Stories from the Sewing Room

It's been a strange week, in regular life and in weather. We had torrential rain and high winds and then switched to bitterly cold, single digit temps with more wind. Our chickens won't leave the coop, which is probably good since they are not especially cold hardy. We've had just a dusting of snow. By this time next week, we are supposed to be in the upper 40s.

Since writing out and sharing my PHD goals, I somehow have it in my head that I need to finish most of the things this month. I don't know why. Slowing my roll and focusing, I decided to work on catching up on the Malted Mystery. I was able to get all of the January clue done after fixing a mistake I'd made with a measurement on a previous month's clues.

I may have even worked ahead, but I won't share that in case anyone reading this is keeping the mystery a mystery. I always take the sneak peek so that I know my colors will work.

Next I switched over to Grassy Creek. I added the two green inner border pieces. Then I moved on to sewing the gray string pieced units together. I got to the end of the units and was like, "What? Oh crap. I counted wrong." I was two short on one angle and had two extra of the other. 

So I made two more and then went back to sewing them together. I misunderstood the directions, so had to do a little ripping. As of right now, I have one border on. I wasn't happy with the alignment of the second one, so I'm ripping that off and will realign it so that the seams match the inner seams. I might tweak that edge with the green a bit to make it line up a bit better too. I didn't notice that until I saw it in the photo.

I'm trying to come up with a quilting design, with an eye on quilting it sometime this week, but my initial pick didn't look as good on it as I had pictured.

I've started pulling out and pressing fabrics for the RSC. It didn't really make much of a dent in the green scrap basket. I will admit that I'm not entirely sure how RSC works, other than use your scraps to make a rainbow quilt by following the color prompts. My plan with it is to just follow her prompts each month and make a block or two using that color and then finish the entire quilt this year. I don't know if there are other restrictions, but I probably won't follow them if there are since I have a hard time keeping my head above water most of the time.

I've been working on a few other things too. Back in 2016, I shared a guide for a mini quilt I made for a swap. The photo quality in it was really bad, so I've refreshed it with graphics. You can find it in the Free Stuff/Free Patterns section here.

My small guild is doing a paper pieced BOM (Sun and Sand pattern) this year. I had to scrap my original plan of using my Tula Pink fabrics since I couldn't make it work with the fabric cuts I had. I was really stressing about it and my husband told me to go buy new fabric so that I could end up with something I liked. I used my Kona color chips and just kind of pulled out colors I liked and assigned them places in the quilt. A local shop, Quilt Depot, carries all the Kona and I was able to get all but one color there. I ordered the remaining piece I needed. I really hope this works out. Most of the people have picked colors similar to the original quilt. Mine was WAYYYY different. LOL. It usually is. Not pictured is the Kona Sheen in Arctic Ice that I picked for the background. I did not include this project in the PHD because it's unlikely that we actually get all the way through the pattern this year.

I had a few quilts to work on this week. The first one belongs to Carol T. I chose The Tempest for the quilting design.

Next I worked on a quilt and shams for Paula. She usually has an exact idea mocked up for me, which is extremely helpful. For this one, she picked the Ripples design. This particular design is set up as a wide block instead of a small, repeatable unit. So I got to apply my Machine Quilters Academy learning and split apart and enlarge the design to achieve the look she wanted. I'm very pleased with the end result. I think it looked very close to the mock up she sent and I got to try something out of the ordinary.

The next quilt belongs to Keetah. It is very similar to the quilt I did for her a few weeks ago. She loved the first one, so wanted this one to be the done the same. It's quilted with Christmas and I used Eggnog Glide thread again.

Margaret sent me another scrappy quilt. She decided on the Malachite design.

Before the cold snap, we'd had quite a large flock of starlings hanging out in the neighborhood. Many of them landed on the roof and when they took off, it made a very loud noise! There must have been at least 1000 birds!

Thanks for reading. I'll be back next week.

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.