Future Finishes

Good morning, my friends. Except for grocery shopping, yesterday might have been the most routine day of the week. It was nice to just settle in for a normal day. Included on the day's agenda was to bake a Magic Apple Plum Cobbler. The plums and apples came from our own trees. As I've mentioned many times, our poor little apple tree has never thrived. Nevertheless, it generally produces enough apples each year to make this one single dessert. Why is it magic? Because it is so magically simple to make. 

We had that with a scoop of vanilla ice cream last night. So yummy.

Backing up to the start of the day, I stitched some more on Le Jardin. This will be finished this morning. It’s the ninth of nine blocks for this project. When the embroidery is finished, I’ll add some borders to the block. That won’t take long. Then, I’ll move it to the list of quilt tops to be finished.

With that so close to being finished, I needed to get serious about tracing the first of five blocks for this Quilter’s Retweet project.

On the way to the grocery store, we stopped off at a quilt shop in town. They don’t have a lot of fabric on hand, but they do have a good supply of solids. I decided to pick up an off-white solid to use as the block backgrounds. I only needed a half yard for this, but there were three yards on the bolt, and so I bought all of it. I’ll use it for another embroidered quilt. Taking the last of the bolt meant I got a 25% discount on the whole amount. Nice.

Later in the afternoon, I traced the first block. Probably I’ll take the first stitches on this tomorrow.

In other near finishes, I finished all the pieced blocks/border for the Girls’ Getaway quilt. More dot-to-dot on this block.

For this one, I outlined the oval of the embroidery. The rest was dot-to-dot or else some backsy-forthsy things on the sides of the embroidery.

For this one, more dot-to-dot.

For this one, I outlined the heart both inside and outside the stitching, and then filled in the rest with dot-to-dot quilting.

And, finally, this one.

As a reminder, this is what the whole quilt looks like. I’ve quilted all but the narrow sashings between the embroidered center panels. 

I might have finished it yesterday, but I was running out of time by then, and so I stopped, leaving it needle down at the top sashing. This shouldn’t take too long to finish, and then it will be ready for binding.

Smitty wanted to work on the Sawtooth Cozy Quilt, but we ran out of time. Maybe today, Buddy.

Okay, so I haven’t been out in the garden for two days. I fear I’ll find man-eating zucchini there…possibly even some man-eating cucumbers. When I last checked the beans, they were about three inches long. They were too small for harvesting, but I expect they’ll grow fast, like other things tend to do. We should see some corn soon too. I need to water the flowers, and there are a couple of easy housekeeping chores to do. As for the rest of the day, I’m hoping to finish off these projects that are so close to their next steps. Also, there’s more zucchini on tonight’s menu in the form of zucchini fritters. They aren’t bad. I’ll make some zucchini muffins to go along with those.

So that’s a pretty long list, but there should still be plenty of time for sewing if I get an early start. And the time for getting an early start is slipping away from me just now, so I guess I’ll be on my way. 

What’s on your to-do list today?