Stories from the Sewing Room

Why is it that the more I try to simplify my life and commitments, the busier I seem to be? 

We are now officially done with robotics forever. The tournament we hosted went pretty well and people seemed to have fun. Two teams didn't show up. On our own team, we were already down one kid (vacationing out of the country) and another fell ill the day of. That left us with two kids, the ones who typically showed up and did all the work, which seems a fitting way to end our coaching career. Our very last match ever was kind of a train wreck, but the boys had fun and laughed through it, so I will call it a success. They even managed to win one of the individual event trophies. 

Robotics typically takes up 6 - 8 months of each year and has for 12+ years. What will we do with all our free time? My husband wants to volunteer with Habitat. I think that's great, but like I said above, the more things we edit out, the busier our schedules seem to be. We still need to address the porch, the landscaping, finish the barn, get rid of things we're done with, and so on.

We did start setting up the second longarm. We moved the lights my husband made me from my existing machine over to the new/used machine because the lighting isn't as good in that area. This frame is 10 feet, so the lights overlap a bit since they were fabricated for a 12-foot frame. My husband installed his fabric advance bypass system. He 3D-printed me a bracket to hold the laser. The laser cable for Lucey 2 is really long compared to my original and would be in the way. Luckily we found a reasonably priced, shorter version online. We also had to order a Tripp Lite since that didn't come with the used iQ, and also a UPS. I suspect we might be buying an additional surge protector as well. I will need to sew in channels and dividers to hold my beloved SewTites Magnums, which means removing the leaders. That part won't be fun. Hopefully I'll have this thing up and running by next week. I'm looking forward to it.

My to-do list feels somewhat insurmountable right now. It looks something like this:

• make 15 guild items (secret)
• bind one client quilt
• keep up with quilting workload
• figure out what to do with sloper for class/attend live class later today
• tighten elastic in tiered gingham skirt & hand sew shut the weird waistband gaps
• make progress on Forever Neverland quilt
• table runner?
• figure out fair entries (I have two weeks.)
• make progress on race car quilt (I have like 12 days to get this done before I need to do the OMG link up post.)
• mend shorts
• find & apply correct fertilizer in vegetable garden
• weed all three flower gardens--my foot and the rainy weather are slowing me down
• figure out how and where to transplant things I want to keep from the upper garden to prepare for porch repair
• continue to work on business website issues
• make muslin of shorts pattern to see if they fit/if so, make some shorts (Why are all the shorts I see this year so short--like 3" inseams? I'm too old for that.)
• continue working on things needed to set up second longarm & iQ

Besides doing all the tournament prep and resting my foot as much as possible, I made a small amount of progress on my Forever Neverland quilt kit. As you can see, I have three blocks totally sewn. I have the HST sewn for the rest, but still need to cut and trim them prior to assembling the blocks. The prints for these blocks are mostly directional, so I've been trying to make sure to orient things correctly.

I added a few more rows to the knit blanket I shared last week. No picture because it looks just about the same. I now have 5/12 rows done.

I quilted Tina's quilt with Paw Prints. I fully bound this one.

I quilted Kristie's quilt with Boho Boxes.

I quilted Sherri's quilt with small-scale Ginger Snap and will be making and applying bias binding to this quilt.

My hummingbirds are finally starting to come in to the feeder. So is this woodpecker. LOL