In 45 minutes the power will go off. Not enough time to write this week’s blog post, I told myself. Then I read another charming post by Wendy Tuma (her fourth this week!) and decided to stop making excuses and to keep my weekly blogging date.
So, here I am writing about my current WIP (Work in Progress). Perhaps it should be called a Work in Process because it has not been languishing in a cupboard but has been keeping me busy over the past few weeks. As I was pinning and tensioning the quilt I mulled over the two words and have discovered that progress and process are more-or-less synonyms. According to the OED (here I go again) progress is “forward or onward movement; advance or development” and process is a “course of action, [or] proceeding, esp. series of operations in manufacture”. It’s a fine line, but I think we should call the WIPs that have to wait in line to be finished Works in Process (rather than Progress).
Enough prattling. Here is the quilt I am working on, pinned and waiting to be quilted.

A few weeks ago I posted a photograph of the collection of travel fabrics that I was about to cut into. It will be a large quilt when it is done, so I have pieced it in three panels and will join them once each has been quilted.
It is not often that my oversized pin cushion is free of pins (what pincushion worth its use ever is?), but this happened as I finished pinning the last panel this week. Luckily I thought to take photographs of the historic occasion.
As my regular readers will know, I live in a small town and need to travel to the nearest city to get bespoke sewing supplies. This week’s trip to stock up on sewing machine needles, decent thread and other notions had a sad edge to it as my local quilt shop (LGS), Pied Piper, will be closing. I am going to miss Yolande’s expertise and good advice and wish her all the best. Luckily (for us) she intends to continue teaching. So, my last purchase from her shop was a bundle of hand dyed no. 12 perle threads and a collection of threads in shades of teal for the quilting of the quilt.
To end off, I would like to sing the praises of The Woodworker. Last year he noticed that I had used the two volumes of my trusted Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as a makeshift extension table when I was machine quilting on my domestic sewing machine. At the start of this year he noticed that I was working on a big quilt that would end up being quilted by machine. And so he made an extension table. It works like a dream.
The 45 minutes are up!