delivered!

The Rubik's quilt was handed over to the Mama on Sunday and she loves it. I'm SO glad.

I recently saw something that said that I shouldn't point out all the things wrong with it, so I didn't. She's looking at the overall thing and thinks it's great, so I won't mention this spot or that spot.

I learned a lot about my machine. It seems to be fancy. It doesn't want discount thread or cheap thread - it wants the good stuff. I even have a middle-of-the-road thread in what I believe is a 50 weight and it doesn't work very well. I get needle-thread loops on the underside of my piecing seams, and if I try to quilt with that, I get breakage and skips and all kinds of shenanigans.

So Aurifil it is. And 50 wt. And then it sews beautifully. I'm sure it would be fine with any of the fancier threads (= expensive) like that, but Aurifil is the one that I can most readily find.

Those coasters are coming along. Hand-sewing the binding on 32 coasters takes a while, as you may imagine. I am a little picky about things, so it probably takes me longer than the average person BUT I notice that I'm getting faster at it. I have 8 pins in my coaster and as I sew, I take them out. One by one, they go into the next coaster. It's quite a system, and I never have pins lying around. I think I've finished about 13 of them now. It'll be fine.

We got a new dog. She's a min-pin-chi mix (miniature pinscher (brown) and chihuahua) and her name is Toffee. She's over a year old, but we aren't sure exactly how old she is. She came up from California on the rescue bus. She REALLY loves us. It's nice having a dog in the house again, and a small dog for the first time. She's allowed on the couch and on our daughter's bed, and when I'm stitching (or knitting) on the couch, she pretends she's a cat and lies on top of my work. Turd. We've worked out a system, though. The system involves the thread not touching her because it makes her twitch. Yes, that slows me down. She loves to cuddle, though, and I like her cuddling.