Checking In

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
–William Shakespeare

I have a loosely set schedule for what I blog. It helps keep me organized. And it is very useful on those days when I don't have something quilty to post about. Sometimes though, I almost feel tied to my schedule. Certain posts are kind of time consuming to put together. I'm so particular about what I put out there that just a regular, everyday kind of post takes a minimum of 30 minutes. If there is photo editing involved, you can add at least another 30 minutes to that. There are so many things competing for my time; work, kids, homework with the kids, cooking, laundry, gardening, dishes, blogging, quilting. This sort of sounds like an apology for not doing my regularly scheduled Wednesday and Thursday posts this week. I'm probably the only one who noticed. I love doing my scheduled posts and plan to continue. But other things are vying for my time and I'm trying to find a balance, so I may mix it up once in a while and post something different or not at all on days when I have a regularly scheduled feature.

This week, I've been enjoying the lovely weather and spending a bit of time in my gardens. I ♥ digging in the dirt. All kinds of green things are peeking up and pretty soon the bulbs will be in bloom. Actually, I already have a few things blooming in the sunniest parts of my yard. I've also been helping the Little Bugs with LOTS of homework and I've been doing some quilting.

This is a wall hanging my mom made for a friend. It was a Block-of-the-Month at the quilt shop near her. She and her friend signed up together. It was $5 for the first kit. If they finished their blocks and took them back the next month, then they'd get the next block for free, and so on. But just after they signed up, her friend's husband found out he had cancer. So my mom did both blocks each month and finished this one for her friend. She's going to surprise her with it for her birthday next month. This is such a cute wall hanging. I love the stripey front door. It probably needs a little button doorknob to finish the look. The quilt hanging in the front window is really fun too. I wasn't sure if that was another quilt above the door, or a window. I decided it was a stained-glass window and quilted it to look like that. I loved doing the shingles on the roof. I just did stitch-in-the-ditch for bolts of fabric upstairs {don't look too closely}. I'm going to quilt some clouds in the sky, but I'm not sure how, yet. I don't know if they are going to be puffy clouds, or if I'm just going to quilt lines to create texture.

Besides the quilt shop, there is a tomato pin cushion, a sewing machine and a rotary cutter. I've quilted the filler around the sewing maching {just a stipple}, but I'm not sure what to quilt in the machine itself yet. I've got the tomato pin cushion figured out, but not the filler around it. I'm really happy with how the rotary cutter turned out. I did an approximation of McTavishing around it, and you can't see it, but I did a swirl in the black part of the rotary cutter. As I was editing photos, I realized that I hadn't finished the details in the handle, so this needs a little more work.

The fun thing about quilting something like this is that it is small, and you can work on it in little snippets of time and still feel like you're making progress. I only had about 30 minutes yesterday, so I did the pebbling in the sidewalk in front of the quilt shop. I'd like to get this finished up in the next day or two, so my mom can have plenty of time to get it bound and to her friend by her birthday. I'm going to work on it during Friday Night Sew-In tomorrow.