October PHD Progress Report

I feel like I didn't accomplish much this month, but I did make pretty good progress on my PHD, finishing two UFO projects and completing two things I started this year. 

Linking with Ms. P. Designs PHD program

I have now completed 12 projects, so I guess that means I've completed the PHD? I still have one more UFO to go and one more start to finish for the year. 

This month I completed my RSC quilt.

I also completed one clothing item, two if you count the shirt I made for my daughter. 

You can read more about my shirt one post back on the October OMG Finish Link Up. It's not as cute or well-fitting as my daughter's is. 

I made some burp cloths for a friend. Free tutorial here. 

And I finished the pumpkin pillow that I originally made for the fair before setting it aside due to the not-great quilting. 

I have to finish the Batesville BOM quilt, which dates to 2007. I need to figure out how to finish it. I'm not going to use the directions I bought for it because my units didn't come out the same size as the instructions and it would take a lot of reworking to get it to fit. So I need to come up with a different plan.

I also have to finish Bedford Tiles, which I started this year. This one needs sashing and borders.

I'm getting there. I also have quilting planned for one of my other UFOs that's not on my list; I just need some time on the longarm. 

I've finished a few more quilts for others. The first one belongs to Ann. She appliquéd a bunch of Mickey and Minnie heads for this quilt. She requested Cakewalk 2 for the quilting. It doesn't show very much even though I did a fairly small scale. I attached her binding to the front of her quilt before sending it back to her.

Then I quilted In the Swirls on a baby quilt Linda's mom made for Linda's fourth grandchild, who was born on my son's birthday last week. Linda's mom hand-pieces her quilts!

Next up was Shirley's quilt, quilted with Moons and Stars. This one was pretty big!

I then quilted Kapari on Deb's quilt. Deb alternates between machine- and hand-piecing her quilts. This one was done by hand. Things were going along and then my power flashed, went off, then flashed again and went to brown-out and then flashed and remained on. Ugh. Luckily I was not actively quilting when the power blipped, but it did blow a fuse on my Lucey. The IntelliQuilter was fine other than it didn't remember where in the pattern it was. 

Next I quilted Ann K.'s dog quilts. This first one has a semi-custom design. I used my IQ to edit a couple of patterns I purchased and combine them into one. 

I used the Paw Print design on the second one. I also attached binding to both for her. 

Out in the yard, we've harvested the pumpkins. One was bad, so it went into the compost pile. Another was fed to the chickens. Two are on the front porch. I weeded the side garden by myself. There were a lot of thistles to remove. Not fun because of all the pokies. One garden down, two to go. Too bad one is an absolute beast. 

We hadn't seen many birds at all for a week or so. Suddenly there were many again, mostly the usual suspects. Unfortunately, the juncos have returned. My only objection to them is that they are winter birds in my yard. I'm not ready for winter.

I am going to my small guild's retreat on Friday. I don't know what on earth I'm going to sew because the two projects I have left aren't really retreat-friendly. I have to go to the dentist tomorrow and we have a robotics event at IU this weekend. It seems like whenever I have plans, they are all bunched up at once.

Before you go, I wanted to share my son's sculpture class project. He got a low A on it, but I think it deserved higher. I may be biased, but I thought it was cute, especially for a high school boy's project. It was all sewn by hand. 

I'll be back Friday with the November OMG link up.

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, and Alycia Quilts.

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October One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

It's time to share your October finish. 

This link up will remain open until October 31 at 11:55 pm EST.

Want to see everyone's goals? Check out the October goal page.

My goal this month was to sew a piece of clothing. I did sew a piece of clothing for my daughter (view here) but my intent was to sew one for myself. I decided on Love Notions' La Bella Donna dolman shirt. I am using a fabric I bought online from Jo-Ann. It was described as "magenta solid double brush jersey knit", 85% poly, 15% spandex. I don't know that I'd call it magenta, but it's pretty nice fabric (read: nice hand and NOT see-through like so many knits). It matches Gutermann 345 thread. 
I measured between a large and x-large on the pattern. I debated blending the pattern between sizes, but ultimately decided to sew a straight XL with the full bust front piece. I may regret this decision since using the full bust front adds two inches to the waist and hip measurements. My thinking was that I can always make it smaller in the waist and hips, but I can't add back fabric I've cut off. 

I cut everything to the XL size with the full bust front. 
The picture below shows the shirt part sewn prior to adding all the cuffs and neckband hem.

Most of the sewing was fairly easy though I did end up with a few bunchy places in band and arm cuffs. I'm wondering if I should have made the waistband piece a little longer since I used the full bust piece, which added a couple inches around. 

The neckline was a bit challenging. I used the method Sew Mary Mac recommended to sew down the neckline. My faithful Bernina 440QE sews through everything, but it did not like this fabric. I kept getting long stitches. I did use my walking foot to attach the neck binding piece and to do the topstitching of it, but it still came out a bit ripply. 

When I first tried on the finished shirt in the bathroom, I did not like how it looked. It was okay, but not particularly flattering. It was pretty disheartening. Nothing ready to wear fits me properly and I didn't feel like this one was that great either.

I had my son take a picture of me and it doesn't look as bad as I thought. My arms look way worse than I thought. 😬 Never in my life did I think I'd be complaining about fat arms, but here I am, a lady of a certain age with flabby arms. 😳😅
I think I need to do a round back adjustment because it feels like it pulls up in the back. Before I attached the band, the front also pulled up in the center, which led me to think maybe there isn't enough bust room. I don't know? You can see the neckline has some issues due to how I sewed it. The fabric is so soft, but I found it difficult to work with. The fabric also doesn't lay the best along where it's sewn to the band. The band is a size larger than I measure, but it doesn't feel overly large. I have so much more to learn! 

It's far from perfect, but it's wearable and it doesn't have holes at the waist like many of my shirts do. I will try again and make a different version--regular hem, longer sleeves, definitely a different, easier to use fabric. Plus do the back modification.

Now it's your turn.

Take a few minutes to visit others, offer encouragement, and make new friends!

This link up will remain open until 11:55 pm EST on October 31. Make sure you add a link to this OMG post so others can find the OMG link up from your blog--just paste this link into your post:  

Stories from the Sewing Room October One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

Join me on November 1 to select a new (or continuing, no judgment here) goal. 

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

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In a Bind

All I've been doing is quilting and binding. My sole personal sewing accomplishment is to trace my shirt pattern. Hopefully I can get this made before Friday, which is when the One Monthly Goal finish link up opens. I'm undecided about grading in the waist and hips. I think I may sew it as-is and then take it in a bit if needed. 

Let's look at the quilts I've worked on (all these photos are unedited and many are a bit tilted; sorry). First I bound Tina's quilt that I shared last week. This one was really big and very thick with the fluffy backing. 

Then I quilted Haley's quilt with Cloud Slide. I love the panto pairing with the quilt top!

I made the binding and attached it to the front of the quilt so that she can hand-stitch it down. Another fluffy backing. I realized I should have flipped that corner back so you can see the binding (the blue), but I already returned this quilt.
After completing these projects I vacuumed my sewing room to get rid of all the little fluffs.

Next I quilted Connie's quilt with Bubble Glitter. 

I then made the binding and fully finished it. 

I quilted Sara's quilt with Stipple. 

Then I quilted Cindy's quilt with Basic Swirl. 

I have three more partial bindings and a full binding left in my queue and the rest are just the quilting at the moment, so I may get a chance to work on my own things soon.

I have plans for many things I'd like to or need to work on. I have a few more projects left to complete my PHD for this year. I NEED to make a dust cover for my serger. I still can't believe it didn't come with one. 😒 I have so many other projects waiting to be sewn and I have many hours of classes to watch. And of course, there are always lots of chores to be completed. 

My son and I have been looking for the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet every night over the past week and a half. Monday night it was so faint we could only see a bit of the tail without using the phone to photo the whole thing. I'm still amazed that it's only visible every 80,000 years. We've witnessed so many cool science-related things this year. Here's the comet Monday night as captured by my iPhone. 


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Projects Old and New + Natural Wonders

I've been working on all sorts of things over the past week. I'll start with the personal projects. First, I started working on the Batesville quilt, which is one of my PHD projects and the one I least wanted to work on. It's supposed to have quite a few borders, including one pieced rope-type one--looks like two pieces of rope wrapped together. I started cutting the sashing and even cut one of the rope fabrics. Then I looked at my blocks and realized that my skills and accuracy have changed quite a bit in the 17 years I've had this project. 
I sewed the sashing between the rows. My rows ended up with two at 39.5" and two at 39.75". According to the directions, they were supposed to measure 40.5". At this point I realized I could either adjust the next two sets of borders to get to the correct size for the pieced border or I could just finish sewing the sashing, add a few straight borders, and call it good. I am leaning toward the second option because 1. it's easier and 2. some of the borders prior to the pieced one had to be different widths to make the pieced border fit and I think that would drive me crazy. Stay tuned.

My daughter was home over the weekend. We decided to make her a shirt. While we were in my fabric closet choosing which fabric to use, she saw my pumpkin pillow top version one that I set aside because the quilting on it wasn't good enough to enter in the fair. She liked it, so we looked through my couple of pieces of Halloween fabric and picked one for the backing. Ta-da. It's done!
She chose a Debbie Mumm fabric for the back. I'm fairly certain this dates to the late 1990s.
Moving along to the shirt, we chose to use Love Notions' classic t-shirt pattern. I didn't have this one printed in A0 format, so I had to print it out and cut and assemble it at home. Luckily she is an extra-small/small. The pattern changes required were shortening the bodice front and back one inch, shortening the hem length, grading between sizes, and adjusting the sleeve by both grading and shortening. 
Things were progressing well until I got to the neckband. I sewed it on the wrong side of the shirt on my first try and had to rip it out. Unfortunately I had sewn a stretch stitch on my sewing machine, so it took quite some time to remove. The second time I used a straight stitch in a long length, not quite basting, but closer. 
Next I had to figure out how to change my serger over to coverstitch mode. That took me a bit. I put in the bottom hem and I did okay other than I didn't quite get my start and stop lined up. I switched over to the clear foot and put in the sleeve hems. I got better with the lining up on each one. 
I had to coverstitch the neckband in place. I tried to glue-baste the curly seam allowances down, but it didn't fully work. I ended up with some extra fabric that I thought I'd trim away. Unfortunately I nipped a hole in the back of the shirt while doing this. Luckily the hole is covered by her hair, so I fused a piece of fabric under it. Ugh. I was so mad at myself. 

I learned quite a bit and I think I'm ready to try a shirt for myself. I'll use a different pattern for mine, but if I do make a classic tee for myself I will attach the neckband in a different way, maybe more like a binding instead of a stitch and press the seam down. It still looks cute on her despite the imperfections in my sewing. I feel like the sleeves look a little twisty. Not sure what causes that.

This project, which the free video class said could be sewn in around an hour, took me about five hours. 

Meanwhile, I've worked on a few more quilts. It's kinda funny that I'll go for a few weeks without having to do the binding and then I'll receive a bunch that all want binding all at once. Right now I'm entering a binding cycle.

The first quilt is made by grad student Katherine. She hand-dyed the fabrics and was planning to hand quilt it, but we all know how that goes. We decided to do hand-guided so that I could avoid all the thick seam intersections. She had me do the binding because she doesn't have her machine with her while she's at school. Seeing the look on her face when she picked up her completed quilt was so gratifying. 
I quilted Sara's quilt with Shooting Star. 
Next I worked on two of Tina's quilts. She requested Soho for the first quilt. I bound this quilt. 
The second one is quite a large quilt. She'd spray basted it so that she could quilt it on her domestic and wasn't happy with the results she was getting (the backing is a minky/cuddle). I've received quite a few requests where this was the scenario, so I agreed to take it on. Most of the time I can easily separate the layers, but this time I couldn't remove the batting from the backing, so I had to wrap the whole sticky thing on my frame. Obviously this isn't the ideal scenario, but I got it done. I'm also binding this one. Oh, the design is A Fishy Tail.
Outside, we have experienced several outstanding natural events. First, we were able to see the northern lights right from our driveway last Thursday! I went out to check and couldn't see anything with my naked eye, but captured a bit of color in my phone, so I ran back inside to get my family. We stayed outside from 9:45 pm - 10:10 pm. The color got much more intense and was visible without the aid of a camera. Wow! Here is a collection of thumbnails that show the progression. I was turning in circles, so some have more color than others since they were more visible to the north than south.

Sunday night I wanted to look for the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet. The article I read said it would be most visible about 45 minutes after sunset, which I figured would be during our evening walk. I wasn't finding anything, so when we got back I grabbed my phone, opened up my SkyView Lite app to find Venus and Arcturus, then looked up from my phone and there it was! My son had come back out with me. I sent him to fetch my husband because this comet is visible only every 80,000 years! I tried to take a picture, which didn't turn out that great. My son grabbed my phone and captured the image below. In the time it took to open up the photo and air-drop it to his phone the comet had lightened so much we could barely see it. So the timing worked out perfectly!
Monday it was too cloudy to see the comet. Tuesday night we had a great view. The tail is so long!
Come back next week to see if I've managed to sew anything besides binding for others. I'll have my regular post on Wednesday and the OMG finish link up on Friday next week. By the way, my OMG is to sew one piece of clothing. Technically I've done that, but the intent was to sew clothing for myself. I've got some work to do!


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