Stories from the Sewing Room

I've been inching closer to sewing some clothes for myself. I've ordered more A0 format prints of patterns I want to make. After arriving in Indianapolis and taking detours to both Kansas Cities (is that how you make them plural? 🤔), they finally made it back to Indianapolis and then down the highway to my neck of the woods. I ordered from a different place this time--The Plotted Pattern. I chose the mid-price, thinner paper. They look good. I actually found this place recommended on Reddit of all places, via a Google search.  

I've been reading through The Palmer/Pletsch Complete Guide to Fitting book and purchased the Butterick pattern they created for practicing fitting. I think I'm gonna need to convince my husband to help me when I go through the fitting process. I'm sure he'll be thrilled. I just watched a video from Love Notions Patterns that showed me more about picking a size that should help too.

I finally located the old bra I had set aside to double-check the fit on my Bootstrap dress form. Insert record scratch here. 

I can't get the hooks to close. Not even close! I'm like 6 - 8 inches apart. The bra is old and stretched out, but still fits, so it's definitely an issue with the form.

There is not enough stuffing in the cup area--I can fit my fist inside each cup with room to spare. 

The measurements all match mine, but I didn't really think the shape matched me. It's hard to tell because I don't know what I look like outside of myself, you know? My body perception might not match reality. I thought it would be close enough, but it clearly is not. I think I need to take the form off the stand, unzip it, pull out the stuffing, and re-stuff it (while it's wearing the bra) to try to fit my shape better. The bust is the area I struggle with the most for shirts, both sewn and purchased. 

So. Yay. 

After that sad discovery, I spent Labor Day working on my RSC instead. I'm not quite done with the top. I want to add borders around the outside. I need to dig through my white scrap bin to find large enough pieces. I'm thinking I'll cut 2.5" strips. I will probably be piecing lots of fabrics together to get long enough lengths. 

Then it will be on to piecing a back. It won't be from scraps, but will be from my existing fabrics. 

That means my design wall is empty again. I will be placing my Bedford Tiles blocks up there so that I can see what the orientation needs to be to get the look from the pattern. And then it's more sashing and border sewing. Blah. So boring. 

My Meadow Mist Marble mystery quilt is all cut, ready for tomorrow's instructions. Nothing like leaving it til the last moment. That's okay because Cheryl's mysteries are very easy to catch up on should you fall behind. 

The thing I probably need to concentrate on most is getting the hanging sleeves made and attached to the quilts I entered in the guild show since those are the only things I have going right now that have a firm deadline. This ranks right up there with sashing and borders.

In my quilting world, I thought I was done updating my website for now, but received a notice from Squarespace Monday morning telling me there is an issue with linked Google forms not collecting information that is input. So I had to fix that since that is how I book quilts and sign people up for the newsletter. It's always something.

I completed three more quilts for others during the past week.

The first one belongs to Trudy and she requested Peace. (Peace is actually considered a border pattern, but it works great as a panto.) I used yellow thread to match, but it looks light in the photo.

Next is Mary Ann's The Puppies quilt. I struggled with this one because the back had a panel and some seams in inconvenient places and I couldn't quite figure out how to get it centered how she wanted. I finally got it. I selected a 60 wt thread for the top because she was worried about the pattern competing with the piecing. Oh, the pattern is Paw Prints. 

Finally, I quilted Echo Blossoms on Trish's quilt. She picked Glide Salmon from the threads I sent her. Salmon is one of my favorites. It blends with so many colors of fabric. The backing fabric was so soft and drape-y. I need to remember to ask her what type it is (update--she didn't know 😄).

Outdoors it is looking like fall. We switched from highs in the 90s to highs in the 70s over the weekend and it's so nice out right now. Lots of leaves are falling, way more than usual for this time of year. My gardens remain neglected due to my fear of catching poison ivy again and also just the feeling of being overwhelmed I get when I look at the state of the lower garden. It is bad! I had a big patch of mystery plant come up down there. It's flowering now and it is goldenrod. I didn't realize, but goldenrod can be as invasive as spearmint in my area, so I will need to tackle it this fall. There are also a lot of volunteer trees growing in there that need to be removed along with grapevine, which was really rampant in the gardens and in the woods this year. 

Robotics kicks off for the season on Saturday. I've opted not to attend the kickoff event, partially for personal reasons and partially because we're getting our boosters Friday and I usually just want to sleep for a day afterwards. The graffiti quilting class I'm taking with Karlee Porter also starts Saturday. I'll probably watch the replay in smaller chunks of time after the fact since I generally can't sit for that long at a time.

I'll leave you this week with some pictures I took while out on our evening walks in the past week. 

I like how you can see the sun rays in this one. I need to figure out how to edit out their sewer vent pipe.

The sky didn't actually look like this, but the photo looks cool.  That tall thing on the left is their flag all bunched up on their pole.