pickled clamshells | Quilt Obsession

One of the things I’ve been working on is stitching the arcs for the Pickled Lady blocks. I’m trying to get lots and lots of them ready as stitching the arcs to the clamshell body takes next to no time. Unfortunately, my wrists are still not cooperating so pressing the arcs wasn’t possible before the picture was taken. All the black triangles are cut for at least another 40 arcs while the white pieces are being cut as I need them.

It was bitterly cold here on Wednesday. So cold that the first cold weather alert of the season was issued by the city. It seems awfully early for this horribly cold weather and makes me wonder what January and February are going to be like. When it’s bitterly cold, I resort to my mice slippers. They are toasty warm and I really don’t care how ridiculous they look. My mother bought these slippers for me well over 15 years ago and I treasure them. They only come out in the winter so they’ve stood up quite well. Watching the cats’ reactions to the oversized mice on my feet makes me laugh. The sight of them makes Mr. Q.O. laugh.

Smudge greeted me Wednesday morning by chirping for his breakfast and doing figure eights around my legs. Huge improvement. Getting him to eat on his own has been a challenge, so hearing him ask for breakfast felt like a huge achievement.

Both of the kitties were spending time either in the cat beds or on the couch, staying warm. Lester looked at the windowsill ever so briefly on Wednesday afternoon but I think he could sense it was chilly and decided to head for the couch.

That’s what has been going on around here lately — very little stitching. Lots of printing and cutting, though. And one pickled lady to add to the mix, but that’s about all there is to show. It seems like November is prep month. Made myself laugh thinking about it, but it’s as though I’m getting ready to hibernate for the winter and want all the preparation work done so that I have lots and lots of pieces printed, cut and ready to stitch.

One of the things I’ve been working on is printing the Storm at Sea shapes. It’s a good thing that the initial idea of going with the 4 batiks got changed to using 11 fabrics as I found one of the original four has a flaw that runs the entire length of the piece. There’s an area that’s about half an inch wide that has less than half the thread count of the rest of the batik. I’ve had the batik now for months and wouldn’t even contemplate taking it back, so I’ve cut the fabric to get rid of the flaw, but it’s possibly going to make it tricky to get the number of shapes I want from that particular fabric. Seems like my Storm at Sea quilt is undergoing some changes yet again.

There’s a group of florals that need to be fussy cut/printed for more Pickled Ladies. Two more of the large pink stars are done for a total of five finished, so there’s only one left to piece and then printing the shapes for the small pieced cornerstone blocks. More preparation work.

The weekend paper comes with lots of catalogues from various stores, particularly at this time of year. I had been looking at them while Smudge was curled up at the other end of the couch when Lester decided to join us. He wanted attention so made sure that the catalogues weren’t accessible.