All Ahead Slow

You might think I'm moving slowly because of all that snow shoveling I've been doing, but you would think wrong. Not one shovel full has been shoveled. I've just been inside under the quilts staying warm and slow stitching.

Yesterday I was determined to finish the last of the Snow Globes blocks, and hours into it...mission accomplished!

It's hard to see much in the image below because the floss is pastel for the most part. I tried to brighten it up, but the background fabric isn't particularly conducive to photo manipulation. (Not sure why it turned pink in the upper left corner...nothing different about that piece from the others.) So anyway...here are all 12 blocks together, and ready to be sewn into a quilt top.

And so obviously, I needed something new to stitch. I got to work tracing out the 8th of nine blocks for the Friendship's Garden quilt.

When it was traced out, I hooped it up ready for this morning's stitching.

And there it is...started. This morning's stitching was mainly using up the leftover bits on my floss bobbins. Tomorrow's stitching path will be a little more organized.

Also, I stitched the 11th inchy for National Embroidery month.

That completes the top two rows, and here they are.

We still have snow on the ground, but it's well above freezing and it's raining this morning. The snow won't last long under those conditions. The kitties are just as happy to be done with it.

Sadie doesn't seem to mind the cold and the wet, but it's deep enough and she's short enough that she sinks up to her axles when she goes outside. That doesn't stop her from trying, however.

Smitty just watches. He thinks she's crazy going on into that stuff. He'll just stick here on his kitty pole, thank you.

Not a single quilting stitch was taken on the Hocuspocusville quilt yesterday. I'm still fighting the let's-get-started intimidation of quilting a large quilt into which I've invested so much time. I took the first stitches on this quilt on July 6, 2015, and so I have nearly four years invested so far. And quilting is hard for me, so I have to work up a good bit of courage to tackle a project like this. I think today, I might overcome the inertia and get it going in earnest. Like so many things, once I get started, it will take over my life and I'll work on it feverishly until it's finished. I'm just waiting for the free motion quilting tipping point to kick in.

There's a short grocery shopping outing in my future, but I'll probably wait until tomorrow when the roads are likely to be cleared of any leftover snow. Today I have one housekeeping chore, and I'm going to bake a loaf of bread from the last of the bread dough. Aside from that, there's nothing standing in the way of me and the quilting. Perhaps a bite of chocolate will fortify my courage. What do you think?