Frankenbatting & Regret

I've only done utility sewing over the past week. I have made three Frankenbattings--one for my own project, one for a customer, and one for my small guild. I used three different types of battings for these: Quilters Dream Blend for my own (seams beautifully), QD 80/20 Natural (more challenging to seam nicely), and Hobbs 80/20 (it's stretchy). Using my walking foot, I zig-zag stitch my batting scraps after straightening the edges where I'm planning to sew.

Here's the QD Blend. If I had trimmed the batting to be even on the edges, you wouldn't even know there was a seam.

I normally try to make the seams in my pieced battings run horizontally. I'm not sure why other than that's the way my scraps usually make the most sense. Maybe because horizontal seams are better in the backing on the longarm? I ended up running the QD 80/20 seams vertically just because it's easier to have the excess batting hanging down rather than off to the sides on the longarm. And, yes, I realize I could have trimmed it, but that's more work and this was a fairly small quilt. I find that the 80/20 tends to get a bit wavy when you stitch chunks together.

The Hobbs ended up having horizontal and vertical seams. Much to my surprise, one of the remnants I was sewing already had a seam in it. Then one piece ended up too small and another was very oversized, so I cut the excess off and used it to fill in the small part. Hobbs is a pretty stretchy batting, so I figured this is okay. It's for a donation quilt, so it's not like it needs to be show-quality.

As far as the regret portion of my post title, I was slightly unhappy with my thread color choice on my Runway quilt, but I wasn't upset enough at it to spend time ripping out all the quilting. What I am regretting is that in my haste to get my project quilted, I forgot to check for seam shadowing. Of course, by the time you are part way into the quilting and notice it, it's too late (unless you want to spend hours ripping out the quilting to fix it). The seam shadowing is pretty bad in this quilt. I am so disappointed in myself. I decided this one isn't worth hand binding. I will probably donate it. Look for a finish soon.

Good from a distance, but not great up close.

I have completed five quilts for others.

First is Marsali's Happy Stripes quilt, quilted with Whoop-de-Doo at a 50% offset.

Then I quilted Toni's quilt with Honey. I probably should have scaled up the design more, but it does look cute.

Next is Marsali's Star Pop quilt, quilted with Thread Garden. She gave me a minky/cuddle fabric for the back and the quilting looked amazing on it.

Jae's baby quilt is quilted with Mallow.

This guild donation quilt is another variation of Bedford Tiles (remember mine from last month?). One of my guild mates made the center, another added the borders, someone pieced the backing, I'm quilting it, and others will bind it. I chose to quilt it with Lovely Loops and used the Hobbs Frankenbatting. I'm pretty sure I've quilted four of these now, including my own. 

If you're wondering how I'm doing personally, I'm still full of rage and despair. Federal workers are not your enemies. They are your family, friends, neighbors, and people in your community. Cutting funding and jobs doesn't just affect the federal employee or the scientist receiving research funding; it also affects the support people such as lab assistants, lab animal caregivers, admin assistants, janitors, food service, security people, contract specialists, shipping and transportation people, etc. It all ripples out. 

My hair is still way too short and still sticking out everywhere. I say it represents my currently prickly personality. 

I managed to catch my pinky fingernail on the long arm needle while advancing a quilt. I have no idea how this even happened. The needle broke and the lower half of it was lodged in my nail bed. It was very painful. It's been five days and I still get occasional sharp twinges of pain. I did not get blood on the quilt though!

Beaker the hen had a costly vet visit last week Wednesday. She had x-rays. Her toes are not broken, but she does have frostbite on a few and a growth ("lesion") on one. The vet wasn't sure if the lesion is a tumor and/or is cancerous. She prescribed an antiseptic foot soak, a pain medication, and an antibiotic and advised that medication requires two people to administer. The first two and a half days it was pretty easy to get all the medicine in. Saturday Beaker must have started feeling better because it is now really hard to hold her still enough and get her beak pried open to squirt the medicine in. In case you wondered, I am the medicine squirter, not the chicken holder. The growth is still pretty ugly and big, but Beaker is starting to put a little pressure on her foot now. We'll see. I'm having a sale in my Etsy fabric shop to help raise money to cover the unexpected bill. I think I've covered almost two prescriptions so far. That was the affordable part of the bill. 🫣  We're supposed to have a follow-up appointment in two weeks with more x-rays. We have her isolated in the garage now to try to help her rest and not be jostled or mounted.

Meanwhile, my son was still having range-of-motion issues after his fall. I talked to a nurse at his doctor's office and she advised me to go to the orthopedic walk-in clinic, which must be done within 14 days of injury. Otherwise you have to get a referral and wait for an appointment. We just snuck in on our last day of eligibility. More x-rays, a brace, antibiotic, and a follow-up appointment were the result. I think we've easily met his deductible for the year. 

My daughter visited over the weekend while the menfolk traveled to the very northern part of the state for their next robotics tournament. I really enjoyed having girl time. We hung out, got groceries, and watched the robotics tournament live stream. I found this cute little cake to surprise her with. If you can't tell, it's a little dog. It looked better than it tasted.

Our robotics team had perhaps our best event showing ever. We were ranked third after the regular matches and selected by the number one team to be in the finals alliance. We dropped a match in the playoff, came back from the loser bracket, and won the tournament! Our team also won the INSPIRE Award, the highest award possible, for the first time ever! It was possibly the nicest day I've had in 2025.

Here are some birds that were flying above me as I walked in the sunshine Monday. My Merlin app tells me they were sandhill cranes. This is as zoomed in as my phone camera could go.

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

January PHD Report

First off, thanks to everyone who has linked up or commented here lately. Things in my life and the lives of people I care about are still very uncertain due to situations outside our control, I'm angry, and I'm tremendously behind on answering emails and/or visiting blogs. I'm trying to respond as I'm able.

I'd meant to share my PHD progress last week, but with everything else going on, I completely forgot. I finished two pieces in January: Bedford Tiles and a table runner from my UFO pile. You can scroll back to my previous posts to see pictures if you want.

Linking with Ms. P Designs PHD

I attended two days of the big guild's retreat last week. I completed my Runway #2 quilt top. 

Or so I thought until I laid it out to take the above picture and was unhappy with the fabric placement. I selectively seam-ripped and am working on inserting new blocks. 

I had also packed one of my older UFO projects, the race car quilt. I purchased a kit while we lived in Maryland and had intended to make it for my son for when he moved from the crib to a "big boy" bed. He can drive now, so it's been a while. I discovered that I'd cut out the entire quilt, but never started sewing it. I completed several blocks at the retreat before packing it in. I'm impressed that I was able to get the fabric direction right on all of the blue/green blocks. I think I may donate this one to Habitat whenever it gets finished.

Thankfully, work has started to pick up and I quilted several things.

Jo Ellen requested Stipple for her table runner.

Jan left the design for her table runner up to me and I picked Curly.

I quilted loopy meander for a shy quilter (not allowed to share). I thought this batik fabric was really pretty. Sorry the picture is shadowy; I was working at night again and it was hard to photo just that without sharing anything else.

I started on Marsali's group of quilts. She requested Whoop-de-do for this one.

My son is finally on the mend--thank you to all who sent get well wishes. Beaker the chicken will be going to the vet today since she's having trouble walking. Never in my life did I think I'd be paying for a vet visit, particularly for a chicken. The roosters have been going at each other, unless we interrupt them, in which case they go for us instead. After seeing their behavior, I wonder if Beaker got caught in the crossfire. Or maybe she slid off the coop ramp in the poor weather. Who knows?

We have another robotics tournament this weekend and my daughter is coming home to visit, which I am really looking forward to. We've been housesitting for our neighbor for months and months. They've had another offer on their house and it was inspected this week, so I'm hoping for everyone's sake that this one goes through. 

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

February One Monthly Goal

 Join your fellow quilters and crafters as we set manageable goals for the month.

New to One Monthly Goal?  Welcome!  To join, share a photo of your project plus some words about what you want to accomplish in a blog post or Instagram post and add that photo to the link up.  Return at the end of the month and share your results.  (Results link up opens for the last 7 days of the month.)

Life has been going rather sideways lately, February is short, and we have a lot of robotics scheduled, so I'm going to go with something I hope will be easy. I will plan to quilt one quilt from my UFO list. I'm looking at Marble Mystery or perhaps the in-progress Runway version 2 quilt. Edited to add: The Runway quilt was in Quilter's World Spring 2024 and can also be purchased as a standalone pattern from Annie's.


Now it's your turn to link up. The link up will remain open through February 7.

The One Monthly Goal accomplishment link up will be available on February 22.  Make sure you add a link to this OMG post so others can find the OMG link up from your blog--just copy and paste this link into your post:  

Stories from the Sewing Room One Monthly Goal February Link Up

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

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

The Owl Quilt

Life has been full of surprises lately. I have done zero personal sewing. I have completed two quilts for others. 

I quilted Marilyn's Deco quilt with Radiate.

I worked on Sara's owl quilt. She really wanted custom quilting. This quilt will hang on the wall in her soon-to-be-born daughter's room. When I took this picture, I'd been stitching for two days and you can barely tell. 

I worked on it Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I spent Sunday burying what felt like 1000 threads, which took me at least three hours. I used eight colors of thread.

I did a lot of stitch-in-the ditch around the various appliqué shapes and then added quilting to the owls, branches, and leaves to give them some definition. I quilted the background with the Midnight Sparkle pantograph. It required a lot of no-sew zones and splitting of the design so that it would stop and start around the appliqués without stitching back and forth a ton around the appliqué (hence the 1000 tie-offs).
Meanwhile, we had our first FTC competition of the year on Sunday in West Lafayette. We were still proofing and printing documents Saturday morning. They left after lunch to drive up there. I'm not sure the robot was even functional at that point, but the hotel staff let them set up in the breakfast area and they spent many hours fine-tuning, finishing the script, and practicing. It was weird being home alone, but I spent many hours finishing the quilting of the owl quilt, wrapping up at 10:30 p.m.

Sunday I started watching the livestream of the tournament at 11 a.m. The boys' robot died about 40 seconds into their first match. Their control hub, sort of the brains of the robot, completely quit working. Luckily they had a spare, along with a two-hour window before their next match. Things still didn't go very well since they were still transferring programming to the new hub and their ranking was at or near the bottom most of the day; normally they are in the top few teams. They did win their last match and ended the day at 21 of 28. They were awarded a CONNECT Award, which was a first for us. The tournament manager asked everyone to stick around after the final matches because they'd be announcing which five teams would earn an advancement to state. FIRST has an advancement hierarchy, which I was frantically trying to find, since two of the winning teams had earned advancements at prior competitions. I thought there was a chance we'd squeak in to the fifth spot due to the CONNECT, and we did. Whew! We have two weeks before the next match, so hopefully they will get everything worked out.

Monday morning my son was running down the driveway to the bus at 6:50 a.m. He tripped and took a very hard fall and returned to the house very bloodied. I was still mostly asleep and my husband woke me up to help clean the boy up. The transportation garage called to make sure he'd made it back into the house--the bus driver had radioed it in. He scraped most of his nose, bit and bloodied his upper lip, which swelled quite a bit, hit one knee and the opposite elbow, and really ripped up his hands. He also ripped a hole all the way through the elbow of his jacket, ripped his pants on the opposite side, and broke his watch. Luckily his teeth and glasses were okay. Tuesday morning I removed the bandages, which took me 1/2 hour, and sought advice from my friend, who is a retired nurse. She thought his hand needed to be x-rayed. I got him out of his pajamas and into some clothes and we went to the smaller hospital's ER. We spent over 2.5 hours there. His fingers are not broken.  They never cleaned his wounds, which I found odd. The waiting room clientele was...interesting. I made sure we brought good masks with us and we stayed masked the whole time. One lady had Covid and kept taking her mask off. Some sheriffs brought in an inmate in his orange jumpsuit. He was cuffed to the wheelchair. He scared me far less than the coughers. We'll know to try elsewhere next time. 

I also got a pretty bad haircut last week. I don't understand why they keep insisting on basically shaving my head when I ask them not to. I am finding it embarrassing to be seen in public with this hair. What there is sticks straight out. Between all that and trying to keep up with the breakneck announcements and wondering how they affect us, it's been a lot. I'm very conflicted on social media use, but feel I need to remain for business purposes. I wish I could de-Zuck my life. I finally have plenty of work in the house and I haven't had time to start it. I'm scheduled to attend the big guild's retreat the next few days. I'm gonna drive back and forth each day. It will be nice to get my mind off things and I should have some sewing to share next week. 

January One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

How did you do with your goal this month? Link up and share!

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

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

My goal this month was to bind my Bedford Tiles quilt. Stitching down the binding seems like such an easy task, however I am typically very slow at binding, so I was counting on this taking me all month. Much to my surprise, I finished January 11.

I'm quite pleased with this finish. I found the sewing very tedious, there was an error in the fabric requirements which led to having to track down more of an apparently out of print fabric (and then I bought everything they had and used it for backing too), and the quilting design I chose--Echoed Swirls--is very dense, even sized as large as I could go, and took forever to stitch out. 

It's done and I like it. I'm really glad I was able to find more of the border fabric because I think it pulls the whole thing together.

Next I'll be contemplating what task to complete in February.

Now it's your turn to share your finish (or your progress if you didn't quite make it to the finish line).

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 January 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 January One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Table Runner Finish

First, I want to mention that a kind reader pointed out that my follow by email/subscribe button was not working. I'm guessing this change happened some time after Intuit acquired Mailchimp in 2021. Hopefully it was a fairly recent change. Acquisitions are so rarely beneficial to the users/customers, you know? But I digress. I believe I have it working now (and the new version sure is ugly, isn't it?). Please, please, if you find something amiss here, send me a message and let me know. 

We're totally freezing here. It's been single digits in the morning. On the plus side, it's been sunny and we had one day in the 30s, so the snow melted off the solar panels. We were off Monday for MLK Day and had two-hour delays yesterday and today. 

Moving on to sewing, I have a finish! It's a table runner.


The pattern I used is Cha, Cha, Cha by Atkinson Designs. It measures 34.25" x 14.25". The fabric line I used is Playground by Dylan M for Windham Fabrics. I'd received a free charm pack from the local quilt shop a while ago and was able to locate a hunk of matching fabric online last fall.

I quilted it using the Spark design, which requires some advanced setup techniques. I didn't spend a lot of time, but if I were to use it on someone else's quilt, I'd work harder to make the staggers more random.

I sewed together this piece from the cutoffs. I'll need to figure out a way to finish it. {One UFO generates another??} It's around 12.5" x 8.5".

Marble Mystery is getting closer to completion; I have the top done except for the borders.

I tackled part of my mending pile by repairing a hole in the arm sleeve of one of my son's shirts. I have to re-do the hem on another, but I don't have matching thread. No pictures because it's boring. 

January has been very lean for work. I've completed three more quilts.

Amy chose Windswept for her panel quilt and it looks great!

Toni sent me two t-shirt quilts and requested In the Swirls for both. 


My daughter came home for a visit over the weekend, so that was nice. I was finally mostly over the headache that plagued me last week--that thing stuck around most of the week. I've been getting quite a few headaches recently. I'm not sure what the cause is. Most of them start with the top of my scalp burning and my hair being very sensitive. Then my neck starts hurting. So weird. I should probably try to get in to my doctor, but most of the time they just send you to urgent care. No thanks. I guess I'm waiting until my next scheduled appointment in the summer. 😒

Our first robotics competition of the season is this weekend. We are not very prepared this year. I'll be watching the livestream from home.

Our One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up opens on Saturday. 

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, From Bolt to Beauty, and Alycia Quilts.

Marble Mystery Blocks

I thought I'd have so much to share this week, but alas, I do not.

After the 10 inches of snow we got Sunday/Monday last week, we got an additional six inches on Friday. That means that we got almost our annual average in just one week. It's been really cold as well, so the snow is sticking around, which is also unusual. My son had 1.666 days of in-person school last week, one actual snow day, and two days of e-learning. He's been back at school this week (so far...).

It started snowing Friday morning. This was taken around 1 pm.

Saturday afternoon we saw the sun.

Moving on to sewing, I have sewn the block rows of the Marble Mystery together. I have part of the sashing rows assembled and have the other batch left to sew before I can put the top together. I thought I'd get this thing put together before it was time to post, but I had some work that was much more involved than I planned and then I suffered a pretty bad headache Monday night. I spent Tuesday taking it easy and trying to will the headache away; I wasn't totally successful. Thankfully most of my work hasn't arrived at my house yet so the only sacrifice was my personal sewing time.

I have completed two quilts for others. The first one belongs to Betty. She is a newer quilter and this is her largest quilt to date. She picked JK Celtic for the quilting and it looks pretty.

I also stitched the custom edge-to-edge design I shared last week on Margaret's quilt. 

I'm happy that I'm able to watch parts of the Australian Open live on tv in the evenings. My son and I particularly enjoy watching Frances Tiafoe. We caught part of his match Sunday night until it got so late I sent him to bed. I thought I'd watch more, but turned it off after Tiafoe was sick on the court, which ended up being a few minutes after I sent my son to bed. I was pretty grossed out. I checked the outcome the next day and it looks like I should've waited it out and stayed up later. Oh well. We're also happy that the new season of All Creatures Great and Small is on. I'm also looking forward to the new season of Finding Your Roots. I've learned more history from watching that than I learned in school. 

We were able to go outside for a few quick walks this week. We were shocked and awed when we found deer tracks forming a heart in the snow. Can you see it? It didn't show up as well in the picture my son took as I would have hoped.

Our first robotics competition is in a week and a half. I'm not sure how ready the boys will be. It's been a rough season. My husband (their coach) is totally stressing.

We were also looking at colleges again with the thought that we may need to start looking at doing some campus tours if he's considering anywhere other than IU. My son wishes to study computer hardware engineering and most of the programs we've found focus more on programming and AI. Anyway, the point here is that the cost of college is truly shocking. Non-state schools are anywhere from $50 - $85k PER YEAR!!! How will these kids ever get out from under loans? My family is fortunate enough, I guess, to only qualify for loans, not aid. So we need to find places where there are chances of scholarships; IU is one that does offer competitive scholarships and we can save the $10k room and board fee since it's local. 

We also found out that he got accepted into the SEAP program this summer, so that was nice. I feel like I've only talked about one child lately. My daughter appears to be doing well. We haven't seen her in a couple of weeks due to work and weather and such. 

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


Marble Mystery & Other Progress

The year has gotten off to a slow, fairly relaxing start. I've been doing quite a bit of personal sewing since I haven't received most of the quilts that have been booked yet. 

I've made all the blocks for the Marble mystery. I did have a bit of frustration with getting the flying geese units to line up properly from row to row within the blocks. I spent a lot of time selectively ripping and trying to realign better.

These things are so frustrating to me! I have to give myself a three-strikes-and-you're-out approach because otherwise I'll keep on ripping until I destroy the fabric.

Here are the completed blocks. My colors for this quilt are Kona Regatta, Mango, Leaf, Bellini, and Bone. They mostly blend with the backing fabric. 


Obviously I still need to add all the sashing and such to get to a completed top. I was surprised that January was the reveal. I thought I'd have another month, not that it's really that big of a deal.

I also worked on a project from 2022--a Free Block Friday program (Space Odyssey) from Angie Wilson of Gnome Angel and Marti Michell. I had completed the first block some time ago and then it sat, as my projects tend to do. These blocks all use the Marti Michell templates. It kind of takes me back to how I made my very first quilt in the 1990s with templates traced onto template plastic sheets. 

Each piece is cut individually. I was using my tiny rotary cutter because I thought it might make cutting off those corner bits easier, but it didn't make it that much easier. I'll probably switch back to my regular 45 mm cutter on the next block.

Here's how block two looked prior to assembly. The blocks will all be set on point.

The completed block:

I also completed block three before setting it aside to work on Marble mystery. I think I want to swap out the small gray interior triangles for pink in this one. In case you were wondering, I'm using Kona Pink, Royal, Leprechaun, Ice Frappe, Silver, and White. They look really frayed while they're on the floor, but not so much on the design wall. 🤔

No picture, but I'm about halfway done with the binding on my Bedford Tiles quilt (my OMG for the month). 

I spent two days quilting Orange Peel on Sonja's quilt. Orange Peel is very difficult to execute well with my setup. She made this from her binding trimmings and I think she said it took like 10 years to complete. 

I sent my daughter an image of the next quilt in my queue with some designs I was considering. She said it would be nice if there was one that combined them. Hmmm...I can do that! 

Let's add in a second rose as well and see how it looks when repeated. Yes, that will work well!

Meanwhile, we were part of the big snowstorm moving across the midwest. We had snow and freezing rain/sleet starting Sunday morning. Here's the view from my sewing room window Sunday afternoon.

And Monday mid-morning.

It finally quit Monday afternoon and my husband ran out to plow our driveway and two of the neighbors'. He said there was about 10". 
The plow truck came through late afternoon and made a big mess--like didn't clear out intersections or only plowed one lane in some places and parts of yards in others. We did go out for our walk since the snow was thinned and discovered that the road is a layer of ice now. He took his tractor back out and tried to clean up the giant ridges the plow truck left in the intersections and also cleared out the ends of the driveways that got reburied. 

My son was due to go back to school Monday after winter break, but he had a total snow day. Basically everything was shut down in our area and roads were under travel warning (emergency and essential worker travel only). Tuesday was an e-learning day and base was still shut down, so another day of telework for the husband. My daughter in Indianapolis was one of four people who showed up at her work Monday. She said the roads still hadn't been cleared Tuesday. They didn't have as much as we did.

Big guild got cancelled for last night. I was glad because I really didn't want to risk driving into town, especially with a passenger. Right now small guild Friday night is still on, but I think we're due for more snow Friday, so we'll see. I'm the presenter for that one and I am not in the least bit prepared. Plus there's high levels of all sorts of ick going around in our community right now and I'd prefer to stay home and hide away from all of that. 

We tried a new recipe, Poulet Yassa, over the weekend that turned out well. The only difficult thing was allowing enough time for it to marinate. My son and I have also resumed watching My Name is Gabriel (available on Hulu, subtitled) and are still really enjoying it. We have two and a half episodes left. We are also looking forward to the next season of All Creatures Great and Small, which will be available for us on January 12. 

Linking with Quiltery and Alycia Quilts.