We adopted a couple of kittens in June. They are cute and energetic and curious and I had to lock them out of my quilt studio (which has now also become my work-from-home office) due to an inability to sufficiently kitten-proof the room. They love to wrestle with each other. Here they are wrestling on a pandemic project.
I’ve never had kittens in the house before, only adult cats. They get into more things. I have to lock them in a bedroom to baste a quilt so they don’t burrow under it, wrestle on it, and try to eat the safety pins. They are pretty adorable, though. They are a brother and sister from the same litter, and after they finish wrestling, more often than not you find them sleeping in a pile together.
I am still working from home. I’ve been reading and quilting and going for walks around the neighborhood in my spare time, but still don’t get out much. We have actually been considering getting a camper so there is some chance we might get a vacation this year. We are also thinking about building a detached porch/shed in the backyard so there is somewhere to sit (socially distanced) in the backyard. I am such a mosquito-magnet, unless I am walking (moving target!) I pretty much can’t sit outside for most of the year.
On a quilty note, in a quest to tackle some of my many UFOs (unfinished objects), last year I finished 13 quilts. After finishing so many last year, I took a break from machine quilting for 7 months, so my finishes have slowed this year, though I did finally start machine quilting again this summer. I have been thinking about what my goal should be this year (last year it was to finish one UFO per month, on average). At first I thought I should try to finish at least two UFOs for every new quilt that I start, so even if I slowed down I’d still have fewer net projects in varying stages of completion. Now I think that my goal should just be to quilt my way through all the finished tops. I pretty much always have a backlog of several quilts waiting for quilting. I did finish this Kentucky Crossroads quilt, though.
I’ve been analyzing why it takes me so much longer to do machine quilting than piece quilt tops. It isn’t the actual hours spent. I have a vintage plug-in clock I use to measure how long it takes me to machine quilt a project, and it ranges from about an hour for a wallhanging to 14 hours for a densely quilted queen-sized project; most quilts are between 4 and 8 hours, which I usually do over 2 to 5 days. I think the biggest reason is that machine quilting has a high mental overhead. It takes a lot of concentration or focus to coordinate the machine speed and the motion of the quilt to obtain even stitches while free-hand doodling a pattern. I also have to prepare for quilting by clearing the tables of other projects so they aren’t swept off the tables by the quilt as it is being quilted, so I can pretty much only do machine quilting while I am set up for it. I usually will quilt 3 to 5 projects in a row, and then get fatigued and switch back to piecing for a few months. By the time I get back to machine quilting, I have pieced a few more quilt tops so the quilting backlog remains.
I should probably start piecing more complex quilt backs in order to make up for the fact that I piece faster than I quilt, two projects for the price of one. I’ve always liked pieced backs but tend to go with simple patterns like wide stripes that come together fairly quickly, but I have experimented with sewing leftover blocks into the back. I found a bunch of blue and white scraps that I am piecing into a quilt back. I have enough green scraps to make another back and other odds and ends that could be put to good use in a quilt back. I have at least 3 finished tops in the closet that don’t have a back. But the kitties think I should just relax.
