A Good Sewing Day

Good morning, my friends. Following through on my promise to sew my guts out yesterday, I did exactly that. Early, I hoed the garden. Everything is looking good out there, happily. I uncovered the zucchini and the cucumbers. They had wire baskets over them to protect them from gnawing critters. I think they've grown large enough to stand on their own now. After that, I needed to put away the laundry from the day before. And then...all sewing, all the time.

There were two more embroidered blocks to quilt for the "Seasons" project. For summer, I did some pebbling in the sunflowers, and then a looping beeline connecting the various bees in the piece.

For the final block...just some swirls. I couldn't really see any particular theme in this one that would lend itself well to quilting, and so I just endeavored to fill in all the little nooks and crannies.

I'd only been at it for about 20 minutes at that point, and so I decided to go ahead and quilt the sashings. For this I did a double upsy-downsy ribbon motif. There are five horizontal sashings and two vertical ones. I ran out of bobbin thread as I was finishing the fourth of the horizontal sashings.

It's difficult to wind a bobbin with that monofilament thread, and I spent the rest of my quilting time on that. It killed my motivation to do anything more, and so I'll finish up the sashings today (hopefully). After that, I'll move on to the many thread changes for the pieced blocks.

From there, I headed into the sewing room, determined to get at least one of the Yoder sisters fused together. At first glance, this is a complicated and scary pattern, and short on instructions. Already, I'd taped the placement diagrams together.

But then I realized I needed to do more taping for the applique templates themselves. Probably I spent about a half hour figuring all this out.

When I was ready to sew, Sadie joined me. She likes doing "girl" stuff, and she thought this yellowish-gold dress would go purrfectly with her furs.

So after giving it some thought, it became clear that the first step was to make the dress. I'm assembling these on a teflon pressing sheet. I can fuse fabric to the pressing sheet, but it can be peeled up and repositioned if I need to.

Next, I needed to make the apron. There are two versions of the apron. I'm following along with the image included with the pattern. I'm making the second sister from the left.

Sadie can become a little overly-exuberant with her "helping," and so she was encouraged to find another job.

Then I went to work cutting six pieces for the apron. (There is a knot where the ties are that isn't visible in this image.) Keeping in mind that once I fuse fabric to fabric, I cannot reposition it, and so I gulped hard and fused the apron pieces to the dress.

Phew! No problem. And then I could finish the rest of her.

And lookie there...I can peel the whole thing off the pressing sheet in preparation for fusing it to the background.

I want to make all four sisters before I fuse them to the background, and so I set her aside to wait for the rest of her party of four to arrive.

Smitty showed up for the second sister. We don't like to talk about this often, but Smitty sometimes likes to dress up in drag. He thought the blue dress would be best with his furs.

And so I went to work making the second sister. This one is second from the right in the pattern picture. Her apron is different. There's an applique template included for a traditional Amish bonnet, but I kind of like the hats. I thought about doing a bonnet or two, but then I really liked the symmetry of the hats. I decided to stick with that.

And now these two are ready to go. 

It was past time to stop by then, and so that was the end of my sewing day. I should have plenty of time to finish the remaining two sisters today, and then I'll be able to fuse them to the background for top-stitching.

When I went back upstairs, I was surprised to find a deer eating the sunflower seeds I put out for the birds! A friend of mine who lives in Idaho said deer eat her sunflower seeds all the time. In 24 years in this house, I've never seen this before. Weird.

Okay, so I don't really know how the day is going to go. I'm hoping to have plenty of sewing time, but my asthma is simply not improving enough. I'm going to have to head to an urgent care clinic this morning, and I expect I'll get another nebulizer treatment. In my 72 years of living, I've never had an asthma flare-up like this one. I barely slept last night with all the coughing, and my rescue inhaler just doesn't seem to be doing enough to ameliorate my symptoms. I'm hopeful the wait won't be long. We also need to pick up a few groceries, and so I'm afraid the morning will be shot. With so little sleep last night, I foresee a nap this afternoon as well.

So, it's anybody's guess how the day will go. I'll be happy if I can start feeling better after nearly a full week of coughing. And with that, I'm off. The earlier I get going, the sooner I can get back to my sewing.