It's a Start

Good morning, my friends. It was a busy day yesterday, with a trek into town for a haircut. Fortunately, the haircut was finished fairly soon...one of the benefits of short hair. I was home early enough in the afternoon to be able to fit in the day's sewing goals. There was some time in the morning, and so I was able to get my morning chores done too. As for sewing, I stitched up Tiny Treasure #71. This one has stem stitch, straight stitch, and fern stitch.

And if you’re keeping score, then you might know that the Tiny Treasure I’ll stitch today will be the last one. Yahoo! They’ve been fun to stitch, but I’m excited to sew them into a finished quilt top. I have some ideas about this, and I think it’s going to be cute.

Okay, and I’m visiting the garden every morning to check on the green beans. Today there were some new sunflowers. This first one is called “Ring of Fire.” 

It’s one of my favorites. The bees are loving these.

This is pale  yellow with a yellow center. Unless I’m mistaken, I think another one will bloom eventually with a black center.

This one is the Infrared Mix.

Okay…insert trip into town and a haircut here. Also, I made a stop off at one of our higher-end supermarkets. They have a shrimp roll that I like for lunch, and so I usually stop when I’m over that way. Today, I was also curious to see if they sold dill heads for pickling. I’m not ready for any pickling yet, but I’d like to know where I can find the dill heads. And, yes. They did. That was something of a load off my mind. 

When I got home, I had some lunch, and then I got busy with my quilting. I’m outlining the embroidered kittens, and then filling in the background with a hooking meander. There wasn’t a lot of room in the backgound of this one.

When my embroidery outline doesn’t have a heavy stem-stitched edge (note the left side of the one below), I did a sort of free-motion zigzagging line. 

And last for the day was this one.

That was pretty quick. Probably I could have done another row, but I’ll stick with my original commitment of three blocks per day. Now I’ve moved the quilt down to the bottom row, and I’ll start with the middle block there today.

Also, I wanted to trace out a pattern for the lemurs. As a reminder, this is the image I'm working from.

The traced pattern has a lot of detail. It’s always hard to know how much to include. As I was thinking about this later in the evening, I realized that some of the smaller details can be done by filling in with thread. As I work on these, I put an “x” in the pieces I’ve already done. For this, if a piece is very small, or if it can be easily done at the end with thread, I’ll mark that section with a yellow highlighter. That will make it easy to find when I start doing the thread work. These are collage (applique) quilts, but the thread work is every bit as important as the fabric.

It seemed as good a time as any to sort through my fabrics to see what I thought could be useful. Sadie gave them the snuggleability test. I told her that art quilts don’t have to pass the snuggleability test. My naivete and simplemindedness saddened her. What is the purrpose of such an item if it is not to be snuggled? The whole world could be a huge snugglefest if only the pawpulous would develop an appurropriately loving cattitude. Sheesh. How many times do we have to go over this?

As I organized my supplies, she considered taking a nap. Snuggleability nearly always purrcedes a nap, and so napping characteristics are also carefully considered.

So I think I’ve worked up the nerve to start working with fabrics today. For this, I’m going to institute the one-hour rule, meaning, I’ll work on it for a minimum of one hour. I can go longer if I want to, but I give myself permission to quit at that point and work on something else. It keeps me from going crazy. 

For dinner last night, I tried this recipe for Pineapple Chicken. It was tasty and simple. Mike grilled the chicken and the pineapple slices, but they could also be cooked on a grill pan. The chicken is marinated in a combination of seasonings, pineapple juice, and soy sauce. Prior to adding the chicken, ome of the marinade is set aside and then cornstarch added at the end to create a glaze. The glaze really makes the dish. We liked it. I served it with jasmine rice.

Our grocery store has been packaging different meats in $5 packages. It’s something different each time we go. This was one of those. For our $5, we were able to score four of these thin-cut chicken cutlets, and those worked well in this dish.

Smitty helped me write this post. I'd say he helped me with the editing, but you can see that he was asleep on the job. It happens when you're an old man cat. (Don't tell him I said he was an "old man.")

There are several things on the day's agenda. I’ll stitch up the last Tiny Treasure. My morning check-in with the green beans has been a pleasant way to start the day, and so I’ll do that too. There is a list of quick chores to do, but I think I’ll have plenty of time for sewing. I’m thinking I need to pick a day to get outside and pull some weeds. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but the movement would do me some good. (I swear I’m going to get back to my workouts…someday. Procrastination. Doncha love it?)

Okay, so I have a list of things to do…time to start checking them off.  Have a good day, Everybody!