gas houser tutorial, kitty quilt top finished

I got a bit of a late start on Wednesday (10/24) so my honey made me breakfast: 

before making gas housers for himself:  

holes in the bread

toast the bread

butter in the holes

break eggs into the holes

flip everything over

voila!

I SKYPE’d with Janice until 10:30 and finally got my blog out after that.  I dropped back to working on my kitty quilt and the top is totally finished:  

On the fabric, each of the kitties is outlined in black, so I put a thin black border on the entire quilt, and followed it up with another 3 inch border of kitty fabric:

I cut out another kitty quilt to take on retreat, and decided that I would make the binding for both right now.  My hope is to come home with the second top finished, and load them BOTH up together and get them quilted….so I want to have the binding ready to go.  It took awhile to get 18 yards of binding sewn and pressed, but finally it was done:  

Just before 1 PM I headed up to the Lake House to sit in on a meeting of the SCCL quilters.  I make a number of Quilts of Valor each year, but I never have any direct contact with the veterans who receive my quilts.  I knew Marge was going to talk about that, and talk about what sorts of quilts the veterans seem to like.  I listened to what she had to say…and so far I think my patterns are fine.  There are a lot of SCCL quilters making all different kinds of blocks…out of all different materials…and maybe there’s just a little bit too much going on in some of the quilts they have made.  Some people might like those and others might not.  I tend to make simpler quilts….so for the moment I’m not going to change anything, but it is always good to get someone else’s perspective.  When I got home I got the last baby quilt off of the frame, and got it all cleaned up and trimmed.  I found a darker pink in my stash and got some strips cut to make binding.  I also got 96 five inch squares of background cut and packed for another quilt on retreat:

We had dinner from the new Panera across the street and I spent hours and hours after that watching TV with my honey and stringing beads on my rainbow necklace.