Spooky Sewing

Good morning, my friends, and welcome to November! Sheesh. Can you believe we're into the "holiday season" already? And it’s my favorite time change of the year. For the past week, I’ve been making a list of all the things I’m going to do with my extra hour of time. 

Truthfully, time seems to fly by any more. I feel as if we just got home from last winter’s trip south. It makes me think of a conversation I had with one of my graduate school professors. Her name was Maria, and her social work career was spent working with the “frail elderly.” I recall her saying once that she asked her clients, does time just seem to go faster and faster as you grow older and older? Yes, was the answer. I believe it. 

We won't be heading south this year, and so we'll get to experience the crappy winter weather here in the Pacific Northwest first hand this year. It's okay by me. I'm just as happy to stay home, but I will miss seeing our SoCal friends. Today is going to be relatively nice. We’re going to get outside and do a little yard work. Gazing out the window at the moment, it’s still foggy, but we’re confident it will burn off.

But let's just back up for a minute and talk about yesterday's sewing, shall we? The first stitches were taken on the Snow Day project.

And this being the first of the month, it's time to set a goal for November's

My goal for November will be to complete the embroidery for the Snow Day piece.

As I was packing things up to move on with the rest of my day, I glanced out the window to notice the color on one of our showier trees. No color editing on this...it really is that red.

Okay, and I had a couple of easy housekeeping chores to do, but then I went to work finishing up November's gold star. I needed to make and trim 24 HST's.

And then, I could sew it all together.

And, yes. I'm feeling pret-ty smug about having November's star done already. Here are the blocks I have for this quilt so far.

Since there won't be a new color in December, I'm already thinking December's star will be pulled from my "multi-colored" bin with a focus on fabrics with a black background. 

From there, I was ready to get busy quilting the Cats in Pajamas. My goal was to quilt the eight "spacers." Each was done with this same upsy-downsy heart motif.

When they were all finished, I laid it out for a picture. In this image you can see all the different motifs I've used on this quilt so far.

Here's a peek at the back.

Just the border remains for quilting, and I'll make that my first priority for today's sewing. Probably I'll do the same "half-hearted" motif I used in the vertical sashings, but I want to spend some time on Pinterest looking at other heart-related motifs I might use in the border. With any luck, this will be ready for binding by day's end. 

If I can get the border finished, I'll move directly to squaring it up and machine sewing the binding. The binding is from that same background fabric pictured above. 

My next project is on hold just now. I'm awaiting the fabric I ordered before I can get started on Matthew's zebra quilt. My tracking number promises it will arrive today. I'm hopeful. 

Also, I'm hopeful y'all survived this year's Halloween visitors. Sadie went dressed as a black cat.

Every year...same costume. You'd think she'd outgrow it, but she is a small kitty.

Today will probably be our best day of weather for the week, and so I'm going to cut back the still-blooming dahlias. It's time to be moving them into the garage for the winter. Mike will load them into the tractor bucket for that since the individual pots are pretty heavy. 

Also, we’re going to try to transplant the poppy into a new planter. We started with five whiskey barrels shortly after we moved into our home in 2002. Over time, they’ve rotted and fallen apart. So far, we’ve replaced two of them. The poppy needs to be done now so that it can grow again in the spring. (I might end up having to reseed it.) That will probably wrap up my year of gardening until next spring. 

Next spring, we’ll endeavor to replace the other two whiskey barrels. One has our cherry tomato growing in it, so that will be easy enough. The other has mint growing in it. We could probably just fill the new barrel with soil, and then set it beside the current rotting mint barrel. It would probably start growing there all on its own. If you’ve ever grown mint, then you know I’m not kidding.

So for today I'll focus on getting the Cats in Pajamas to binding stage. Also, I have a couple of easy housekeeping chores. Mike has requested biscotti, and so I’ll probably do that too.

Happy November, Everybody. And if you haven't voted already, please do. Our democracy is counting on you.