Stories from the Sewing Room

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.

Last week I was trying to plan out my projects. I'm happy to report that I made a small amount of progress. I was able to piece the Jimothy block. He's going to be turned into a pillow cover. We need to decide if it will be a bound pillow or a stitch and turn out-type. And he needs to be quilted first. But it's progress! Something to remember for next time is to really reduce the stitch length on the tiny pieces. The pattern is from Getting Jazzy with It. Her instructions were good and I really liked that there were alignment marks on the bigger units so you knew where to line up adjoining paper chunks.

I have decided on a pattern (actually a mash-up) for the dress to wear to the wedding and ordered appropriate fabric and have had the patterns printed. I'm waiting on both to arrive.

I've decided to tackle the smaller of the chicken cross stitches first and have made a small amount of progress. For some reason, I'd stitched one comb and a little bit of body on each project before setting them aside. Anyway, I figured if I started with the smaller, easier one, I'd feel like I accomplished something because it would be easier to finish.

I've considered how to recover the dining room chairs and might go with the easy selection there as well. I'll need to remove the seat from one of the chairs to measure how much fabric I might need and go from there. 

No further progress on anything else. I did order a quilt kit that has a six-week stitch along starting next week. I thought maybe I'd try to work along with that so that I'm not left with yet another UFO. I'm not that into Halloween, but somehow I always get suckered in by cute Halloween projects (see Ghostie Girls runners, still not sewn). Speaking of Halloween, I found a pumpkin vine growing in the rock retaining wall behind my house. The pumpkins in the garden are ready to harvest.

I have made zero progress on my OMG. I have one week. Yikes, thought I had two. Weekend plans, perhaps?

I'm still trying to make my way through my quilting queue. Here are the quilts that I've worked on since last week.

First, three more memory quilts for Annie, quilted with Diagonal Plaid Bias. These all have a strip of t-shirts down the back as well, which you can see in the first picture. I still need to make the binding from the backing and bind three of the four memory quilts.

And Lacy Loops on her other quilt.

Jae decided on Ground Cover for this one.

Other than that, life has been happening. My husband requested help with the blown-in insulation in his barn ceiling. He thought it would take about two hours to put in 30 bags of insulation. He would be up on the ladder and I would feed the batts into the hopper. Despite wearing PPE, I was covered in dust. I was sweating profusely and my nose was running and my mask was soaked in sweat, so it probably didn't really keep me from breathing in the dust. My eyes were in misery and are not yet fully recovered. The hopper did not work well and I had to break every bale into little chunks to get past the safety fencing and push it down in with a stick. Plus I'm still not at 100% health-wise. I made it for two and half hours, in which we got 14 bags installed. His boss kindly came over and helped him finish the job (in another 2.5 hours). At this point, half of the ceiling insulation is in place. I'm not sure how I feel about having to repeat this process to complete the other half of the job.

We met up with my son for lunch on Friday. While leaving campus, we saw a delivery robot. 

He also came home briefly Friday night and we brought him a camera lens Monday evening. I enjoy every second. I won't get to see my daughter for another couple of weeks.

Smoky the rooster has started to do some really creaky crowing most mornings. We're taking that as an encouraging sign because they stay silent when they're ill. Henry leaves the coop most days but has to be put back in at night. Peanut had really been struggling and we unfortunately lost her last night. 😭 Here's a picture of her and Smoky from back in April before all this started. 

Monday morning I heard some weird noises and looked out the window towards the coop. The three bigger hens were in the garden and they were making alarm noises (at a much lower volume than the alarm noises Silkies make) because there was a FOX! NOOO! Smoky wasn't alarming, but he was patrolling the area under the coop. Luckily Henry and Peanut weren't out. The other hens (Penny, Poppy, and Nugget) hopped up into one of the garden tanks and froze. I went out two separate times and circled the entire area, hoping to scare away the fox. Ugh. Not how I wanted my day to start. The entire area is as reinforced as we can get it, above and below ground, but I would hate for a clever critter to figure out how to sneak in and kill our pets. 

Finally, this gem from Kroger. 

The lemons weren't even on this table at all. 🤷🏻‍♀️