I have elected to go along with appliqued annuli, and for this section am finding it’s actually easier and faster to hand baste these down as I go. While I have gone further than in this pic, I have deliberately maintained a mix of sizes and thicknesses of the rings, and the two solid ones you see here had centres cut out after all – didn’t look good. In fact, once I work through all the annuli I have already cut out – another 50 or so, I think it will be even quicker to cut just the full ‘circle’ shape, sew it down and then cut out a middle bit.

It’s a large project, and it’s just as well as my enjoyment of the process isn’t flagging. Every now and then I find some way to rationalise, economise on effort or speed up the time for a step, and hand basting this area is one example.

As I stitch I have time to either listen to recorded books , or put the radio on to a favourite music station and think about ‘things’, including my next projects, which will be a quick one in the Stitch Club workshop series, and then the next Pandemic Pattern. Yesterday I finished off a Great Courses lecture series on the Ancient Civilisations of North America, and today I started listening to A Time For Mercy by John Grisham. I have Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s In Her Own Words waiting, and I will soon return to Michelle Obama’s Becoming in which I was interrrupted several months back.