Stories from the Sewing Room

Or close, anyway.

It has been a week. Things are so-so. My free time for me time is just about over and I wish I could have done more. I did enjoy doing not a whole lot for a couple of weeks.

My son had his wisdom teeth removed Friday and that went well (the surgeon is great, but the co-pay...💸). The swelling is starting to recede. Due to poor scheduling on my part, he wasn't able to attend the first official robotics competition of the season. The team placed 5th, in the middle of the pack. We compete again the first week of January.

I did get my house mostly cleaned over the weekend because I just couldn't mentally take it any more. I still need to do a deep clean in the sewing room. Everything else is good enough.

My husband was replacing the struts on my vehicle, which is the one we take on long-distance trips since it is the newest at 11 years old. He got that done, went to take the car in for an alignment, and said that the coolant level is dropping too fast, though there is no sign of a leak. He rented a diagnostic tool and the results were inconclusive. No one can look at the car before we need to leave, let alone fix it. And the likely culprit is super expensive, but way less than a new vehicle, of course. We have who knows what winter weather coming, so now we have to rent a vehicle and leave earlier than planned and hope for the best.  We aren't really ready to leave, which means it's gonna be a mad scramble to get as much done in preparation as possible. Ugh. I'm feeling a bit defeated and tense. Every time I think we're getting ahead, nope. Deep breaths. It will be okay.

My sewing recap for the month (if there's a green check but no explanation, please see last week's post):

1. Quilt the #Trending quilt ✅ 

2.  Custom quilt and bind the apple quilt (circa 1999!!) ✅ 

    Okay, so I'm still binding this one and am gifting it in a few days. But I won't have reliable internet access for a while, so you can see it mostly done. I really wanted to use the IQ to do the cross hatch border, but I couldn't get it to work, so I had to do it by hand and there are plenty of mistakes where my spacing wasn't right. I also did the continuous curve by hand instead of with a ruler because I didn't have a ruler that fit, so that is a bit wobbly. Additionally, my piecing was less than ideal since it was one of my earliest projects. Sorry for the lousy pictures, but I took them all last night. 

4.  Quilt SCQG BOM ✅

        I quilted this one with Interlocked Orange Peel and used Glide Peppermint thread. I accidentally sized the design bigger than I had intended, but I liked how it looked and went with it, 'cause who wants to seam rip? Plus I learned that it's way easier to align patterns at a larger scale. Much less tweaking required.

5.  Make some lumbar support pillows for our chairs❌

6.  Make my daughter a shirt❌

        This still needs to be done before the first of the year. 

7.  Piece and completely finish test quilt✅

        I got this one done last night. The pattern has two borders. I opted to leave them off because I didn't have a suitable outer border fabric. The downside to this is that I cut off all my star points on the edges when I did the binding. I could have avoided this if I had chosen to bind by hand, but I didn't, so oh well. I quilted this with Curly.

8.  Fix drawstring in son's pj pants ✅ 

9.  Make this month's units for the Melodic Mystery ✅ 

10.  Try again at piecing the Grassy Creek borders❌

        This is my OMG and it looks like I'm going to fail for the second month in a row. Maybe next year. 

We had to buy a coop heater thing for the chickens since it's supposed to be frigid for part of the week. Henry seems to be improving very slightly. He can wiggle around now to get to the food as long as it's in the coop. My daughter has been hand-feeding him quite a bit since the other chickens kick over his food bowl in the coop. She texted me this somewhat terrifying picture of him. She had discovered that her phone can remove the background somehow.

I didn't have time to get any other pictures, but I'll try to get one soon of Smoky. His wattles and "walnut" are huge now and the blue patches on the ears really show.

If you're celebrating a holiday this month, I hope it is nice and relaxing. Take care, and I'll try to come up with a post for next week though I likely won't be sewing anything new between now and then.