Stories from the Sewing Room

Friends, I am so close to my holiday vacation. I just have one binding to go. I considered trying to push through and get it done last night, but decided to take it easy and finish it up today. 

I know that I need to stop when I get tired. I'm not always great at stopping, but whenever I try to push through, things go sideways mechanically (why???) and I make mistakes. This is a goal to work towards next year. 

I did have a bit of time yesterday to get some of my own sewing done. I have completed the top and bottom rows of border for the race car quilt. 

I was really surprised to see some unexpected directions when I pulled out the pattern. I had assumed that the blocks would just alternate, but they don't. I don't even know what this repeat is! Probably no one would have ever known if I had just sewn them alternating, but I'm trying to follow the pattern. Considering how non-square my blocks were, they are going together fairly well. I'm still giving myself permission to just sew without making sure all intersections are perfect. It's kind of freeing and kind of cringe-inducing. 

These rows went together very quickly. I haven't measured them yet to compare them to the pattern measurements. Everything to this point has been 1/2" off from the pattern, so as long as that continues, the border in between should go well. Then I just have to figure out a backing and this thing will be done and donated.

I've also been making a bit of progress on the knitted baby blanket. I'm in the last repeat.

I'm having a lot of fun with the small guild advent calendar. So is everyone else based on the amount of group texts I'm getting per day! My gifts are days 10 and 11, so I opened day 10 (the quilting spray starch) yesterday so that I could get a picture of everything so far while the light was good. 

Brenda is a rock star and made every single person (14 or 15?) a quilt. Actually I haven't seen all these yet, so just going on group text info. She made me a chicken table runner and the note said she found the embroidered chickens at a yard sale. 

We have guild Friday night. I suggested we all bring our things Brenda made, which I knew would embarrass her, but she does such creative and innovative work (you should see some of the things she's come up with for the round robin quilts that I don't participate in) that I think it would be fun to see. We are also doing a fat quarter basket swap, so I'll share my offering next week. 

Okay, now for the last of this year's quilts. I bound two of Hannah's quilts that I completed recently. 

I started on Hannah's final quilt in this group. She requested Dunes and also wanted a cutout around one block. I had heard Dunes can be difficult to stitch due to the very slight curve and the amount of lines and stitching R-L and so on. It is a design that you set up as a block or an extended width rather than as an edge-to-edge. I didn't feel like I was having many issues, but it was pretty time-consuming to stitch. 

Then I got to the point in the pattern where I needed to do the no-sew zone and everything went to heck. Part of the pattern disappeared when I tried to split out the lines to remove part of the overstitching. I tried to add the pattern back in and then it didn't line up with the cut out. THEN I noticed that part of the previous pass had terrible tension and I had to remove that. It took forever to realign the pattern properly. Anyway, I eventually got it done, but it took multiple days. 

I bound her quilt and now they are ready to ship back to her. 

I also made the binding and sewed it to Cindy's mom's quilt. 

I started on Kim's quilt. She picked Orange Blossom Special for the quilting. The pattern stitches out really well, but it is really slow, so it took two days to stitch out. Like I mentioned at the top of the post, I still need to bind it. And then it's vacation time!

Look at me switching up the quilt photos with a dramatic night time image!

In other news, not a lot is happening (which is good). I was a little surprised yesterday morning that I was hearing machinery around 6:30 am. They were pouring the basement floor in the house that's being built kitty-corner to us. They had loads of giant work lights set up. It lit up my dining room and we're not even that close. I feel sorry for the people directly across the street from them!

Remember Jeri, whose quilts went missing for a while before being delivered with the box completely torn open? Thankfully the quilts were fine. Anyway, for the last batch we switched to UPS and I had an AirTag in the box. I also sent her a little gift. My husband laser-engraved these slate coasters with a picture of her dog. 

It's time to share my November PHD progress. Can you guess what it looks like? 

Linking with Ms. P Designs PHD program

Yep, pretty much the same as last month. It's killing me that I'm so far away from the PHD right now. But I have made progress on many projects this year. I added the approximate years I started each project in the chart just for fun. 

I did create a new quilt from start to finish in November. I call it Flying. I even wrote up a postcard-style pattern for it that I sent out to my longarm quilting mailing list and listed in one of my Etsy shops.

That leaves just one new start for 2025 that I haven't yet finished, the Linda Hahn class.

As far as the actual PHD portion of my list, I have made progress only on #11 and #14. I've completed the last of the blocks for the race car quilt (#11) and just have to sew them into rows and columns and add a border in between the rest of the quilt and those. Then quilt and bind it. 

I have two patterns repeats left for #14, the knitted baby blanket I started in 2017. It looks the same as it did last time I wrote about it, so I didn't bother with a new picture.

I'm wrapping up this year's quilts, hopefully this week, so maybe I can knock out a few more of my own projects by the end of the year. 

Here are the quilts I've worked on since last week. First is Hannah's, quilted with Echoed Swirls. I still need to bind this plus one of her others that I previously quilted. Side note on Echoed Swirls--this design is very dense! This is as big as I can get it. The lines are no more than 1/2" apart.

Next is Jeri's, quilted with Interlocked Orange Peel. I've written about this quilting design several times before. This quilt is a throw and it took me several days of work because the pattern would not line up no matter what I did. I ended up having to use every other row of my backup file to try to get close to alignment. Although I love how the design looks, this is the last time I will be quilting it for someone else. It's just too much hassle to get an end product I'm happy with. 

I quilted Maureen's Oak Leaf on Kayle's quilt. In my opinion this design stitches out best at a larger scale like Kayle chose. 

Kayle selected Stardust for this quilt. This quilt pattern is adorable and I love the pops of neon. 

Annie picked Radio Waves for this one. 

I quilted Bubble Glitter on Mary's quilt. This quilt alternates between this pieced part and large white swaths. It has a combo of high-thread count sheet and pieced parts on the back. 

I got the binding sewn onto all of Jeri's quilts. 

Speaking of Jeri, her box of missing quilts was finally delivered. The box was completely ripped open on one side and had been taped closed with two different types of tape. Thankfully the quilts were fine. We are going to switch to UPS for this group and also add an AirTag so we know where they are. 

Moving on to some fun things of my own, my small guild is doing an advent box where the participants each provided one purchased and one one handmade item to the hard-working organizer. She wrapped the items and made cute little bits of a story that are included in each day's items. She let me know Saturday night that mine was ready. We were in the middle of a snow storm, but my husband decided he'd drive me to her house to pick it up. I guess you can't take the Michigan out of him. 😏

As we were driving back into our neighborhood, we saw lots of flashing lights. Oh yeah, we forgot the fire department's Santa parade was driving through our neighborhood that night. I felt bad for the Santas standing on the back of the fire engine in the snow. Here's a totally lousy picture I took to send to the kids and urge them to hurry and open the front door to wave. 

Back to the advent box, here is mine before opening. 

Here is what was in the first two days. I don't have time this morning to find today's package and photo it before I have to leave for an appointment. There is a bag of sparkly binding clips, the little tin of cookies, a wee braw bag Kayle made, and the wooden thing is a needle holder and has some needles in it. 

Totally switching gears, I bought a new Christmas cactus (Thanksgiving cactus, probably). I thought the blooms would be light pink or white with hot pink stamens. Instead, the first flower is a strange yellowish beige with the hot pink stamen.

And here is something I found funny. I was cutting someone's fabric order and while folding the fabric I noticed one of the birds appears to have pooped. Hmm...I don't remember seeing when I cut other pieces previously. It is an unfortunately located manufacturing flaw. I cut the person a new piece and will be adding this piece to my own stash because it just makes me laugh.

I'll leave you with that. 😅

After a brief period of calm, things are starting to go haywire again. Most of it is completely out of my control, but I keep letting it eat at me. The worst things are that the post office has misplaced a box of quilts and Mom is sick again. So far they haven't been able to figure out what is wrong.

I haven't done any sewing other than what I showed in Monday's OMG post. I am about halfway done stitching down the binding on that quilt. 

I am trying to finish off the last quilts of the year. I have 8.5 quilts to quilt and eight to bind. 

Here are the quilts I've worked on since last week. 

First up is Deb's, quilted with Pumpkin Seeds. It came out so cute. 

Next is Teah's, quilted with Arches. 

Cynthia's quilt is quilted with Graceful Vines. Fun aside: she already made this quilt once before with the same patterns and fabrics, but she gifted it, so she recreated it. 

I finally finished up all the bindings on Pat's quilts.

I quilted Cosmos on Hannah's quilt.

Marsali requested Thread Garden for this one.

My quilt, quilted with Lovely Loops.

Jeri's quilt, quilted with Cactus Flower.

I'm slowly working on Cindy's mom's quilt. They finally decided on Blackbird for the quilting. There's some fullness, so I would not generally recommend this type of quilting design for this situation. You'd generally want to use something like Ground Cover, Oil Spill, Identity, or even stipple that has a lot of curvy movement back and forth in smaller areas. I did what I could. I hate when I can't make it perfect or perfect-adjacent.

Another of Jeri's, quilted with Love Blooms. We're having fun with different styles of designs in this group of her quilts.

You can stop reading here if you're only interested in the quilting.

I have managed to get outdoors a few times this week. Between work and the mostly lousy weather, it's been a challenge. I was really surprised to see this lone clematis flower on a mostly dying back plant. 

We had a couple great sunsets. My husband captured this photo. 

We got a chuckle from this license plate.

On Thursday night I sat through the fourth installment of the county planning board meetings regarding the lack of sidewalks in our neighborhood. The developer's family finally filed for the plat amendment to strike out the language requiring the sidewalks and street trees. The board debated it yet again. They took public comments. There was a tense moment when one of my neighbors spewed legalese and dubious statistics apparently in favor of sidewalks? I don't think he's even attended any of the other meetings. 😳🙄 Thankfully another neighbor got up and spoke in calm tones against the sidewalks. In the end, they voted 6-1 in favor of striking the sidewalk requirement. So I guess we're done? 

After the meeting and after dinner, we went for a walk with our friend. By this time it was pretty dark out. We noticed that there seemed to be some flames or at least a fire-like glow coming from the stubby road up by the new construction. We walked up there and there was a vehicle none of us recognized. The guy led with "I'm a property owner and I'm not doing anything wrong." He claimed it was a nice night so he was enjoying some "embers". It was odd. I ended up texting the property owner to let him know someone had a what appeared to be a fire on the road next to his new driveway. He came out and made the guy leave. Yes, I'm the nosy neighbor. 

We went back up there a couple days later and sure enough, there were ashes all over the road. So weird.

The menfolk surprised me with a new-to-us computer to upgrade from our failing 2019 Mac. This one is a 2021, but super, super fast with more bells and whistles. The transfer from one computer to the next took all night. The next morning, I could not access any of our Office products (where much of my business stuff resides) because our license was too old. Panic ensued. We purchased an updated license and I could not get it to activate. After my son got home from school, he got it activated in minutes doing the same things I tried. I guess I'm old now. 

Well, if you made it down here, thanks for listening/reading. I'll try not to be such a downer next week. If you celebrate Thanksgiving, my wish for you is to spend it with people you care about. 

How did you do with your goal this month? It's time to share your progress.

My goal this month was to completely make a surprise quilt from start to finish. It was pretty clear part way through the month that I wouldn't have enough time to make it, quilt it, and bind it, particularly since I want to stitch this binding by hand. Here was my project at the beginning of the month. The fabrics are Andover Sequin in Ocean, Dashwood Sapphire Skies, and Kona white.

November 4: I had everything cut.

November 10: sewing some units.

November 15: Trimming a ton of HST.

November 22: Assembling the rows. I'm cutting it pretty close.

November 22, after dinner. Just two seams left to go. Plus borders.

    

November 23: I have a finished top. I pressed five yards of fabric and seamed the backing.

Then I started quilting. This ended up being the fourth design (Lovely Loops, always a winner) I picked. By the time I had the top done, I didn't have a lot of hours left to spend on quilting if I also wanted to get the binding attached to the front before I needed to do the link up post. 

My new goal is to have the binding stitched down before the end of the month! Stay tuned.