Stories from the Sewing Room

I haven't made much progress sewing-wise.  My time this past week has been filled with painting and paperwork and correspondence. 

I have two coats of paint on approximately half of the basement walls.  I was worried when I started painting because the paint looked peach.  This could be because my only lighting was a halogen work light, but it made me nervous.  The paint dried into a nice, boring beige, so I can live with it.  Some day when there's lighting installed I'll try to remember to share photos.

I have successfully filled out the FAFSA within the deadline.  My taxes are getting much closer to completion.

Now that the days are getting longer and sunnier, we are starting to generate a lot more solar energy again. The snow is melting and many of the trees have buds.  Soon I will need to clean out last year's debris from the flower beds. I don't enjoy that part, but I do enjoy the flowers.  Spring is my favorite.

I did start work on the outside borders of my For the Love of Geese quilt.  As you may recall, these are the fabrics I decided on.

I will need to make 40 units to complete the borders.  I have six done so far.  Here is a little photo progression from when I was working on them the other day.

I'll be busy quilting this week and will share when I can.  I'll have a wide variety of beauties to share eventually, including a hand-pieced antique quilt.  :)

Have a wonderful week, and thanks for stopping by.

Linking with For the Love of Geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

Do you celebrate Valentine's Day?  I hope you had a nice day.  We don't do much, usually just get the kids some candy or small trinket of some sort.  This year, my husband and I painted the basement ceiling.  Isn't that romantic?  LOL

Last week I mentioned I was having a hard time choosing a wall paint.  I was poking around on the internet and  found a place called Samplize.  They sell 12 x 12 samples of actual paint on removable vinyl sheets. I ordered three samples I was considering and then threw in a fourth that was listed as a similar color using the $5 coupon I was offered during shopping.  The samples came pretty quickly, just a few days with free shipping, and it was very easy to choose which color we wanted.  

We don't have the lights wired in yet, so I used a work light to get this picture.  We were able to move the samples around to several locations in the basement to see how they looked in different lighting.

If you are vacillating between several colors, I definitely recommend trying out Samplize.  They don't have every brand of paint, but they do seem to have every color in the brands they stock.  I would recommend narrowing down what you want using paint chips from the store since the fourth color I threw in was way, way off what I wanted. I am in no way affiliated with this company.  It came up multiple times in various decorating blogs I was looking at.  I had a good experience, so that is why I am mentioning it.

We have purchased our paint locally and I will be painting walls soon.  I'm glad this is the last of the painting that needs to be done in our house!

On to sewing. I am really early on finishing my OMG this month.  Usually I am still working on it at the last minute.  My goal was to finish sewing together all the flying geese pieces into wedges on my For the Love of Geese quilt.

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal - February Finish Link-up

Next I needed to address the outside borders.  I was originally planning to do them in the purple fabrics in the fabric line, Petal Party, I am using.  However, I did not have enough yardage and the line is out of print.  Apparently it was out of print when I bought it.  Ugh. I stewed about what to do for a few days and then realized I didn't have to use the purples.  I had enough yardage left from the left to do the outside borders in rainbow. This photo is really close to the actual colors of the fabrics.  In most of my pictures they turn out looking quite different.

I started working on the pieces this week. I'm excited to see it all come together.

My design wall looks so bare now that I have removed all the flying geese units from it.  I kinda miss them.  They were up there for months.  Can you see the next quilt I'll be working on?  It belongs to Sonja.  You can look at last week's post to see a glimpse of both the quilts.  I'll share photos after she has seen her quilts in person. :)

We have had so much snow lately, much more than we've had in recent years.  This first picture was taken at 5 pm Monday and the second was taken 24 hours later.  I think it's around 12 inches and we have more coming this week.

I found out something really surprising this past week. My daughter and I were watching the latest episode of Finding Your Roots on PBS.  One of the guests was actor Christopher Meloni.  I was so surprised when Henry Louis Gates mentioned an ancestor, Claude Mathias Phaneuf (Farnsworth) on Meloni's mother's line, because I have Claude Phaneuf in my family tree too!  I got in contact with my cousin, who has researched that line quite a bit. Mathias Farnsworth was kidnapped from his home in Massachusetts as a teen and taken to Quebec.  He was later renamed Claude Mathias Phaneuf and basically any Phaneufs/Fanefs/Fannaffs in Canada and the US descend from Claude Mathias. Weirdly, I also found a site that says Dr. Gates is somehow descended from him as well.  It's so easy to get sucked into endless genealogical research. Several of my lines dead end pretty quickly, but I have a few that are rather interesting.

Finally, I spend yesterday cleaning chocolate out of my dryer.  Can you believe that?  Someone left some chocolate candies in her pocket (as far as we can tell, because otherwise she had them in her bed 😲) and they got washed and then dried.  It took three of us to get all the chocolate cleaned out.  Amazingly, all the chocolate streaks came right out of the sheets when I rewashed them.  Anyway, that is not an experience I would recommend.  😐

Linking with For the Love of Geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

I'm really not sure what I've done with my time in the past week.  I don't seem to have accomplished much, but here is what I have done.

I finished my Morewood Mystery top. {Pattern by Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs.}

I made a backing, loaded, and quilted my top.  I used Overlapping Crop Circles, which seems appropriate for a quilt that features onion slices, cabbage, and asparagus.  {The veggie fabrics are from the line Toss and Serve by Maria Kalinowski for Kanvas/Benartex.  Though I bought my fabrics on Etsy last summer, I believe it is long out of print.}

I finished another 1/8 wedge of my For the Love of Geese top, so now I'm 3/4 done with this part. {Pattern by Denise at For the Love of Geese.} 

I finished the last remaining block and instructions for the BOM I am hosting for my small guild.  It's a mystery quilt, so no pictures yet.

I decided it was time to try to get back into my better fitness routine.  I generally go for two outdoor walks most days, but have added in my more intense treadmill walk again.  I decided to also do my five-minute resistance band workout, which I have not done since last spring.  :(  I snapped my resistance band and spent a ridiculous amount of time on Amazon trying to find a replacement.  

I had my husband get a sample of the paint color we picked out for the basement.  On the paint chip it looks like a really pale tan with a hint of blue.  On my wall, it looks pale yellow!  Other than flowers and fruit, I do not like yellow.  I am feeling uninspired by the colors available from our local Benjamin Moore.  I have a few colors I really like in the Valspar line at Lowes, but we were planning to switch over to the Benjamin Moore since it doesn't smell.  The Valspar we've bought recently smells like vomit and chemicals, which is so very unappetizing.  I've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out this paint situation as well.  Here are the paint chips with the colors we were considering.  They look so different in these photos.  I took them one after another.  The only difference was the white paper.

View in my sewing room:

I'm thankful to get the opportunity to quilt so many beautiful quilts for people.

Finally, I'd like to link to a recipe that I made recently that was really good--so good we've had it two weeks in a row.  It's Baked Chicken Parmesan by Skinny Taste.  I made a half recipe each time.  Super easy and quite tasty.

Linking with For the Love of Geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

My goal for February is to finish sewing the remaining wedges of my For the Love of Geese quilt.  I have 5/8 finished.  

                        Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal February Link-up

Last week I finished my second Valentine's Day pillow.  As a reminder, the pattern is by Then Came June and Pen + Paper Patterns.  I made one block and added borders to get the size I needed.  I quilted this one with Compass.  The pillow from last week has already made it to my mom's house.

I finished January's Morewood Mystery blocks last week.  This kinda looks like a candy. The final clue releases tomorrow!  I'm currently pondering how I want to quilt this project.  It will be an edge-to-edge, but not sure which design yet.

Yesterday I had a break in between quilts, so I put one of my own on and quilted it.  This is a National Parks panel by Riley Blake that I quilted with Malachite.  Hopefully I will have this one bound soon.  I plan to use it as a wallhanging.  Do you visit National Parks?  Or did you in the "before" days?  Do you have a favorite? We were planning to visit another last summer, but that obviously didn't happen.

My first finish of this year is one of the pillow covers I shared a few weeks ago.  I finished the binding Monday night.  This will be sent to my mom.  The pattern I used is called I Heart You Quilt by Then Came June & Pen + Paper Patterns.  I made one block and added borders to get to my desired pillow size.  I quilted it with Ginger Heart by Apricot Moon.  I love the entire series of Ginger patterns.  They stitch out so nicely.

My second finish of the year is also my One Monthly Goal for this month.  {My goal was to take a pile of fabric and completely finish this quilt.} My small quilt guild sews memory quilts for a military base program.  Since there haven't been many deployments, the organization was not in need of our services, but said they would accept quilts for baskets that go to new parents.  Here is my contribution, completely constructed from stash.  

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal - January Finish Link-up

Years ago I was planning to make my daughter a skirt with the backing fabric.  This is a nice use of it.

The batting I used was a remnant left over from a previous project.  I quilted it with Kra-Zee Day-Zees by Crystal Smythe.  This is a design that came with my IntelliQuilter (it might be called something different within my program), but can also be purchased at Intelligent Quilting.  I used lavender thread for the quilting, but it ended up looking gray.  Purples can be so hard to match.  Also, don't you hate when this happens?  Two inches left to stitch.  Ugh.

I sewed a quilt top over the weekend as well.  The pattern is called Under the Sea by Sweet Jane Quilts.  It was published in her first book.  All fabrics were in my stash. Many of the blue fabrics are Cotton+Steel prints.  My daughter helped me with fabric layouts and pressing.  I'm hoping to quilt it soon.

Finally, a totally random share.  My daughter's college campus is closed until April.  She had her first biology lab this week at home.  She was supposed to test buoyancy of various  mixtures.  I had to laugh when I saw what she was using.

Have a nice week.

Linking with For the Love of Geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

After my fall last week, I decided to take it easy over the weekend.  I completed one client quilt and just really didn't do anything else at all.  I really enjoyed taking a long weekend off.  I should do that more often.  Side note:  other than a giant bruise on my elbow, I am doing quite well.  The pain, while quite intense, thankfully lasted only a few days.

I have the pillows I shared last week ready for binding.

I still need to sew this month's Morewood Mystery blocks.  I have them laid out, ready to sew.

My Bonnie Hunter Grassy Creek mystery is at a standstill until I finish sewing the remaining quarter of my For the Love of Geese pieces--they are on the design wall and I need the design wall to finish the Bonnie Hunter.

I have one last block of the month to test and write up for my year-long program in the small guild I belong to.

I have participated my first large guild board meeting. I am now officially the secretary and I successfully completed the notes for that meeting.

I am making some progress on my OMG, which is a charity quilt for my small guild.  The top is done, the backing is pressed, and I found a remnant of batting in my stash that is the perfect size--that there is a WIN!  I will quilt and machine bind it over the next week.

I am taking part in a local quilt shop's online Mystery Quilt Retreat this weekend.  I am trying hard to use what is in my stash, so I will be doing all of my cutting from this fabric.  {Creating my own jelly roll.} The background fabric is the background of this picture.  😄  I've used it for several recent projects.

My plans for the rest of the week are to get the fabric pressed and cut in preparation for this weekend and try to catch up on the stuff mentioned above.  Oh, and get a much-needed haircut.

What are your plans for the week?

P.S. We are finally done with all the windows!

P. S. S.  It's Inauguration Day.  Gonna try to catch it with my kids.

Remember my reindeer pillows?  I decided to make Valentine's Day pillow covers as well.  I made two blocks using Pen + Paper  and Then Came June's I Heart You quilt pattern and added borders to get to 15.5".  I decided to quilt these two blocks using different quilting patterns.

The pillows aren't done just yet, because I have been super busy with other projects and personal things outside of quilting.  I took a tumble in driveway yesterday and I am feeling pretty beat up, so I took some quick, poor quality photos, but hopefully it illustrates how very different quilting can change the look and/or feel of a pattern.

The first one is quilted with Ginger Heart.  I sized it to be very tiny since I felt that was the size that best fit my vision for it.  I used super cheap muslin for the backing because it is going on the inside of the pillow.

Which do you prefer?

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation and For the Love of Geese.

My goal for January is to make a baby quilt for charity from these fabrics, all from my stash.  Years ago I was going to make a skirt for my daughter from the bunny fabric.  Pretty sure she wouldn't wear it nowadays!  It is just the right size for a quilt backing.

I have completed two quilts for clients and have several more to go.  Here are some sneak peeks of a few of them.

I am mostly current on the Bonnie Hunter Grassy Creek mystery.  I have not started last Friday's clue yet.  Here is its current state:

These are my completed clues from the two previous weeks.

I also signed up for a mystery quilt retreat from a local shop--don't worry, it is all virtual.  I am still staying at home other than groceries and appointments.  Here are a few of the fabrics I'll be using. I'm planning to work from stash as much as possible.

My husband is great at using the Silhouette machine that I just had to have and never figured out how to use.  We made these shirts for our kids as Christmas gifts.  My ideas, his work. 

Finally, the mystery block of the month I designed for one of the quilt guilds I belong to kicked off on January 1.  Here is my first block.  The colors are Kona Watermelon and Quilter's Linen navy (offered as a fabric option in EQ8 and found at Hancock's of Paducah).