Stories from the Sewing Room

It's time to share your September progress.

This link up will remain open until September 30 at 11:55 pm EST.

My goal for September was to quilt my Range quilt. I'm pleased to say that after a weekend spent quilting, I was successful.

I decided to try something new and change threads as I went down the quilt. I pulled out these eight threads to match my fabrics. I only ended up using six of them, omitting Rock Navy and Blizzard. I used only white thread in the bobbin.

The quilting design, Rich Girl, has eight lines per design unit. I did split out one of the lines to change the color sooner, but overall I just went with where it felt right to make the transition. I split the quilting over two days. I've tried to photo each of the transitions, but the pictures didn't turn out very well. It's been very dark and gloomy the past few days. Only the bottom picture with the backing is the correct color.

Now I need to decide what to use for binding. I have the Royal Blue set aside, but I think maybe it's too dark for the upper half of the quilt. It's color number six of eight as you progress down the quilt. It's the bottom blue on the picture right above with the backing. Which color would you use?

It's been a week of feeling really busy and yet nothing really seems to have been accomplished. My fabric and pattern orders came in and now I have to go about the challenging process of completely altering the top portion of the pattern in order to get something that fits reasonably. 

I started prepping the fabrics for the Krista Moser BOOtiful stitch-along. I'm so glad I didn't start cutting yet because the first video instruction came out yesterday and I realized I had completely missed one of the most critical cutting instructions.  I think my strategy for this project will be to wait until each Tuesday, watch the instructions, and then do the cutting and assembling.

I have made progress on the Ghostie Girls table runners, though not as much as I would have liked. This picture isn't particularly exciting, but it shows almost all of the stitch-and-flip pieces that are required in order to actually start piecing the ghosts. I think the only ones left are for the hair bows, but that comes in at a later step.

The chicken cross stitch has moved forward though I haven't worked on it yet this week. We are still missing poor little Peanut the hen. I'm pretty concerned Henry will be next.

Of course I've been busy with work. I stitched Stipple on Deb's quilt.

Jeri selected Stellar for this one. I'll need to fully bind it.

I bound all the memory quilts. I only took pictures of three of the four.

I stitched Mod Moon on Jeri's quilt. Again, need to fully bind.

Melissa requested Peace for her Vintage Lace quilt. This is a big quilt and had a very long stitch out time. It used almost 2000 meters (two small cones) of thread.

Jeri wanted Sparkle 1 for this quilt. More binding upcoming.

Other than that, I completed some house chores. Those seem never-ending, even with just the two of us here. Our entire county was under a boil water alert from Sunday midnight until mid-morning Monday. We were attending a scholarship ceremony with my son on campus Sunday evening and due to not being able to use the water for cooking or eating, it was very light hors d'oeurves and bottled water or soft drinks for dinner. We sat with him while he ate dinner afterwards in the IMU. No drinks available. Good thing I'd grabbed him a few extra bottles of water on the way out of the ceremony. 

Side note from the scholarship ceremony: this was for students who received awards directly from the Office of Scholarships. That accounted for one of the four my son received. The director said there were 9800+ incoming students and only 61% of them received a scholarship from her office. "Only." So doing the math, that's around 6000 students who received money. There were maybe 50 kids at this event. 

Moving back to the water situation, we'd been to the grocery store earlier in the day and most of the produce was missing since it had been sprayed with the water system. They had notes taped up. The health department suggested using disposable dishes and silverware. Luckily we had enough clean dishes to just wait it out before running the dishwasher. The worst part was trying to brush teeth and rinse using bottled water. It is difficult and I'm thankful I live somewhere where that is not part of my daily routine. 

We had a pretty heavy thunderstorm Friday evening that apparently caused the water issue--they'd lost power which increased turbidity above legal limits. I took this picture after the storm. Everything was very yellow. The sun was't flaring like this, but this is how my phone translated what it saw.

A random news post from last week: 

I'd rather it was for something like this rather than something life-threatening. My son said that two kids in his dorm (not the one from the post above) decided to have a boxing match in one of the lounges which resulted in one kid having a black eye and a broken nose. I guess one of the kids was drunk and tried to ride down the stairs or something. It might have even been the same kid. 🙁 I do not understand this type of behavior. My son is definitely having his eyes opened to how other people live and behave. I'm not sure that he is very impressed.