Thanks, Mike!

When Joe was in grad school, back in the '70s, one of his most admired professors was a guy named Mike F. He got things done. He got things done. When someone asked how he managed to be so productive he replied that he had a list of projects and every day he did a little bit on each one. Honna and I thought that was an amazing approach, guaranteed to work, and at the same time knew neither of us possessed the discipline to utilize it. Yet every now and again, one or the other of us will find that we are doing just that. The Mike F method.

This has been a Mike F kind of weekend! Here to the left is my first foray into machine quilting. I haven't finished the hand-part of the binding yet, and still have threads to tie and trim, but if you don't look too closely at the stitch length, you'll see that it isn't half bad!

In front of the "West Wing" reruns that we are currently watching from Netflix, in addition to the above-mentioned hand-binding, I've worked on some mug rugs that I owe some people and they are ready to go! Either tomorrow or Wednesday I'll be off to the post office with these. I hope that the recipients are pleased and haven't written me off as all talk and no delivery.

Judy and I visited a different guild in August and liked it so much that we're going to join. The night that we visited, there was a presentation from Quilts For Kids, and we each brought home a kit. It was easy and fun to put together. The fabrics were superb quality and everything was precut into strips. The clear instructions included covered every step.

The machine quilting above was done a stout quarter-inch from the seam line. On this project, I stitched in the ditch. I even put the binding on completely by machine and zigzagged the edge down, just as instructed. It was fun!

Oh, what have we here? Yes, it is some of the Cows that my readers made for me a little more than a year ago! They were uncovered during that recent clean-up of the studio and I knew it was time to do something about them. There are about 40, an enormous herd, and I didn't need a queen size cow quilt. So I picked out 25 that seemed to go together pretty well, trimmed them to size, cut lattice and cornerstones, and each day of this holiday weekend I have stitched a row together and a lattice strip together. When the top is a flimsy, I'll figure out what the smaller quilt is going to be like. I foresee the one staying at home, and the other moooooving into my car as an emergency nap blanket.

Then there's Thing Two, which you may remember from this post. I'd divided the HSTs into groups of sixteen. Under Mike F's guidance and inspiration, each day I press, trim, and assemble the HSTs into a block.

If I can keep on with this, in just a couple of weeks, Thing Two will be ready to be bordered, quilted, bound, and given away!

Long ago, I embarked on a project along the lines of the dreaded Farmer's Wife -- a queen quilt made of 6" blocks set on point and latticed. I would need 110 and was using patterns from the Around The Block  series of books. I got a little over half-way there and then became distracted (who, me?). Thanks to a gift package of new-to-me CW scraps from dear Lori, my interest in this project has been rekindled to the tune of one new block per day.

The list of WISPs is dwindling, Mike, and I'm hoping you'll stick with me a little bit longer. One of these days we are going to have to look at the real cadre of UFOs!