Stories from the Sewing Room

Well, I can't avoid it any more. It's time to make the string pieced borders for my Grassy Creek quilt. My goal this month is to piece all the string units for the border.

I have prepped all the foundations I need, so it's just a matter of cutting and sewing and then removing those foundations. I'm hoping I have enough variety of grays left since I'm trying really hard not to buy anything. I've used most of my darker grays. I do have gray fabrics in my stash still, but grays can be all over the place--green grays, blue grays, pink or purple grays--know what I mean?

This is such a dull picture.

I don't particularly enjoy string piecing, probably because I way overthink it. 

The colors for Bonnie's newest mystery were released Monday. I'll download the clues, but I'm not planning to make this year's quilt right now. I have Grassy Creek, Unity, and Rhododendron Trail in progress. 

The next clue in Cheryl's Meadow Mist Designs Melodic Mystery comes out tomorrow. Cheryl's QAL are so easy to keep up with. I'm still really pleased that I was able to cut out the entire mystery quilt top from stash. I'm trying to make a big effort to only use what I have and finish all those UFOs. Have you seen my UFO list? 😳😆 I'm making decent progress, all things considered.

I did finish my table runner that I shared last week. I quilted it with Sawtooth Offset. It is now ready to go in the guild sale. I do wish I would have switched the border and binding fabrics with each other, but I didn't feel the need to rip off the borders either. I might have quilted it differently too, but at least I got to try out a new pattern.

I did not have quite enough clearance with my backing fabric, so I asked my husband for an idea. He used some composite shims and made a wedge so that my throat plate could clear the leaders. It's not very pretty, but it worked great.

I trimmed all the HST trimmings the runner generated. I did have some waste with this because most, but not all, of the units could be trimmed to 1.75". Since they all couldn't, I ended up at 1.5" since I didn't want to deal with 1.625" units. I think I'm going to make a square in a square unit for the center of the green block. I'll probably end up going with a mini version of the table runner, though with a slightly different center block.

I still need to quilt the reproduction fabric mini I shared last week and make the second one too. The second one is a bonus, so I'll get to it when I get to it. Maybe I'll sew a bit of that and then a bit of the string units and alternate to alleviate boredom.

The quilting is coming along nicely. Here's what I've completed this week.

Heather's quilt, quilted with Sugar and Spice.

Paula's, quilted with 60s Mod Butterfly.

Jan's, quilted with Turbo.

Linda's, quilted with Spring Thing.

Linda's, quilted with Interlocking Rain Lines.

And Paula's, quilted with Othello.

All in all, a lovely and varied group of quilts. 

I'm feeling pleased with my progress. I laid out my schedule and realized that if I work extra hard in November, I can extend my December "vacation" a bit. Not that it will necessarily be a vacation since I have plans to quilt at least five of my own projects. But at least I can choose to work or not on those without risk of disappointing anyone other than myself.

I harvested all my AeroGarden lettuce and had enough for a few salad meals for myself.

We put down a deposit on six, 5 - 6 foot, Norway Spruce to try to regain some of the privacy we had before the lot owners behind us clear-cut their lot. I'm still upset about that. It was needless to remove so much. It really just makes me sick. Anyway, the local nursery is really busy, so we are looking at a month or more before they can install them. 

The kids and I got the updated booster shot Friday. We all fared much better than my husband did when he got his. We were all just kind of lazy and low-energy Saturday and I have my third boob in my armpit again, just like I did after the previous booster. Plus side is that since I'm still taking the heavy doses of Aleve for my injured knee, the swelling goes down most of the day until the med wears off. I'll take the sluggishness and swelling over the actual disease any day, thank you very much.

One brag...my daughter got selected to participate in the NF Young Adult Leadership program in January. My baby will be heading back to Washington, D.C., to learn about leadership and advocacy and lobby for continued funding for NF medical research, which is done through the NIH and the DoD Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (the DoD program, mostly performed by Army researchers, has been funded since 1996, though in these recent, divisive times, it's had a hard time passing, hence the urgent need for advocacy). 

See you next week.

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.