Stories from the Sewing Room

Happy New Year!

Do you make New Year's Resolutions? I do not, and I don't tend to plan out a whole lot of anything either since whenever I do, things tend to go far off track. A lot can happen in a year. Only short-term goals for me.

My One Monthly Goal for this month is to fully complete this quilt, to be donated to Quilts for Kids once I have enough quilts made to make shipping reasonable. {This will be number three. I think four or five total would be a good amount.}

I will continue working on the Melodic Mystery this month. The next clue comes out tomorrow. I think we're getting close to the end. I ordered some backing fabric from Hancock's of Paducah (from the sale section!) and am awaiting its fulfillment and arrival. The rest of this quilt was made from stash. Here are my parts so far.

starts today. I pulled most of the fabric, including my backing fabric, from stash. I needed a bit more green and yellow (FQ and 1/2 yard due to how I had to buy them). I treated myself to a new background fabric--Moda Thatched, whose pattern does not show in my picture.  I will be making the throw sized quilt for this one.

As time allows, I have three quilts of my own to bind. I will be doing these by hand. I'd like to at least get the bindings attached to the fronts so that they are more portable and stable. Right now all three are stretched out on the living room floor. 

We won't talk about those Grassy Creek borders. I don't think I'll be choosing those as a goal anymore since every time I do, things get way too busy.

My current evening project is removing the quilting from my Under the Sea quilt. I was not happy with it once I finished the quilting. I tried to accept it, though I never put the binding on. I finally gave in and have been slowly picking out the stitching. I'm about a quarter of the way done.

I've also moved all my selvedge strips upstairs with the intent of making more balls of selvedge yarn to knit a small rug. I made one a couple of years ago for my mother in law. For a long time it was just folded over a chair. I noticed she's started using it in her bathroom, but it has grown/stretched out tremendously--like double!  Is this normal?? It was 29" x 37" originally. It seems to have stretched on the 37" side. It was so much bigger that I didn't even recognize it as the one I made until I started looking closely at the fabrics. Advice appreciated.

I spent much of last week getting my daughter's clothes ready for her trip. I had to hem two pairs of pants. 

And I made her a "two-hour" shirt that took me about eight hours! She seemed happy with it though. She has some forest green pants to wear with the shirt on one of the Congressional visit days.

She went with Let It Snow for the second one. I used Glide Wheat thread on both.

And one for Sally, quilted with Flirtatious.

Checking in on the chickens, we were surprised to find an egg in the coop Saturday. We aren't sure which hen it came from. For comparison, on the left is a large egg from the grocery store and on the right is the silkie egg. It is a bit smaller than a Cadbury egg.

We also found an egg Monday morning. My daughter figured we'd get one every other day. I checked in on Henry in the coop Tuesday morning since I was the only one home. Guess what I found?

And now there are three...

Which hen is laying, or is it more than one? Oh, you may also notice that they are eating the contact paper lining the wall near the pink circle above. This sure has been an interesting experience.

Linking with For the Love of Geese/Quiltery.