Borders

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.



February OMG Complete

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.

I'm not sure why my photos appear to have pink streaks on them. They didn't look like that when I uploaded them.

Can you tell which was my last-minute color addition?  If you guessed Oyster, you are correct.  It is a beautiful, soft pink color, but not what I want for a family room.

We went with Grandma's China.  The others looked greenish in the basement's limited natural light.  

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.


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.




Veggie Quilt, AKA Morewood Mystery

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.



We got a lot of snow from Monday evening into Tuesday.  Here's how it looked out the back window yesterday late afternoon.  The birds and a squirrel have knocked a lot of the snow off.  We think we got somewhere between six to ten inches.  My son had an "at home learning day" instead of a snow day.  He's an at-home learner every day.  He had no live classes, so he finished all the assigned work rather quickly and took most of the day off.  I guess we'll take it.  I do like that no days are added to the end of the year this way, but I miss the idea of a free day off now and then.

Some of my Christmas cactuses are blooming.


Our baby pineapple did not make it, but the top still looked good, so we decided to try to root it.  It's doing well so far.  This is the pineapple that my husband brought me from Hawaii in 2015; he got to go for work. After we ate the pineapple, we rooted the top and after five years it grew a fruit.  The original plant is dying rapidly since we cut off the fruit, which had rotted on the stalk.  This one is rooting in a half-pint jar.  It's so tiny.


View in my living room:

This is one of the smaller stacks of quilts in our house. I may have a problem.  😂

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.

February Goal

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.


This picture includes the ones we visited on our last trip.
I used a fun National Parks print for the back too.  It's a bit sad that it won't ever be seen.

Until next week--