Stories from the Sewing Room

I won a set of ecopeco cutting mats in the Quetzal Blue color way from Elm Street Quilts' May One Monthly Goal. The mats arrived this week and they are just beautiful. And they do not have a smell. I'll update once I use them more. I have the larger one on my cutting table right now.

I have done very little sewing over the past week. Here's my total.

The big project that I tackled this week is to finally sort my fabric stash into the bins I bought with my Christmas money (in December). My hope is that by having the fabrics in smaller containers that I will be able to see and use what I have.

Anyway, I somehow thought that sorting all this would make my fabric closet more tidy. However, I do not have shelving in the closet yet and I don't feel comfortable making huge stacks with the new bins. So they are now stacked under the long arm until I can get shelving installed. I also had to order more bins since I didn't have quite enough to finish. I did find that I had a large tote's worth of scraps. Those will still need to be sorted by color.

I finally tried out my long arm yesterday. My husband couldn't believe I waited that long before I tried it. I had to get over my fear of the unknown, I guess. It was really easy to thread and quite easy to set the tension. So I think I'm ready to attempt an actual quilt now. Good thing, because I have a pile of them here.

We've replaced two more windows. That makes six down, seven to go.

We have had one meal of purple green beans from the garden. The lettuce is done now. The cucumbers, tomato, and green beans are growing like crazy. We harvested our beets. One of them was easily the size of a softball.

I'm hoping to get much more quilting and sewing done over the next week. I really haven't accomplished much in the past few weeks. I need to get several client quilts done, order fabric for the Meadow Mist Mystery quilt (the fabric requirements are out now--will you be joining us?), and try to get more of my For the love of geese quilt done. And maybe get some shelving!

What are you working on?

Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

Well friends, we've survived another month of this strange 2020. I saw this the other day and had to laugh.

2020 has been a lot of things we didn't expect or want, but some things about it have been good. Spending more time with family, getting house projects done, reorganizing priorities, having hope when it seems foolish to have hope.

Just when it felt like I would never sell my long arm, I was able to make a connection through Longarm League to get the robotics sold. Then it seemed like I would never find a serious buyer for the long arm itself. "I really want this, but I don't have any money." Umm...okay, thanks? Yeah, heard that one way too many times. And seriously, how do you even answer that? Then, seemingly out of nowhere, and really quickly, literally overnight, Jenny is the new owner of my Juki.

My sewing room looks so huge without the Juki.

Jenny and her husband picked up the machine yesterday afternoon. I swept and mopped the floor and my husband and I built the new machine, an APQS Lucey, last night. We took our time and stayed up way too late to get it put together. Start to finish was under 2.5 hours. Seriously, it was so easy and straightforward. The directions were easy to understand. The parts went together well. I had a case of the giggles over these cone bumper parts. I've never seen anything like them.

The room looks so different.

I'm a bit scared to plug everything in, turn on the machine, and use it. I'm super pumped that I got the automatic quilt advance! Can't wait to try that out. Side note--I am ordering the robotics this week, so hopefully everything will be business as usual soon. I still have a big pile of quilts waiting on me and am so thankful that my clients have been so understanding and patient as I work through this transition.

I did finish two of the quilts in my queue over the weekend. Here's a sneak peek of one, made by Nancy. This is part of a sampler quilt she did with one of the guilds she belongs to. I quilted an overall pattern called Zest on it.

Nancy had me do custom quilting on this one. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Here are the rulers I used to complete Nancy's quilt. Top is the 12" ruler from The Quilted Pineapple. Next is the HQ Mini Scallop ruler. I love the notched straight edge on it. I used the cute snowman ruler from Julia Quiltoff and the 4-N-1 from Natalia Bonner.

I did not finish my June OMG, though I did make progress. My goal was to have the green ring done along with the center parts. As you can see, I only got the green ring done.