Dark and Stormy

Good morning, my friends. Oh, my goodness. We've had some nasty weather the past couple of days. We had nearly half an inch of rain on Sunday. Yesterday brought at least another inch. We're also heavily overcast, making day nearly as dark as night. We're supposed to see just a little clearing today, if you can believe the forecast. As I’m writing this, the rain has stopped. It’s overcast, but not so dark. We’re expecting more nasty weather for the remainder of the week. The weekend looks pretty good, but then more rain next week. It's hard to deny that the Big Dark has arrived in the Pacific Northwest.

We got our vaccines yesterday. When I went to bed last night, all I had was a sore arm. Then, I woke up last night with chills that made my teeth chatter. Obviously, I was running a fever. Smitty snuggled up and helped me stay warm last night. When I got up this morning, my temperature was 101.1. Tylenol has helped, and my fever is down some…99.5 now…and so I suppose I’ll live. It’s probably the flu shot that I’m reacting to. That’s not unusual for me.

Before we left home yesterday, I had some time to take the first stitches on the second block for the Quilters' Retweet.

There was some time to kill before we needed to leave. Knowing the Quilters' Retweet block would stitch up pretty quickly, it made sense to decide what I'd be doing next. After this, I'll be at the "Short" project on my list. So I asked Mr. Random to tell me which project should be next. Mr. Random chose 15.

Looking at the list, #15 is Kathy Schmitz' "Snow Day."

Just now, I noticed the "Hawksbill Honu" is still there at #13. That quilt is finished, and so I'll remove that one from the list for next time around. For now, let's take a look at the newest selection. I believe someone gave this to me at some point, but I can't remember who. If it was you, then thank you, and please forgive my fevered memory.

Looking down there in the lower right corner of the image above, you can see it was supposed to include fabric pieces for the "Snow" banner. I don't have those pieces, and so I'll need to figure out a different way to do that part. No worries. We'll get 'er done.

After that, we headed out for our vaccines. We ended up waiting more than half an hour as the waiting room filled up with more people awaiting vaccines. Finally, we got our shots and we were done. It was lunch time, and we were both hungry. We got some lunch before heading home. And after all that, we both needed naps.

When I woke up, I was ready to get to work quilting the last row of cats for the Cats in Pajamas project. Thankfully, Smitty was on the job, guarding the landscape, on the lookout for invading forces.

He was doing double duty yesterday, also guarding the stairwell for any intruders who might try to get between me and my quilting.

Confident I was completely safe, I could get busy with the quilting. All the cats are quilted now. It's a little hard to see in this image, but hopefully, you can get the idea.

Here's how it looks from the back.

There's still more to do on this. For one thing, there are four spacers that create the offset for the quilt blocks. For those, I'll fill in with a meandering heart-shaped leaf and a loop. I took a few stitches, and then left it needle down.

My goal for today's sewing will be to fill in the four spacer blocks. I’m going to have to feel better, though. If I can get that done, I'll be ready to quilt the sashings and the border. From this point, the designs will all feature hearts of some kind.

With that finished, I had the Snow Day piece on my mind, thinking about how to get the "Snow" banner turned around the right way so I could stitch it.

Here's a picture of the sheet with the design. You can see it says to "Reverse" at the bottom. The designer, Kathy Schmitz, had a way of tracing using freezer paper. She wanted me to print the design onto the dull side of freezer paper, then iron the shiny side to the back of my fabric, then use a light box to trace it onto the right side of the fabric. And, honestly, that's harder than it needs to be. If you're using a light box anyway, you can accomplish the same thing by turning the pattern sheet face down and tracing it that way. I've done it many times. (If you don’t have a light box, you can tape it to a window…or use an empty picture frame with a flashlight underneath. There’s more than one way to skin a cat…but please don’t skin any cats.)

Instead, I decided to scan the image and create a pdf from it. Then, I could flip the pdf horizontally using my photo editing software to make the design I wanted. Then, I printed it onto Sticky Fabri-Solvy. And that worked great. Now, I can embroider the letters on the banner.

From my stash, I pulled this tan with "falling snow." I've used this in more than one quilt, but I still have about a half yard left. It seemed a perfect fabric for this piece.

Now, I've cut it to size and applied the Sticky Fabri-Solvy. And that's ready for stitching. By the way, I might have traced this in the way I mentioned above, but I find this kind of fabric with a printed design difficult to see through. Also, sometimes the ink won’t write on those white dots.

Okay, and now I'll set that aside until I've finished the project I'm working on currently. It's good to be prepared.

It's a stay-at-home day. I’m going to have to feel better if I’m to do anything other than lie around like a slug. There's probably something on the day's to-do list, but I haven't checked yet. If I’m up to it, it'll mostly be a sewing day. I'll keep working away at the Cats in Pajamas, but I'm hoping to get at least one of the blocks for the Inverted Star project finished today. It all depends on how I’m feeling.

With that, I’ll go back to my lazing around. If I’m not able to do anything more than that today, I’ll probabaly take the day off from blogging tomorrow. If history repeats itself, I should be feeling a lot better by tomorrow. If y’all are still waiting to get vaccines, don’t let my experience scare you. Mike is feeling just fine today…not even a sore arm. So there’s hope for the rest of you.