Stories from the Sewing Room

Well. It has been a week. {Why do I feel like I'm always saying this?} 

I have made some reasonable progress on my Magnificent Mystery. I have completed parts five and seven.

Part seven involved making two sizes of flying geese. I didn't have the correct size Bloc-loc templates to trim these. Part way through I remembered I have the Wing Clipper tool. I really like this ruler. It has lots of sizes and is easier to use than a regular ruler. And it is more attractively priced than the other specialty ruler.

Here are the completed parts.

Part six involves making and trimming 120 HST and then sewing them into blocks. Will I be able to get it done in the next week and a half? It's anyone's guess. 

I'm still making progress on my knitted blanket. I was able to fix the mistakes I'd made in the fourth skein. I didn't take a picture of the mess. I sort of wish I had, just to show that I fixed it. Special shout-out to Mimi at Pastiche Knitwear for having the videos published that made me understand how and feel empowered to make the repairs. I have no affiliation with the person. Google suggested the videos and they were an a-ha moment.

Anyway, I am now part way through my sixth of 10 skeins on this project. 

My daughter was home over the weekend and brought some of her yarn with her. This yarn came in hanks and she wanted to turn them into balls/cakes to make it easier to work with. I had purchased a yarn swift and ball winder last year on a really good sale, so we broke them out. 

{You can also see her pile of fabric on the table. She selected and I purchased some things back in 2020 to paper-piece a snake quilt and I told her the time is now to start. But we discovered we'd never bought background fabric.}

Here are her finished cakes. 

I went to small guild Friday night and guess what? We are doing a UFO challenge this year. How serendipitous that I already have a list made (PHD).

Meanwhile, I felt like I haven't gotten much work done, but looking back over my camera roll, it's not as bad as I thought, at least for last week. 

I quilted Deep Waves on Ann's quilt. 

I quilted Sugar and Spice on Twilla's quilt.

Everly's quilt was quilted with Threaded and pink thread. This one is bound for the IHQS's youth entry category.

I quilted Triplet on Sara's quilt. 

I bound both of Ann's quilts and got them shipped back to her. 

This week got off to a really slow start as I had some things to attend to that took me away from the sewing room. 

So far this week I have quilted Rylan's quilt. He selected Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut. This one will be entered in the youth category as well. I love that young people are taking up quilting. Both kids chose great color combos and tried more advanced blocks.

Next up I have a custom quilt that I've been pulling and/or sourcing threads for. Almost everything else I have booked to quilt needs to go on the big machine, however, I custom quilt on the big machine, so...yeah. Not much money coming in this week. Some weeks it's like that. If you need a smaller quilt quilted, there's currently no waiting. ha ha

In other news, we thought the dryer sounded bad last week, so my husband figured the rollers and belts were going since it's about 14 years old. He ordered some parts for $35 and tore apart the machine. The rollers and belt looked fine but he did find a big hairball (thanks, daughter who doesn't even live here) and a lot of lint that had escaped the filter. I didn't get a picture of it, but one of the sound deadening strips on the drum had a spot that had fallen off and melted into a hard blob on the bottom of the dryer. My husband couldn't find any description of that issue online at all. I guess we're special. 

So if you ever wondered what the inside of a dryer looks like, now you know. 

Alas, my vacation time has come to an end. I am grateful to have plenty of quilts waiting for me. Before we get into that, let's look at what I've sewn this month. 

I've finished all the spire pieces for the Linda J. Hahn Beach Bumz project. I like that you can chain-piece these foundations. I don't love tracing them from stencils.

I took the time to grade the seams so that I won't have dark blue shadows (hopefully). Can you see it in the photo below?

I alternated trimming the Magnificent mystery blocks with piecing the Beach Bumz spires. There were 16 spires in all. They are all fully trimmed but I haven't removed the foundation yet. Linda says to leave the foundation in. I don't want to because you can see my lines through some of the fabrics I used and the foundations still have the faintest smoke smell.

I have been hard at work on the Magnificent mystery pieces too. There is sooo much trimming of blocks for this quilt. I have all of month three (large hourglass blocks) completed. I did month four (Irish chain) ages ago. I am part way through month five, which is smaller hourglass blocks. The blocks are all made now and I am working on trimming them. 

After they are all trimmed, another piece of background fabric gets sewn to one side. I haven't started months six or seven yet. The final design is revealed in February. I took the sneak peek, so I know what I'm sewing. Here's all the pieces of my project, minus the backing.

I put off working on this project for a while because I really dislike making hourglass blocks. They rarely come out with all four corners exact. I purchased some marking tools. It was a fail. Can you see how the marks were larger than 1/4"? In the end I just went back to using the markings on my machine and took care not to let the edges pull in towards the needle at the end.

Back to the quilting work...I got off to a slow start, realizing I needed to spend a day doing design work, tracking down quilts and setting up appointments and so on. I got the first quilts on the frames yesterday.

Toni picked Dragonfly Dance for her quilt. 

Ann K. requested Cakewalk 2 for this comfort quilt. I'll add her binding to the front so she can stitch it down when I ship it back. 

In other quilting news, I attended the big guild meeting last night for the first time since last August. I donated the race car quilt! Woo hoo, it's gone! 

I've been working on my knitted blanket too. I've finished four skeins, but made some mistakes that I need to fix. I have one missed stitch for sure that's about four rows down and it looks like I dropped a stitch in the same row too, but I can't find proof of it. I'm hoping to work on the repairs tonight. 

Finally, I don't normally take pictures of most of our food, but I was chatting with my sister and sent her a picture of my dinner. The recipe for Better-Than-Takeout Cashew Chicken can be found here. It's so good. When we have it for dinner, we usually serve it with rice. When I eat the rest as a leftover, I often just eat it as-is. Let me know if you try it. 

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, and Alycia Quilts.