Coming Along

I'm so encouraged!  I've had a hard time this summer getting to the end of a project.  Some of the projects have been rather large, and it's no wonder that they take a long time to finish.  One example of that was the job of painting the railing on the balcony.  I'm so glad that was finished in July already!

Another project that I want to finish soon is S's quilt.  Last week I finally got all the 9 patch blocks resewn.  Quite a few of them had turned out too small, and needed to be taken apart and redone.  The problem was that my 1/4" foot made a fat 1/4" seam.  By moving the needle to the right I was able to correct that.

Today I laid out half of the top and made the three layer "sandwich" of backing, batting and top.  Both the backing and the top needed to be pressed carefully again. 

 S. and I were very surprised to discover that we were very short on backing material.  We have only 56" length of the 108" backing fabric.  This is definitely a mistake.  I remember when Lorraine was cutting the backing she came across a flaw and cut a portion off, and then restarted.  I think perhaps we came home with the first cut, the one up to the flaw, and the amount we actually needed stayed there at the shop.

We're fortunate that I also bought a large piece of the same backing for a quilt in progress.  We'll be able to use that backing for the other half of S's quilt.

I will begin the machine quilting tomorrow.  I plan to first quilt "in the ditch" throughout and then later possibly do something decorative in the plain beige squares.

Work on the back patio continues.  There, too, we've had some problems.  It took lots of patience, and our two heads to figure out just exactly how to relay the blocks.  We think we have it right now.

A carpenter will create a wooden frame for the sand underlay.  Joshua will compact the sand or we'll borrow his compacter and do it ourselves.
Then, finally, we can lay the blocks.

Yesterday Dickens brought home a "pocket gopher."  It's basically a type of mole.  We have lots of them in the front landscape.  They make quite a mess.  He dropped it on the sand for the back patio, but because it wasn't dead, it managed to dig itself in overnight.  Dickens was trying to get at it this morning, but didn't succeed.  Later Jim dug it out.  It had died overnight, worn out from its ordeal.