Stories from the Sewing Room

I've been super busy and somewhat productive! I worked on assembling my dress form pattern pieces. It went together much more quickly than I had expected it to. I had to trim the right side of each piece of paper, assemble a row, trim the top of the row, repeat. 

Meanwhile, I was reviewing my in-progress quilting projects that were the highest priority for me. I was unenthused about most and just decided to start a new project and do some brainless sewing. I worked on a baby quilt made from charm packs (using a free pattern by Jessica Dayon). I quickly remembered why I don't really like working with charms or other precuts. None of them are the same size!

I made all the nine patch units and then realized I should have laid out the squares ahead of time because I spent quite a while rearranging the pieces to get a layout where similar patterns or colors were more evenly distributed, or as evenly as it was going to get with my willy-nilly assembly process. I have fabrics to make one more using the same pattern and I will know to plan ahead and also check the size of the charms prior to starting. I feel like having to trim all of them to the proper size ahead of time really misses the point of using precuts.  🙄 My brainless project became much less so with trying to square up the blocks and dealing with my lack of foresight. I made all the blocks in one day though.

I'm hoping to get the sashing and borders on later today and then this will go in to the to-be-quilted-when-I-get-a-minute pile.

I worked on more lovely quilts over the past week. The first one belongs to Legene. She selected Calder for the quilting and a dark, bluish-gray thread. 

Next up is Ann's log cabin quilt, quilted with Malachite and Glide Cloud (light aqua) for the thread. I attached binding to the front of this one.

Then I worked on Ann's Prismatic quilt. I had quilted the coordinating pillow shams back in March, so it was interesting to see what the actual quilt looked like. Windswept is the pattern and I used a variegated thread she had selected previously. This one also was a partial binding job.

Finally, another of Ann's, quilted with Briar Rose and adding the binding to the front again. I have one more of hers to go, and it is a BIG, somewhat complex one.

Outside of this, Henry the rooster has continued to get himself up into the coop at night. His technique is improving so that it's not so painful to watch. We haven't had any further  animal rescue adventures. 😄

Our fridge died last week. It's been limping along for quite some time, making weird noises and not always working quite as expected, but I noticed it was 42 degrees inside, then 50+, and ending up holding at 60. The freezer portion was fine. I was concerned first of all about getting the food moved. Of course we had gotten groceries the previous day. We have a mini fridge in our basement, so we moved the most critical things first. We asked our neighbor if we could use her garage fridge and got the okay, but I decided to send my husband out to buy an additional mini fridge instead so that our food was much closer to the kitchen. Also, mini fridges are plentiful right now with back to college, and we can move it out to his workshop later on. 

In the meantime, I was looking at fridges online to see what was available that would fit the opening in the cabinets. Not much, as it turns out. Plus everything is over $2000 and most had mediocre reviews. Ugh! One of my friends came over to drop off her quilt during this and told us about a repair man she has used with good results. My husband gave him a call and while waiting for a call back was Googling and found a YouTube video that described the same issue with a very similar fridge. So he ordered some refrigerator fans from Amazon and also consulted with the nice repair guy when he returned the call. 

Long story short, we had to defrost the back of the refrigerator using my clothes steamer and my hair dryer to get a cover part off, and the $30 fan took care of the issue. The fridge got a really nice cleaning, we avoided having to buy a new fridge for a while, and we also learned from the repair guy that most appliances now are only lasting about six years. That is depressing. What a total waste of resources. Our fridge is around 11 years old right now. We got 10 years each from our washing machine and our dishwasher. I guess we're doing okay, but six years? Really?

The September One Monthly Goal link up will open on Friday. Will you be joining in?

Linking with For the Love of Geese, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.