaders and enders. I've never actually done leaders and enders, but it might be a good way to lay waste to all these pieces. I'm also thinking of instituting the one-hour rule when we get home, and spend an hour each day sewing them together. For now, I sewed together the four that were generated from this Bunny Bait project. Gotta start somewhere, right?

There were some other smaller triangles generated by this project, but if they're less than about two inches, I toss them.

When I had everything packed up again. I went to work on my slow-stitching. I needed to finish the bird house below.

From there, I moved my hoop down and finished the last of it. This is Block 6: Snowman with Mittens.

Here are the six blocks I have for this quilt so far.

So, I started this project on February 3rd. Now half the blocks are stitched. It looks like I'll still be working on them by the time we reach home. We can all breathe a sigh of relief that there will be no stitching emergency.

Okay, so I traced out the next two. Tomorrow is our last day in Pahrump. We'll move on to Death Valley on Friday, and we will not have electricity there. Since I won't be able to use my light wafer there, I decided to trace the next two blocks, and these should keep me busy for the duration of our stay in Death Valley.

Block 7 is "Reindeer behind Tree."

Block 8 is "Smiling Snowmen."

So I'll start with Block 7 this morning, and I'll probably get out for another walk today. Aside from that, I have no plans for the day. It's getting warmer with each passing day. It seems like a good day to take my DSLR out into the desert with a macro lens attached and see what kind of close-ups I can get. It'll give me a good reason to charge my battery too because I expect we're going to see some wildflowers in Death Valley. Certainly, I want a fully-charged battery for that.

There was a pretty sunset last night. Sunsets (and sunrises) are pretty here in Nevada...big, somehow.  The image below was taken from the steps of our RV.

Moving a little to my left, it looked like this:

That's it from me today. Slow-stitching awaits.