A Little of This and A Little of That

This weekend is the first weekend without football since last August. I've been a football fan forever, but I never realized until last night how football dominated my weekend schedule. Of course now that most of my quilting time is relegated to the weekends my weekend plans revolve around quilting and football. Grocery shopping? Stop at the small grocer during the week. Fabric shopping? What's that? Dinner with friends? Only if they like football, come to my house and don't mind if I hand quilt while they are visiting. Laundry? Yeah, I can do that between games and needles of thread.

With no football on the calendar for tomorrow it's like having another day off! I can go to the big supermarket tomorrow and buy enough food for the whole week. So what else I have done so far this weekend?

Last night I finished my Tulips mini whole cloth quilt. It is my first finish of 2007. The top photo shows the quilt in its actual colors. The second photo shows the quilting better. This is my first hand quilting project. I like it. Not bad for a first complete quilt. I used a variegated yellow and blue YLI thread on it.




Today I did a little of this and a little of that. I cut strips for binding to send to Nancy for her birthday charity string quilts. There are a lot of quilters who are making the string blocks and I confess that I don't care for the string blocks. But I do want to contribute so I offered to make binding for Nancy's quilts. I have enough strips cut for four quilts. Tomorrow I'll sew the strips together so I can send them to Nancy.

I also cut nickels for my football swap. I am the hostess for the swap so tomorrow I will swap out all the packages and get them ready to mail out. I straightened up the closet in my studio. I was trying to find a pattern I know I have, but couldn't find it anywhere. I traced a red work angel to work on tomorrow. Instead of doing the snowmen some bloggers are doing I found this BOM red work project that started this month on Bobby Socks. So I thought I would give it a try. I need to go buy embroidery floss tomorrow. I need to make sure I have enough red to complete the whole project. I don't think there will be enough red in the skein I got in my Stitch-It kit last week.

Last August I bought a small table top drawer set at IKEA for my studio. I started working on it then and couldn't get it together. The nails kept bending and not going in properly. Then I tried using wood glue and that didn't help either. Today I asked DH if he could make it for me. He did and now I have it sitting on the end of my sewing table full of my marking pencils, sewing needles, sewing machine tools and attachments and other odds and ends. All those items had been sitting in a blue basket on a nice wood tray, but they are all neatly put away in the drawers now.

I also started marking my Birthday Garden quilt. I have several different marking tools so I'm experimenting with each of them to see how they work. Did I tell you this quilt is my experimental quilt?

Finally it was time for watching Tiger Woods playing golf and I wasn't ready to stop playing for the day so I pieced together two pieces of batting and sandwiched my Don't Touch Me quilt. I decided to do free hand cross hatching. I started with the same blue and yellow thread I used on my Tulips. I quilted about 8 inches and decided I didn't like it so I'm going to frog it and use white thread instead, maybe cream if I can find some in my thread stash.

I can't for tomorrow. As much as I eat, breath and sleep football I am happy to have a day off tomorrow. Woohoo!