Stories from the Sewing Room

I am happy to present to you, at long last, my completed Under the Sea quilt.

I started this quilt as an at-home retreat hosted in January 2021 by a somewhat local quilt shop. Attendees received a clue every so many hours and by the end of the weekend, you had a completed top. The quilt pattern is Under the Sea by Sue Pfau of Sweet Jane Quilts. I believe it was published in a book, but I don't know if I ever found out which book.

Anyway, I finished my quilt in the time allotted (kind of a shocker for me!) and quilted it. I didn't end up loving my quilting choice, so I kept putting off binding it. Fast forward to early 2023 when I decided to rip out the quilting. It took me a couple of months of sporadically working on ripping it out in the evenings. Although I do not enjoy ripping out quilting, it was the right choice for this quilt. I really like the second quilting design I chose, Double Wedding. It looks much better with the quilt top. You can still see some of the holes from the previous quilting design, but I think they will close up over time or if/when I decide to wash it. I finished up the binding Monday evening.

Moving along to the longarm quilting side of my life, I've been busy! I have quilted and bound most of the quilts I've worked on recently.

First up is Ann's Christmas braid quilt. She selected Winterfest for the quilting, along with gold thread (Glide Sand). I attached the binding to the front of her quilt.

Next is Pat's Minnesota Hot Dish quilt. I quilted it with Flirtatious (love that panto, goes with just about everything). I completed the binding on this one.

Pat's next quilt is quilted with Rosemary. Again, I completed the binding. This one is a Christmas quilt; it's so subtle! I thought Rosemary kind of looked like pine boughs.

Pat's River Log Cabin quilt is quilted with Star Spangled, which is a design that came preloaded in my Intelliquilter. Yes, more binding. :)

Then I quilted Judy's jelly roll race quilt. She liked the Overlapping Crop Circles design and we picked out Glide Lagoon thread to fit her vision. It looks good!

Next up is Jeri's quilt. She selected Champagne Bubbles for the quilting design. Her use of low volume fabrics is fantastic! A couple of the ladies I quilt for use low volume and they are all so good at it. I try, but mine never look as good as theirs. I fully bound this one.

I have another of Jeri's quilts here right now. I'll start on it today--yesterday I had a meeting and then a breast MRI (no issues, just dense tissue and family history), so nothing got done. Anyway, we have something pretty bold planned for Jeri's quilt and it will probably take me two days to stitch out. My habit of randomly buying all the bold colors of thread is finally paying off because I have the perfect color in my collection. Watch my Instagram stories or check back here next week to see what we picked. :)

Moving over to non-sewing parts of my life, things have been very busy. We had robotics outreach three afternoon/evenings in a row, sandwiched in between two regularly scheduled practices. I was also feeling under the weather. My son felt the same, so we're not sure if it was something we ate or just all the stress of the last few weeks taking its toll on our bodies. His school is on a trimester schedule and finals were last week. He started his next group of classes Monday and had a Spell Bowl competition Monday night. Due to robotics, finals, and other things, he never made time to study the spelling words. 

We tried Sunday afternoon and discovered the list he was given was misprinted--three pages of page one, three pages of page two, etc., stopping midway through the "g" words. Somehow he managed to get eight of nine words correct in his round and received a ribbon for "near perfect score". One student on his team scored higher than him. Because they only had eight kids on the team, they couldn't advance anyway (had to have at least 10), so it was fairly low pressure and it seemed to be the high point of his otherwise downer of a day. The word he missed: per se. He will never forget that word ever again in his life. LOL. My words (courtesy of elementary school and middle school spelling bees) are anxious, cadence, and hippopotamus--got interrupted by the judges midway through and lost my place on that one.

My daughter landed the internship she interviewed for, so we were all excited for her. She will do the internship plus take three classes next semester. And then she can graduate. Eek! She is studying animal behavior and will have minors in biology and anthropology. What she will do with this degree remains to be seen. She got to visit a local research farm last week Friday and sent me a bunch of pictures of her holding various birds they took out of the catch nets. She was proud that she was the only person who didn't get bitten by the titmouse. 😄

We had a lot of heavy rain over the weekend and most of the leaves are down now. Monday I saw we had one tree very full of bright yellow leaves still. We think it's a redbud. By Tuesday afternoon, after a heavy frost and heavy winds, no more leaves. We also found this weird plant on our property line. Google tells us it's an American Senna, native to the eastern U.S. They can be poisonous to humans, but attract butterflies and hummingbirds.

We set up the heater in the chicken coop Monday in preparation for the forecasted lows in the 20s. I hadn't been out there in a while. Two of the girls are looking pretty sparsely feathered right now, probably due to Smoky the rooster. Both roosters are looking really good. They seem really big in comparison to the hens now.  These are pretty lousy pictures because I was feeling too lazy to open the coop door to take better ones. Plus, with the door open, you have to keep the girls from escaping.

The two hens under the water dispenser don't have many feathers on their backs.

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