Stories from the Sewing Room

I've wrapped up all the pre-holiday quilts for others, so now it's my turn! 

I have so many goals for the month. It's probably unrealistic to expect to get them all done, but here's what I'm hoping to do.

    1. Quilt the #Trending quilt--I'm planning to do this today, but binding will have to wait.

    2. Custom quilt and bind the apple quilt (circa 1999!!).

    3. Quilt Chalk.

    4. Quilt SCQG BOM.

    5. Make some lumbar support pillows for our chairs.

    6. Make my daughter a shirt.

    7. Piece and completely finish test quilt. I have a week to do this! 😱 I thought I had longer. Time flies. 

    8. Fix drawstring in son's pj pants. This involves dismantling the entire waistband. 😒 I'm thinking I need to make sure they still fit him before diving in to this one.

    9. Make this month's units for the Melodic Mystery.

    10. Try again at piecing the Grassy Creek borders.

                               Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal December Link-up

My official goal is to get the Grassy Creek borders pieced. Hopefully I'll be more successful this month than I was last month.

Besides catching up on my personal sewing projects this month, I plan to deep-clean my house. Not so fun, but it really needs to be done. I haven't seen any spiders lately, but there are cobwebs everywhere. And dust. 

Meanwhile, we are in competition season for robotics. The team had their first scrimmage Friday night and took first place! It will be a practice frenzy between now and the first official competition next week to try to get the robot in full competition form. Plus we have driver's training going on and an upcoming wisdom tooth extraction. Busy, busy. I never run out of things to do. Is that a blessing or a curse?

Looking forward to 2023 (!), I have a general plan for which projects from my UFO list I plan to work on. I will be participating in the Board and Batten QAL hosted by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs next year too. It runs January 5 - March 2 if you'd like to join in. Here's my fabric selection to make a throw size quilt (pulled from my stash, bonus!).

I'll be quilting for others again after this month's hiatus. I'm blessed to already have a queue for January, though I am doing my best to ignore it while I take some time for me. 

Here are the last few quilts I did. If you are ever interested in seeing the whole quilt, please follow me on Instagram @just_anne_marie to see full photos, though with some delay so that the owners can see and/or gift them first.

Margaret's, which I custom quilted.

And Jan's, quilted with Exes.

First things first, I completely failed at this month's OMG, which was to sew the string pieced units for my Bonnie Hunter Grassy Creek quilt. I never even got started. Maybe I can try again next month.

I did get all this month's flying geese units finished for the Melodic Mystery quilt.

I've started working on the quilt I'm testing, but no photos allowed on that.

And I finally, finally, finally finished binding my Flower Patch SAL quilt! It was really windy last night, but we got an almost okay picture. 

And lots of bloopers. 😃

I'm really close on finishing this year's quilting for others.

I quilted Rosemary on Abby's very first quilt. She did a great job!

We went with Threaded on Christi's quilt and it is so cute. I may have quilted this on Thanksgiving. 😏

Persephone 3 was the choice on Trish's quilt. This is such a beautiful quilt!

Connie chose Triangle Meander for her quilt. I am binding this one as well. I struggle to find more "masculine" pantographs. I think Triangle Meander is a good one to add in that category.

And finally, something a little different. I had quilted Legene's quilt a while back and it ended up being too small to fit her bed, so she added borders to the sides and gave it back to me. I knew that it would be quite difficult to match up the pattern and that we needed to do something different. In the end we decided to just stitch lines down some of the gold stripes in her fabric, kind of like piano keys, but spaced about 1.25" apart. The thread matched really well and barely shows. I wasn't sure how loading and quilting a previously finished quilt was going to go. It was fine. It's important to have enough extra fabric to be able to attach it to the leaders; that's probably the biggest thing.

Moving to more personal things, I canned some pineapple last week. We used extra light syrup. I find that home canned pineapple is less acidic (or at least less acid reflux inducing) than regular fresh or canned pineapple. I didn't start any new pineapple plants this time.

We had an uneventful, semi homemade Thanksgiving dinner. It looks very midwestern and rather unhealthy to me. 😆 We had to serve everyone's favorites though. We had marinated turkey breast cooked on the grill; homemade, healthier mashed potatoes; stuffing from a box; a green bean casserole made with sour cream and cheddar instead of cream soup; crescent rolls from a tube; and homemade pecan and apple pies. I made the pecan and my husband made the apple. We finished the evening by catching up on Andor episodes.