Back to Work

Today is my first day back at work since December 18th.  The time off was good...it would have been better if I didn't get sick starting on the 27th.  I'm still sick now and only managed to get about 3 hours of sleep last night.  Thankfully, today is pretty quiet still as folks are still trickling back into the office and there aren't a lot of meetings yet.

I thought I'd do a quick post on the happenings around here and some quilty items.

First off, its been very cold in upstate NY the past week or so and we've been using our fireplace a lot!  Hubby and I aren't the only ones enjoying it.  Our cat, Ellie, hasn't moved more than 2 feet from the fireplace the entire time that we've had it running.  In the photo below, she's curled up in front of it, but she usually is sprawled out between the blue plastic bin (for carting wood into the house) and the Amazon box (holds newspaper to start the fires).  I really need to get a picture of her sleeping in front of the fireplace as it is very cute.

With being sick, I didn't really have the energy to get up to my sewing room and work with the machine or rotary cutter (not a good idea to use a very sharp object when doped up on cold medicine).  So I've been spending some time working on my needlepoint.

I've been working on it for about 14 months now and this is how far I've gotten.  That top row.... that's one row of 7...that's right... seven!  It will take me something like 6 years to get this puppy done.  It will look good when its done though.

I did manage to finish hand-sewing the binding on a charity quilt for my guild.  I'll be able to drop it off at the next guild meeting.

On the day or two that I was feeling a little better, I did venture up to my sewing room to do some quilting on the Lone Star wall hanging.  Since there was a lot of SID (stitch in ditch) quilting that I needed to do, I decided to just baste it on my quilting frame and do all the detail work on my smaller machine.  I marked out the straight line quilting with a blue water-soluble pen and a ruler, then used my walking foot to get the nice straight lines.

The larger sections that don't have any quilting in them yet will be filled with a free-motion filler...something like McTavishing or pebbles.  I also plan on breaking up the squares on the outer border with doing a micro-filler in every other square.  So far I have two of the four triangle sections quilted.  It takes about 2-3 hours to mark each section, quilt it and then rinse out the marks (I just spray the sections lightly and use a cotton swab to get the moisture to the edges where the colored fabrics are --- don't want to risk fabrics bleeding).

Depending upon how this cold does this week, I'd like to get at least the other two triangles marked and quilted.  I'd love to start on the four larger corner squares, too.  The corner squares will have the same type motif as the triangles, but you'll be able to see a full Lone Star in those blocks whereas the triangles only show half of the Lone Star.

I haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do with the Lone Star in the middle.  I've seen people do simple SID to outline each of the triangles and I've also seen free-motion curves between the points of the triangles.  I'm not sure what exactly I want to do...so I'm avoiding it for the time being.  Any suggestions are welcome!  :-)

Have a great week!


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations