Monday---again?

Boy, the weeks seem to be flying by! Middle of February already. Hope you all had a lovely Valentine's Day.

Pictured is Skyler seeing if the "kitty eating machine" is going to stay where it belongs before venturing from the safety of the sewing room. That, and he thought we should head to the kitchen for some reason. I was getting plenty of meowing just before the vacuum came out. I had just finished cleaning off the air exchange grate with q-tips and made a mess of the carpet which DJ took care of since I had done the hard part of the job. Of course, Skyler thought q-tips were toys-- like pencils, LOL. I am sure to find one under the kitchen bookcase along with his puff balls. He loses stuff and I retrieve it--the never ending game we play.

So what have I been up to? Some of the FABs were doing the Cheese and Crackers quilt. The "plan" was to start cutting this weekend and depending on how far we got, start on the strips sets shooting for a virtual retreat on the 21st. It was kind of a last minute thing anyway. Norma, Pam and I had been talking about doing this for months. Then it was narrowed down to when Norma got back from her bus trip and finally "are you busy this weekend?"

Pat had some things to finish up first (woohoo! t-shirt quilt is done!) but she will catch up this week going with blues and creams, she thought. Cher was not that nuts about the pattern so probably would have opted out but that cast on her right arm is presently a deterrent to sewing. Every team needs a cheerleader, right? Norma planned on working with 30's repros like me while Pam was going to satisfy an item on her bucket quilting list by making something scrappy.

I pieced the base for my March "Be Attitudes" block (Be Positive) before I started working on the strip sets for Cheese and Crackers. I sewed off and on all weekend watching a couple movies on DVD plus the bonus features for one that DJ and I watched recently. The picture shows where I left off last night, ready to sub-cut today, maybe start a few blocks too.

You see, the way I have the sewing room set up means taking the board off the table to cut as the mat is underneath it. It isn't all that heavy to lug it around but I tend to do as much sewing and pressing as I can before doing that. For smaller seams I can handle the 12 x 18 June Taylor mat on the right hand side of the table along the cutting mat. The width of a fat sort of exceeded the limits of space -- you don't need a hot iron too near the mat!

Anyway, I went ahead and pieced the border units even though the body of the quilt is NOT pieced. Terry Atkinson writes thorough directions with good pictorials so it was easy to jump ahead. The stacks on the top row are for the body of the quilt and the others below are for the pieced border. There is a fair amount of white space between the blocks. The whole deal you see gets cut into 3 inch strips.

Now I happen to know that Norma as getting bogged down with cutting background bits and moved ahead to piecing blocks---like 40 of them before she quit for the night! Me, I got piles of strip sets, LOL. Pam has her blocks done and units pieced for the borders. She went more lap quilt sized and resized the blocks a bit so she could use the bricks she had cut from the scrap bag---pretty smart! I expect the pictures to go flying back and forth next weekend as we gather around the machines and work on the assembly process--turn those blocks into rows and rows into tops.

Sometime this week I need to pick out some fabrics for the Twisted Sister class and track down some Insul-bright for an hot iron cover pattern some of the Belles want to try to make. I still need to make a back for the challenge top I finished recently. Add all that to the list! You know where to find me.

Thanks for stopping by............