Stories from the Sewing Room

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.

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! 

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.