Stories from the Sewing Room

I don't have much to share this week since I've been sick. I thought I'd be done with my daughter's quilt by now, but I didn't feel as good yesterday as I did Monday. I have the binding sewn to one side. 

And in case you missed it yesterday, here it is in progress.

I've been working on my guild project that's due in November. I am 3/4 done and am running low on one of the materials. I ordered more, which I hope was the correct item/color. Fingers crossed it gets here quickly and is the correct item.

My cousin sent me a box of fabrics. It looks like most are vintage (80s) cottons, but there was a bag of hand-pieced blocks in there along with a note that says "Rumor has it these came from one of the great grandmothers." Her grandma is my great aunt (or grandaunt as Ancestry calls it), so I'm trying to work out who the potential great grandmothers may be since we only have one line in common. I will have to ask her for sure. There are 53 blocks, I think, and they are hand-pieced. 

I've finished a few more quilts.

This one is Connie's, quilted with Geoglyph. I also bound this one.

Charlene selected Cassava for this one. Her backing fabric had some glitter. 

Jan requested Hiding Out.

Sara picked Ginger Heart.

And Keetah wanted Sea of Snowflakes. It's really hard to see in this picture, but the border fabric was cream shades, but flashed to iridescent red. Look right down in the lower left corner. I've never seen any fabric like this before.

Moving outside, we harvested as many tomatoes as we could. I counted 65. We probably left close to that many on the plants because they'd been eaten. My husband made a double batch of spaghetti sauce using the tomatoes. He used my recipe, but it tastes nothing like when I make it. There is a lot. 

The pumpkins appear to have been hit by squash bugs or something and I'm not sure if the plants will survive. There's one fairly sizable pumpkin that's got a hint of orange and a few tiny ones. The grapefruit-sized one that was up in the air hanging from the fence fell off. 

It's been a tough garden year. Oh, I think I forgot to mention before that the Brussels sprouts are basically little leaf veins and stalks now. We won't be harvesting any of those.

This leaf bug was hanging around on our slider screen.

It's been a weird week with just the two of us home and both at various stages of sickness. I've lost my sense of smell, which is really odd. The only way I can think to describe it is that everything's really quiet. There are no distractions. I can barely taste any food. I finally had to have my husband smell the jug of milk because I couldn't tell if it was still good or not (it wasn't and I'd had it in my breakfast that morning). On the plus side, I haven't felt much like eating and nothing has flavor, so my diet is off to a good start. I've lost four pounds so far. 

Finally, I just want to take a moment to remember Dolly Parton. 😭

How did you do with your goal this month?

This link up will remain open until August 31 at 11:55 pm EST.

For quilting, we decided on the Get in Loser design from Melissa Kelley. The thread is Glide Grape on the bottom and Amethyst on the top. It was a pretty long stitch-out even though I feel like I went with a standard size for the design scale. This first one is true colors.

My full quilt photo color is so far off. I couldn't adjust it to look remotely close to actual.

We debated which color binding to use. I used the darker color simply because I had a better all-purpose thread color match for it (or so I thought). After quilting, the quilt now measures 88" x 102.25". I was a bit shocked that I lost 2" of width just from quilting. I haven't completely finished yet since I was feeling tired by late Monday afternoon and I still had to make a trip into town to deliver my son's car to him. But I'll get the binding completed for sure before the end of the month and then I'll update the post with a final picture or two.