Many Miles Covered

Good morning, my friends. I'm writing fast again this morning. We have an early start today because I need a fasting blood draw. Mike is going with me. We'll get breakfast afterward, and then do our grocery shopping. Breakfast will be nice, but the rest of the morning sounds pretty forbidding, doesn't it?

Many miles were covered since our last chat. I got my hair cut and colored. Yay! I feel so much better. After that, I bought some new shoes and retired the previous pair. Also, I picked up some peanuts for the birds and some potting soil. The local feed store had a good sale, and so we took advantage of that. The Fantastic Felines were dropped off at the post office and are on their way to Texas for auction. Then, yesterday we had a surprisingly nice day. I took advantage of the nice weather to get out and deadhead the hydrangeas and groom the clematis plants. The yard is feeling less urgent now, although I still need to get out and clean up the herb garden. Hopefully, that can happen tomorrow.

And what about the sewing, you ask? Well, I took the first stitches on the Cozy Quilt piece.

By Wednesday evening, I had it this far.

The only other sewing I did was to get the Nordic Star table runner to binding stage. Smitty helped me work out a quilting pattern for this. We studied it for quite a while before deciding on something.

First, though, I needed to sandwich it.

This is being quilted on my domestic machine. I started by stitching around the inside of those arrowhead-shaped pieces.

Here's a close-up of that.

And here's how it looks from the back.

Sadie helped me bury my thread tails.

It took me a couple of hours, but the quilting was finished by the end of my sewing day.

I stitched around the squares between the stars, and then stitched all around on the outer border.

Here's how it looks from the back.

It just needs binding now. I've cut strips from what was left over from that same red. When I went back upstairs, I found the kitties soaking up the afternoon sunshine.

Probably I'll have plenty of time to sew the binding on when we get home this afternoon. If I'm really energetic, I might actually finish off the hand-stitching on it today too. Time will tell.

My next project will be to finish making the quilt top for the Christmas Miracle stitchery. I have in mind to give it a couple of borders, and then call it quits.

That'll probably keep me busy for the rest of the day. 

We're expecting good weather tomorrow, and so I'm hoping to get a little more yard work done. If there's time for sewing, I'll probably get going on my list of WIPs. It'll be the first time I've worked on that section of my white board since before we left home back in December. It'll be good to start moving my projects along again.

So that's it from me today. I'll be back tomorrow, but I'll be taking Saturday off. We'll be attending the No Kings protest in Newberg, and we're looking forward to getting out and rousing the rabble. What's going on in your world?