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.