Stories from the Sewing Room

I struggle to make decisions. Not usually the important ones, but the inconsequential ones, such as what fabrics to put where or what color thread to use on something. For a few weeks I couldn't even decide what to sew. Did it really matter? No. 

I eventually decided to work on something that isn't currently listed on my PHD list, but is a long-standing UFO. I call it the hippo quilt, but the actual pattern name is "A Mother's Work is Never done [sic]". It's a pattern by Jill Reber that was published in the June 2002 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. I chose a hippo print fabric for my border, hence the name. 

Random aside: I taught someone how to quilt using a different pattern from this magazine issue. I used fabrics from JoAnn and did some awful sewing machine quilting on it, but it is still in use: it is the quilt I add on top of our comforter because I'm always colder than my husband. It's been going strong for over 20 years now. This one is called Fortunes in Fabric by Mabeth Oxenreider. I finished it in 2003.

Anyway, back to the hippo quilt. I remember switching out a few of the fabrics I had set aside a few years ago. I have an Alison Glass print in the mix, along with some prints from Amanda Jean Nyberg's (Crazy Mom Quilts) Good Neighbors line. Everything else is probably 20 years old. I cut out all the block fabrics several years ago. I sewed all the half square triangles at that time and then set it aside. This quilt uses more traditional construction methods such as cutting out triangles to sew the HST and those corner blocks, but stitch and flip for the flying geese.

All these flying geese generate a lot of HST cutoffs to be sewn.

I started sewing a block. I got to the point of making the corner units. I needed to sew a large triangle to the smaller pieced triangle unit. Somehow I was short one large triangle, which is odd because four were needed and were cut from two squares. I couldn't find it, so I cut another one. 

Guess what? I found the missing triangle. 

No idea how I managed to sew two to the same thing, but I did. 

Here is my first block.

I decided sewing one block at a time was too slow, so I started doing as much chain piecing as possible prior to cutting and pressing. I thought I'd just make parts til I got bored, then get up and press and trim them.

For some reason I decided to flip ahead in the directions and realized that the pattern author had mixed her fabrics for each block instead of sewing one block in one fabric as I had done. And here is where the decision paralysis set in. Do I mix and match? Do I make blocks of one print only, like my first block? I remember pairing prints, so I must have planned to mix them. If I rip this block apart to mix and match, its pair is the orange batik peeking out of the pile above. I froze up over this inconsequential decision for a couple of days. Then I chastised myself for being silly. Does a 20-year-old project really matter that much? What would you do? Let me know in the comments.

Last week was my son's spring break. I had inadvertently scheduled a bunch of very large, very time-consuming quilts that week. Needless to say, I didn't get them all done. I enjoyed working in little chunks and spending some time with my boy. I took him to some appointments, we wandered through Target, which I hadn't been to in months, we went for walks, and went out for lunch and a trip through the bank drive through with my husband when he got out of work early one day. 

One of the appointments made me think back to when my son was around two. We'd just moved to Maryland and they required children to be screened for lead regardless of the age of the home. So I had to hold my kid on my lap and restrain him so they could do the blood draw. He was sucking away on his pacifier and when the nurse got done, he said something she couldn't understand. I was laughing because he was screaming to have his blood put back in him. The nurse didn't find it amusing, but I did. I still do.

I've been talking about the mysterious American woodcocks a lot recently. One afternoon my son and I went out for our evening walk in the afternoon since it was supposed to storm after dinner. He is a budding photographer and brought his DSLR and big lens out with us. We decided to try to walk carefully into the woodcock's territory in our neighbors' yard. We didn't see it, but there was a towhee and he wanted a picture of that. So we were standing there trying to track the towhee and all of a sudden the woodcock flew right out of its hiding spot almost directly next to us. I may have let out a little scream because it had startled me. We didn't see it right next to us, but did get a good view of it flying away. No photos of either bird. 

We've started work on prepping the new spot for the garden. It's that flat pile of gravel in the approximate center of the photo. The yard slopes there so we had to peel some and build up some to try to level it. We ordered four raised metal beds as a start. We have some fence posts on order. Asparagus crowns are on order. I think we're about two weeks away from early planting. Not sure if we'll be ready by then. 

Oh, I haven't shared the week's quilts yet. Here they are.

Amber's heart quilt, quilted with Ginger Heart. This took me two days.

Amber's herringbone quilt, quilted with Easy Clamshell Echo. One very long day.

Melissa's quilt, quilted with Triangle Lacing. I fully bound this one as well. Melissa's a newer quilter and I'm enjoying watching her find her style. 

Leslie's quilt, quilted with Moons & Stars. Do these owls look vaguely familiar? You might remember when I custom quilted Sara's owl quilt in January. This is her mom's quilt. 

I started on Jeri's next batch of quilts. She selected Dragonfly Dance for this one. I'll be binding all of her quilts. 

Linking with Quiltery and Alycia Quilts. 

 It's time to share your March progress.

My goal this month was to finish my Marble Mystery quilt. I finished much sooner than planned because I wanted to join in on the finish parade link up at Meadow Mist Designs. 

I won a QAL prize. I got a $50 gift certificate to Back Side Fabrics and picked out two yards of this Kaffe fabric. I'll use it for the backing of my tessellations quilt some year when I finish it.

I felt like I should make progress on something else too since I'd finished the binding in just a few days. I had mentioned maybe adding a border to the race car quilt or making progress on the Beach Bumz class project. I've done neither. I detest putting borders on quilts and my Beach Bumz project is in time out (sealed in bags with various odor absorbing products) because I feel like the stencils and foundations and book smell like cigarette smoke. 

Instead, I quilted my Melodic Mystery quilt and have started binding it.

I've done very little sewing (once again) because I couldn't decide what to do. Our furnace has been acting up and the floor heat wasn't working in the basement, so it was a chilly 62 degrees for over a week and I wanted to spend as little time as possible down there. The HVAC service man came twice on Monday. Things are working now, but we'll have to do a system flush of the geothermal lines soon. The basement was a comfortable 68 degrees yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to sew since I had a meeting in the morning and needed to take my son to an appointment in the afternoon.

I did make the binding for my Melodic mystery quilt and I've got about a yard of it stitched down.

I took a class on how to use the additional metal feet for my serger last week. We made all sorts of samples with flat lock seams, adding beading, inserting lace, gathering, inserting elastic, and creating a rolled hem. When I was driving home, I noticed it was almost time for school to let out, so I was at the light in front of the school trying to text my son to see if he wanted a ride home. The light changed, so I was trying to text and drive (don't do this!). I drove a bit farther down the road to the bank and couldn't figure out why he was sending me messages about a plane. Apparently my phone decided that the message should be "Do you want plane to pick you up?" LOL. I did my banking and went back and got him in my boring old car. 

I completed three quilts for others. 

Erika's mom's quilt, stitched with Ariana. 

Trudy's quilt, quilted with Peace.

The last of Ann K.'s quilts, quilted with Basic Swirl.

The weather was warm enough last week to pop most of my daffodils. Here are some pictures I took last night.

I'm also seeing buds on many of the trees. This is one of my crabapple trees.

This is a weeping cherry. Every year this tree gets into full blossom and we immediately have a large storm that destroys all the blossoms. 

We also had a few other weather-related happenings. The moon looked very large and tinted a bit Thursday evening.

We got up at 2:10 am Thursday into Friday to see the lunar eclipse. We stayed outside for about half an hour in the pleasant 57 degree night. I took this photo with my phone, no zoom, about 2:10.

My son took this picture during totality, around 2:26, with his DSLR and a giant zoom lens. 

I took this picture with my phone at the same time, zoomed way in. 

We felt that the eclipse was rather underwhelming after seeing the total solar eclipse last year. And we were pretty tired Friday.

Early Saturday morning, a bit before 5 am, the phones went off with a tornado warning. I slept through the racket (this is not the first time I've slept through it; maybe this is how I die?) and had to be awakened to relocate to the basement. I promptly fell down the last two steps and skinned my knee. Plus it was freezing down there. Good thing there are piles of my quilts in the living room. Still tired.

My mom called us twice on Saturday to ask if all our windows were broken from the golf ball-sized hail her news said we had. We did not have large hail at all. She was sure we had tornados over our house. The nearest confirmed tornado, at an EF-0, was about 12 miles south of us. The only damage I saw around us was a branch down in my neighbors' yard. 

These same neighbors are hosting some of the woodcocks on their property. They've seen them and said they were quite big and round. My son saw one flying away from their yard. I had turned around for a second and missed it. 

Our chickens are doing fine and occasionally laying eggs. They got a cabbage (hanging in the background) for St. Patrick's Day.

We're planning to relocate our vegetable garden to a sunnier location and wanted to get a water meter installed on our spare property so we had water access in the new location. We were declined because they said they don't have the water capacity to add new meters at the moment and are in the process of applying for permits to add another pumping station. They told us to call back in five to six months to try again. 😧 I guess we'll be buying some hoses to stretch from the house over to the new location. 

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

Last week I took a class, Beach Bumz, with Linda J. Hahn at the IHQS. Linda is known for her New York Beauty blocks. She's published several books and developed her own stencils, templates, patterns, and techniques to make the blocks. I signed up for this class because it was a small project that used techniques I need more practice with: paper piecing and curves. {Have you noticed that curves are everywhere right now?}

Linda's method uses leave-in foundations. I think the foundation felt like an embroidery stabilizer. Unfortunately, our class kits were short two of the templates. I had time to trace off all four of one of the missing templates, but only one of the other. She will mail us the missing parts, but I won't be able to advance my project until I receive them.

I purchased one of her books so that I had the basic instructions since those weren't included in the class kit. 😕 I also purchased the mini quilt set because she said that you can create mini versions of each quilt using the trimmings from the bigger versions. You can see the difference in size in the curved templates in the photo below.

Backs of blocks. Foundation in the pointy part.

Can you see the marker on the foundation showing?

In the meantime, since I finished my main OMG project in a matter of days, I decided to quilt another UFO from my list. It's another of Cheryl's mystery quilts, the Melodic mystery. I believe this one is from two years ago. I chose a fairly small scale of the Pluma design for the quilting. Each pass was at least an hour and I finished it well into the evening. I love how the quilt looks on the frame with only the longarm's lights on it. Maybe I should take all my quilt photos in the dark. LOL.

Our state robotics competition was held on Saturday. Half of our team (2/4) are seniors this year, so this was it for them. Our matches didn't go as well as we'd hoped, partly due to random part failures (we've been plagued by those this season), partly due to alliance partners who did not help us, and, in some cases, hindered us. 

We also had an unfortunate judging experience with one of the pit judges, who was also a room judge at our last QT. The boys generally don't complain about judging and they did both times with this guy. We did make a formal complaint that probably didn't really accomplish anything, but I felt it was important to pursue it, particularly after learning at least one other team had the same issue. It also gave the boys a chance to be heard. 

We ended the robot matches in 24th of 28th place, but, much to our surprise, were chosen as an alliance partner for the finals playoff by the number five ranked team. 

Unfortunately, the other robot failed at the beginning of the first playoff match. We moved to the loser bracket and lost our second match as well. One of the opposing team's robots was illegally pinning our robot so that we couldn't score. This is not at all the spirit of FIRST. Intentional contact is not allowed. We were very disappointed that the judges didn't penalize that team--it should have been at least a yellow card if not DQ, but it wasn't. There weren't even penalty points awarded. My son rarely gets angry and he had steam coming from his ears for more than a day afterwards. 

The boys were awarded another Connect award--we've won two other Connect awards and one Inspire award this season--and just missed (by one award place) moving on to a premier event. It's not how we would have chosen to go out. Too bad all those years had to end on a sour note. 

Friday night we were out for our evening walk. We got near our neighbors around the corner's driveway and my son thought he heard a frog. I said no way, it's been too cold for that. But we paused to listen and he said it really sounded like an American Woodcock. I'm like, how do you know what that sounds like? And do we even have those here? Meanwhile, my husband pulls out his phone and opens Merlin, and I'll be darned, but it was a woodcock. I wanted to get closer and try to see them--if you're familiar with them at all, you've probably seen videos on social media of them "dancing". If not, look up a video. They are fun! Anyway, it was late, getting pretty dark, and we still had more prep to do before leaving at the very crack of dawn for the tournament, so I was shot down. Oh, and my son recognized the call because he'd watched a video of them a few days prior. This is what all teenage boys watch, yes? 🤷🏻‍♀️

Sunday evening we heard them again, on a different part of the neighbors' property, on our own property, and across the street from us. My husband is more aggressive with wildlife than I am and flushed one out of our woods by playing the mating calls from Merlin. It swooped around my son and I, who were up the street. We heard at least one Monday night too. 

The spring weather makes it really hard for me to want to stay inside and complete my work. But we have bills to pay, so I sacrifice. Here are the quilts I've completed over the past week. 

Carol's wine quilt, quilted with Persephone 3.

Ann K.'s baby quilt, quilted with Scribble Hearts. Ann has me add the binding to the front of all her quilts.

Ann K.'s dog quilt, quilted with Paw Prints.

Ann K.'s doll quilt, quilted with Scribble Hearts.

Ann K.'s rocket quilt, quilted with Shooting Star. 

And finally, Ann's other doll quilt, quilted with Basic Swirl. 

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

I was planning on a nice, leisurely pace of binding for Marble mystery this month. Then I got a reminder email from Cheryl that the final link up day is today. The menfolk went off to robotics practice Monday night and I sat there and did binding and started watching a series about the Roosevelts. I finished up the last bit yesterday. Here she is:

We had very strong winds, so this is as good as it got. I'll try to take a better picture on a less windy day.

Blooper photo. So windy the camera couldn't even focus.

Meanwhile, I had to prepare my fabrics for the class I'm taking with Linda Hahn at IHQS tomorrow. I think I shall rename my project.

Last fall I had ordered a half yard bundle to use. The colors were all much more intense than I expected. I wasn't super thrilled with my choice, but I dug around in my batik bin and found a couple of fabrics that I thought could work with part of the bundle. The bundle is from Anthology Fabrics' Periwinkle Glow line.

I feel like I need to take a minute here to say that I did shop my existing batiks prior to buying the bundle, but didn't have the right amounts of yardage in things that worked together. The fabrics I picked from my stash are the background Moda Bella and the tone on tone blue and lime green (both Island Batiks left over from previous projects).

Anyway, I've gotten my fabrics cut and my supplies gathered. I'm not totally convinced this thing is going to be all that attractive, but we'll see. Hopefully I'll learn some new skills. If nothing else, I will be able to spend the day amongst other humans.

I have been trying to work as much as I can while I have the work. Here are the quilts I worked on since last week. 

The first two belong to Marsali. She requested Lateral for this quilt made with Art Gallery fabrics. I used a peachy-yellow thread called Shortbread. 

And Textures for this quilt. Textures took me two days to complete. Each pass, set as large as I could get it, took one hour to stitch.

Legene picked Flirtatious Leaves for this baby quilt. She was concerned about the quilting distracting from the panel, so I used 60 wt. thread for the quilting.

Deb wanted Stipple on her quilt and was hoping for a green thread. The only thing I had that was remotely close was a Bottom Line 60 wt in Sage, so that's what I used.

Carol picked Lei for her quilting and wanted me to use black thread. I find that dark threads on light fabrics tend to lose stitch definition, but I did as requested. What color would you have used? 

If you're wondering about Beaker the hen, she went back to the vet for a follow-up appointment. Her toe did fall off. The white, swollen-looking area that we thought was pus is actually dead tissue. We are to continue to soak her foot in the disinfecting solution. We put her back into the coop Wednesday night. She seems to be doing okay. Much to our surprise, when the coop was opened to put her back in, there was an egg in there. We've had three eggs this week. We hadn't had any at all for months. 

Last night at guild we had Tara Miller from Quilt District speak. She showed us some of her antique quilts. I thought I'd share. 

This was a southern quilt from the 1890s ( I think? Late 1800s anyway.) Clues that it was southern are the very thick sashing and the thicker weight of the batting. I don't know if it shows, but the Baptist Fan quilting went in every direction.

Improv piecing from the 1890s.

Various blocks from the late 1800s. The pineapple block is wool. She said that you wouldn't see solid, true black cotton until after the Civil War era.

I believe she said this was around 1910-1920. I hadn't seen a basket like this before.

1940s, again with the every-which-way Baptist Fan quilting.

1940s

1980s, based on a free pattern from Mountain Mist batting.