An extra day!

I was supposed to fly to Hartford yesterday but my flight was cancelled. That’s OK. The weather forecast on Monday evening looked bad so I got on line and booked a second flight for today… just in case…

The lady at Southwest told me that if my original flight was cancelled I would be able to switch my reservation and pay just the much more budget friendly price of the first ticket. If Wednesday’s flight went to plan I could cancel the second ticket for a full refund. And guess what? It worked! Yesterday’s flight was cancelled at lunchtime Tuesday. I called customer service and everything got taken care of. I’m flying to Hartford this afternoon.

That left me with a spare day at home. I could have expanded my packing to take all day a la Parkinson’s law.

From Wikipedia: Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

But I decided to do something radical instead. I made a little quilt!

When I was cleaning up last week I found a little bag of scraps. They were all shapes and sizes and neatly pressed, not from any project I recognized. In fact I really don’t know where they came from. Maybe someone left them my table in a Happy Scrappy class? I had left them in  the bag and put them in my scraps bin.

It was time to retrieve them and sew them together!

And what better time to try out my new sewing machine? I had finally got around to unpacking my birthday/Christmas present and setting it up.

A new BERNINA 570 QE! You might remember I got to sew on one at Houston last year? Extra 1 1/2″ sewing space, big bobbins and built in dual feed… Looks good?

So I sat and sewed all those scraps together. I added the solid shades of purple and the white border but everything else came from the bag. The new machine worked beautifully. Time to quilt. I’m going to need a new plexiglass-glass insert to seat the new machine into my sewing table so I switched to my B740 for some walking foot fun. Organic curves and utility stitches in 12 weight thread, filled in with 50 weight echo lines. A 1/4″ cherry red binding and I was done.One last picture just because I can.Not a great work of art but a happy day.

Time to put those last few bits in my bag and head off to Hartford for Stitches United! I’ve got four classes, three demos on the show floor and some gallery walks planned. There will be pictures…

BTW If anyone out there knows who donated the scraps please let me know. If it was you, THANK YOU! I hope you like what I did with them.