Knitting, Binding and Cross Stitching

I'm still stitching away on February's cross stitch ornament from Linen and Threads.  I will add some more stitches this weekend for slow Sunday stitching.  I need to buy some extra skeins of these colours so that I can use them for all 12 ornaments. I have a plan in my head for a project which will include all 12...

My friend, Pat, is teaching me to knit.  This week, I made the big leap from working on my red practice sampler to actually starting a real project using a pattern!  We went shopping yesterday at the local knitting store and I purchased knitting needles and stitch markers with a gift certificate that my husband gave me for Christmas.  Pat gave me a pattern for a cotton dish cloth and showed me how to read and follow the pattern as well as do yarn over.  She sat beside me and coached me as I did the first few rows.  The new circular knitting needles are stainless steel and are very slippery, but I am getting the hang of it.  Yesterday, after she left to go home, I knitted for a while and got this far...

This morning, I went to town and got to the point where I had to start reducing the number of stitches on the needles.  She had not shown me how to do this, but I figured it out and now my dish cloth looks like this:

Knitting is obviously addictive!

Earlier in the week, I made a quilt top with the nine patches I showed on my last blogpost.

I only had one yard of the fabric I wanted to use for the backing so I used up the leftovers from the jelly roll and added more length and width to my backing to make it big enough.

The gray fabric has little rabbits on it.  You can see below that I did straight line quilting with my walking foot in a diagonal grid through all of the white squares.

I went searching through my stash for the appropriate fabric for the binding and found this yellow print.

I hand sewed the binding down on Wednesday as I wanted to have the quilt finished in time for show and tell at guild on Thursday morning.

Here is the finished quilt. 

The March pattern for the London Modern Guild HST BOM came out this week so I made my block.   I have 4 blocks done now--there were two in February. 

I am happy to announce that Spring has officially arrived in my back yard.  Our witch hazel bush is in bloom.

Finn continues to offer guidance and assistance as necessary to my daughter on her stitching project.

I will be linking to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching link up in the morning.  One less hour of sleep tonight but one extra glorious hour of daylight after supper from now until the Fall.  Have a great week!