Update

Well, my quilting friend and I spent 5 hours on Wednesday working on our quilt projects! Yay!

The next day I spent at my class's sewing lab working on one of my assigned projects -- cutting out a dress pattern and learning how to match checked fabric. I'm not sure how good a job I did. We'll see how well things go together on Saturday.

Quilting Day

Bonnie has announced the newest Mystery Quilt, but I can't take part. I still haven't finished Carolina Crossroads! But I have a new strategy. I recently made a new friend who also finds it difficult to find time to quilt. So we are meeting once a week to work on our quilting projects. The first week we sewed for about five hours, including a lunch break. We skipped Holy Week, but we are meeting tomorrow. Must finish! Must finish!

Eeeeek!

Patti at Quilting is My Passion has done something rash, something many of us would find unthinkable.

. . . what is this terrible thing I've done? I've thrown out my crumbs. Totally thrown them out. They are in the garbage can by the curb waiting for tomorrow's pick-up.

Read about it here.

For those of you who aren't scrap fanatics, "crumbs" are little tiny bits of fabric which any sane quilter would consider too small to use. But some of us aren't quite sane. While going through some of my UFOs (or Works in Progress, as I prefer to call them), I came across these foundation pieced log cabin blocks which are only 2 inches square. They are foundation pieced on muslin using a rubber stamp which I bought from Sharon Doyle's company, Thoroughly Modern Minis, back in the early '90s. (I "met" her through an online quilter's guild hosted on Genie way back in the Pleistocene.) For blocks like these almost no fabric scrap is too small.

Interestingly, the remarks in Patti's comment box unanimously support trashing crumbs. Perhaps we crumb hoarders are too embarrassed to speak up. Or perhaps we've all been sequestered in padded sewing rooms without Internet access. (Perhaps I should go piece some of these mini-blocks before someone comes to lock me up.)

What Was I Thinking?

About 20 years ago I began making a redwork baby quilt. The embroidery pattern was from Better Homes & Gardens. My project has twelve cats embroidered on a large piece of unbleached muslin. The pattern originally called for a faux sashing to be made by sewing pieces of green bias tape as a lattice between the cats. I embroidered the cats using a chain stitch in red perle cotton. I did an outline (or stem) stitch in black floss for their eyes and whiskers. The faces were kind of tedious, so the project has been in my drawer for a very long time. But recently I pulled it out and finished those ancient cats. I was thinking it might be a nice gift for one of my granddaughters -- and appropriate since I originally started the project for her father!

I've decided to abandon the green bias tape in favor of cutting the cats into separate blocks and sashing them with red '30s repro prints.

But look at what I inadvertently did: When I embroidered the whiskers I absentmindedly put them behind the cats' smiles rather than in from of them! Perhaps they are relatives of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.