An Everything Day

Good morning, my friends. Well, my extra hour in the day stretched to accommodate all my favorite activities: Cats, Gardening, Quilting, Cooking, and Photography. So let's just see where it all began.

In the cooking category, I baked a batch of Chocolate and Pistachio Biscotti. I've made these before, and they're supposed to be dipped in more chocolate. We liked them as is, and so I bagged the whole chocolate dip at the end. These will be nice with our morning coffee.

Biscotti isn't hard to make, but it is a time-consuming process. 

In the gardening category, it was nearing lunch time before I was able to get out and cut back the dahlias. They're safely stowed in the garage for the winter now. While I was doing that, Mike very cleverly gave the poppy a new barrel. You can see one of the older, falling-apart barrels in the background of the image below. We'll switch that one out next spring when we plant next year's cherry tomato.

As for the poppy, Mike gave this quite a bit of thought. He first removed the wood and rings from the old whiskey barrel, which left him with a sort of "poppy cake." It was too heavy to lift into the new barrel, and so he took a machete and cut it into fourths, like a pie. Then, he could safely lift it into its new barrel while barely disturbing the plant. Yay! I've been worrying about accomplishing this without destroying the plant. Now, it's done and ready for blooms in the new year.

In the photography category, I noticed this perfect spider web on one of our red-leaf maple trees. I'm assuming the spider was inspired by Halloween. So, of course, I needed a picture of that. We often get these big garden spider webs this time of year, but it’s rare to find one that goes the full 360 degrees.

In the quilting category, I was ready to quilt the border on the Cats in Pajamas. I scrolled through heart motifs on Pinterest, eventually settling on this one. It's really just a heart-shaped feather.

That was pretty easy to do on the quilt. It took about an hour, and the quilting was finished. It's a little hard to see, but you can get a look at it along the left side and the top of the image below. From there, I took it downstairs to square it up. 

In the cat category, or cat-egory, Sadie took one look at that and claimed it.

This looks like a delicious spot for a nap.

Why yes, I think this will do purrfectly.

It took some convincing, but eventually she decided to nap in the bed provided for her in the sewing room. That gave me an opportunity to square it up. I might have sewn the binding on, but I was kind of tired of wrestling with it by then.

Besides...the fabric had been delivered for Matthew's Zebra quilt. I'd hoped for a little more contrast between the two in the upper left, but this will do. 

So, I started by cutting one 4-inch strip from each color. (I already had the white in my stash.) Those were cross-cut into 4-inch squares. I can get 10 or 11 from each strip.

The original grid is 25 columns by 30 rows. (I've added two rows to each side to make it queen sized.) So, I drew a 5 x 5 grid on the pattern, and I'll make it one grid-block at a time. There will be 30 blocks in all...six rows of five blocks.

Now I've done the cutting and laid out the first block. I was getting kind of tired of sewing by then, and so I covered it with rulers and left it there.

Today I'll start sewing it together. Before I do that, however, I'll get the binding sewn on the Cats in Pajamas by machine. Hand-stitching will probably commence tomorrow. If I’m feeling really energetic, I’ll sart on it this afternoon.

So that was a busy day. While I was waiting for various baking times on the biscotti, I was able to get my to-do's for both yesterday and today finished. Today is going to be all sewing, all the time. Probably I’ll do the laundry, but laundry and sewing are a good partnership. I'm hoping to have a lot accomplished by day's end. Happy Moanday, Everybody!