This is a walking foot; a strange name for a sewing machine foot that allows you to stitch in the ditch. This is what happens with any new craft; you have to learn the lingo.

The walking foot moves the fabric forward in sync with the feed dogs (sigh); those are the teeth in the plate under the needle. You probably aren't interested in the translation anyway. You just want to know why I'm showing you this foot. Well, I've gotten to the quilting part of my quilt. Until you put the quilt top (the pretty part), the batting and the backing (any old cotton) together and start to sew on them you don't have a quilt. To me this is the challenging part. Some folks just turn their quilt top, batting and backing over to professional quilters, but I didn't want to do that without trying it first.

I did the easy part, stitch in the ditch. Basically you just follow along as close to the seam as you can get. You start from the middle and work out. And you use safety pins rather than straight pins to hold the whole thing together.

The fancy part is called "free motion quilting." And I'm terribly intimated by it. It's the art in arts and craft. My Thursday class taught this technique; I've been practicing, but I'm certainly not ready to a do this to my quilt top. I'm going to work through this but it's going to take a lot of practice on muslin (it's hard for me to not write "Muslim"). At the fabric store I asked for a yard of Muslim. I'm sure I wasn't the first to do that.

Despite the age of my sewing machine (born 1976) I have been able to find all the attachments I need to quilt. For a nanosecond on Thursday I thought I might have to buy a new machine; then I found the quilting/darning foot. Does anyone remember darning socks. I do. I wonder what happened to my mother's egg.

I finally feel like we are back to our usual life; I got on the treadmill today after a 12 day absence. That's when I knew things were back to normal. Plus we are having leftovers tonight: meatloaf and potato salad that was leftover from the Red Hat Ladies barbecue.

The only thing that is not normal is Kerry's health. He had a blood test prior to our trip, but we didn't get the results until mid-trip. His platelet count is 24,000; at 20,000 doctors worry about bleeding out. You are supposed to have upwards of 250,000 platelets. This is the lowest his count has ever been. He's now having his blood tested every four weeks. Scares me to death. Also, his glucose level was over the top so now he's taking insulin pills. I'm much more worried than he is; that's my job in this relationship. He may have to go through another chemotherapy treatment for the platelet disorder (ITP). Until we figure that out we are not venturing very far from home.

I'm going to my first quilt guild meeting tomorrow night. My quilting buddy, Linda, is out of town so I'm going alone to scout it out.