What's On Your "To-Do" List?

 Greetings from a sunny ( and balmy) snowy Northeast Ohio!!  

It's 37 degrees F. and after the cold days last week, it feels quite nice.  I might not even wear gloves outside today?!?  Yes, all those comedy routines and jokes about us apply when the winter sun is shining and it gets up to freezing!  We are on the downhill side of winter and the year round resident birds like cardinals and tufted titmice have started territorial singing as the daylight increases.  Hearing them cheers me right up and is a signal to my brain that spring is coming!!

How many new projects have you started this year so far?

I found one!!  It's Katja Marek's Homage to Grandmother's Flower Garden.  Have you seen it?  It's a stunning layout!  The pace is doable since the quilt is broken into 52 weekly sections.  I'm using 3/4" finished hexagons because it's larger than I want with the 1" that she has used.  And since I already have an EPP project going, I'm machine piecing this one using the Set-In Piecing Simplified chain piecing technique.  

To satisfy my "fussy cutting" itch (without starting yet another project), I chose this gorgeous floral from my stash to use for the center round of the large flowers.  It also has determined the color palette of rosy pink, golden yellow, and cornflower blue for the entire quilt.

Katja has designed the quilt with an interesting background but since I'm a devoted stash buster at this point, I'm working with a blended scrappy assortment of the palest blues I can find on the shelves.  To keep my momentum going down the road, I've precut lots of these blue hexagons so I can dive into each section without much effort.

My fussy cutting is rather casual but it still scratches my itch.

The trickiest part is inserting the leaves but after some fiddling with different approaches,  setting each one up as a unit like this seems to work best for me.  Sometimes that will mean pinning those pieces to the body of the top until an adjacent section is added but sewing the two background hexagons to the "weird" pieces and then to the leaf section with the final seam being between the two "weird" sections works well.  The "weird" shape is called "Marge's star" as it was introduced by the Aussie designer, Marge Sampson-George.

Isn't it delightful so far?!?

While I'm stuck on the next quilting step for that quilt I showed you in my last post, I've been moving some old UFO's forward.  If you ever attended one of my UFO Assault Lectures, you might recognize this little pineapple piece -- I finally took off the foundation papers and found this cute print in my stash for a wide border to bring it up to a usable size.

This old teaching step-sample is all stitched together and I'm auditioning borders today -- the pieced green border is settled but I'm waffling about a narrow accent border -- argh!!

It's all laid out on the floor just inside the sewing room and so hopefully, when I go back up there later today, one of the five choices I laid out will sing right out!

And I'll have another top to quilt!!

I'm excited to have all the units for parts 4 and 5 ready to add to my version of Jemina's Creative Quilting current mystery sew along!  I've become a regular Zoom webinar attendee for native plants and insect programs -- it's a great time to baste hexies, too!

So it might seem like all I'm doing is stitching?

That about sums it up -- mostly all I'm doing is stitching.  But I think I've stumbled onto a more upbeat strategy for not feeling guilty about it.  For some (inspired?) reason, I didn't make a "to-do" list last week?!?   Instead, I did "got-it-done" lists at the end of each day.  Everyday there were two or three household chores done plus the stitching and no guilt.  It amounted to the same amount of daily housework and sewing as usual, but not having the "to-do" list guilt was great!! Soooo, the "to-do" list will only have notations for tasks I might forget and very few deadlines.  

Up with the "got-it-done" lists because accomplishments build positive momentum!!

And that's a good thing!

Have a guilt-free week!!

Mary