Stories from the Sewing Room

It's time to update my PHD progress. The months seem to go by faster and faster. 

Linking with Ms. P. Designs' PHD program

I looked at item 1 from the 2025 starts. I'm embarrassed to admit that I forgot what I'm supposed to be doing for the blocks in this quilt. I'm determined to finish it this year, so I'll need to get to studying. 

I did start and finish one new item during July, the super-mini Dumpster Fire. The finished size is 4" x 6". 

I also did my annual cleaning of the motor brushes in the back of the longarm and the cleaning and oiling of the inside of the head of the machine. The motor brushes were normal, but the inside front was pretty bad this year. There was quite a bit of black debris in there this year. Usually there is only oil and oily dust. I'll probably need to think about an APQS spa day in the next few years.

Next is the last of Ann K.'s baby quilts, quilted with Cakewalk.

The next two are Teah's. The red one is quilted with Baptist Fan and the other is quilted with Loops and Swirls. 

My daughter made me this crocheted chicken for my birthday. She didn't use a pattern for this one. She's pretty new to crochet, so I thought that was great.

She also brought my husband this crocheted dumpster fire. I had purchased the yarn and pattern for her. She put her own spin on it. The pattern is available on Etsy.

Moving to the dumpster fire update, the termite damage has turned out to be pretty significant and my husband took off work Friday and worked on the house all day Friday - Sunday in addition to the evenings he'd already spent. He's replaced part of the damaged wood with new material that he treated with deterrent. We will have to replace part of the drywall in the dining room. He accidentally cut through a wire, so now I have a hole in my basement ceiling too. 

The picture below shows what's left of one of the studs from the wall. It looked like corrugated cardboard. 

My husband has been lecturing me about how rags with chemicals (stain, acetone, lacquer thinner, WD-40, etc.) can ignite and you need to spread them out and let them dry. Well, here's proof they really can go up in minutes if they get a little too close and/or it's really hot out. Thankfully a young girl who lives a few houses away noticed the smoke coming from their house, got her dad, and then they went and alerted the neighbors so they could get to safety. 

From this angle, you can't even tell they had a fire. The rainbow was pretty vivid, but didn't show up well in the picture.

When I went out to be a nosy person, I noticed that I had a lot of pears that look nearly ripe. I'd totally forgotten that we had a good amount of fruit on the trees this year. I looked it up and should probably wait a few more weeks to harvest. 

Over in the garden I have harvested three zucchinis. I can harvest a few green beans, but there is not enough to feed three of us. My asparagus has tent worms/army worms. 🤮 Two thirds of the pumpkins are growing well on the outside of the perimeter and have stretched inside the fencing. The deer keep eating my sunflowers. 

So that's some of my week. I'd call it the highlights, but most was not a highlight. Things can just calm down for a while. I'd like to find some time for sewing and I have many chores still to do. School starts in one week. 

It's time once again to share your finished goal for the month.

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

This month really got away from me and I realized Tuesday that I needed to work on my post for Friday (and really, Thursday night since it goes live at 12:05 am). That was apparently the motivation I needed to start working on this project. Tuesday I fixed the parts of the blocks above that needed addressing and sewed them together.

I trimmed the panel to the correct size and then fudged it a little so that I didn't have any of the white showing. I find that a lot of panels that come through here tend to be parallelograms. This one was fairly on-grain, so that was nice. 

I cut and created the other borders.

As of Wednesday night, I made it this far. Everything lined up nicely except for the border I cut 1/2" too long. Oops! Just two borders remain. 

While I don't think I can fully finish this quilt before the end of the month, I feel pretty confident I can get the last two borders on and get it quilted. 

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 July 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 July One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

It's not been one of our finer weeks. Over the weekend, we discovered that we have severe termite damage along the walls on the front porch. The first company already came out to give us a quote on treatment. It was pricy, but not as bad as I expected. The second company is coming this afternoon. This photo is the corner. It's so bad. Devastating. Our house is only 12.5 years old. 

I decided to sew something for fun this weekend. May I present to you the 4" x 6" dumpster fire. 

I decided to try Wonderfil Deco Bob 80 wt thread to piece this: I've seen many recommendations about using very fine thread for paper piecing. Not gonna lie, I really struggled with it and felt like my seams were really easy to pull apart. If anyone knows what the trick to using this thread in your Bernina is, please let me know!

Meanwhile, I've been getting to know Lucey 2. She has a much smaller available throat space than Lucey 1. I'm finding that there is about 15" (or maybe 17" if I really push?) of available stitching space and I can only fit around 12" comfortably and still have space to realign. I'm still learning.

Lucey 1 has about 18" of available stitch space and I can go 16 - 17". The frames are different, as is the throat of the machine. Lucey 1 has a square throat and the dead bar is right against the vertical frame. Lucey 2 has a rounded throat and the dead bar is several inches from the vertical frame.

Lucey 1

Lucey 2

The fabric advance pedals are opposite (forward/wind on the right on one and on the left on the other), which makes it interesting when you've built a lot of muscle memory! The on/off switches go in opposite directions too. 

Here's what I've quilted since last week. 

Jackie's sampler quilt, quilted with Stipple.

A donation quilt from the small guild, quilted with Hot Nights (flames).

Kim's large quilt, quilted with Radiate (sideways fans). I also fully bound this one.

Charlene's first Christmas quilt, quilted with Holly and Berries.

Ann K.'s quilt, quilted with Basic Swirl. I need to attach the binding to the front. 

Charlene's second Christmas quilt, quilted with Celebrate Petite.

Finally, Ann K.'s next quilt, quilted with Abracadabra. Also needs binding. 

Out in the garden, things are doing okay-ish. We've still been getting tons of rain. I harvested one tomato and two cucumbers. 

There are lots of tomatoes still on the vine. The peas are mostly burnt out. There is at least one zucchini growing! I have not determined what creature is nibbling on the blossoms and asparagus.

Surprisingly, there are signs that the asparagus is still actively growing new stems even though the plants are mostly feathered out (or whatever you call it). Two of the three clumps of pumpkins we planted outside the garden are very bushy. My sunflowers were coming along nicely, but the deer got them. One still has leaves. 

Speaking of deer, we have a mom and twins living in our yard. 

The deer seem to be chewing everything in sight, but they have surprisingly left my day lilies alone recently. 

Oh, and our neighbor around the corner sent us this picture he took through their windows into their back yard. 😮 My first thought was that it is a mountain lion. I learned that mountain lions, cougars, panthers, and pumas are the same thing. We all decided it was probably a bobcat since its tail is short. It looks big though!

Nine weeks after bringing Lucey 2 home and six weeks after buying the used iQ, everything is finally all working together. The last remaining cable we needed was set to arrive last Friday, so I thought I'd update the tablet to the current software version. Well. I got an error that required the coin battery inside the tablet to be replaced. After replacing it, you were supposed to follow a set of instructions to get to a menu that allowed you to reset the date and time to whatever day it is. We were able to reset the date, but it didn't go past the error message upon restarting. I was having a meltdown because I'd already spent so much money and I didn't want to have to buy a new tablet (plus wait however long the wait currently is) right now. 

I contacted support and she had me do the same thing we had already done. 😩 Oh, I forgot to mention that you also had to attach a corded keyboard to the tablet. I don't have one, but my tech-loving son has a few. He had left to go pick through computers to be discarded at school with his friends. I had small quilt guild, so it was at a standstill. The next afternoon, he was urged to look at it again. And fixed it in a few seconds. His fix was to set the date a year ahead. Why that worked, I have no idea. But it worked, I was no longer locked out of the tablet, and I was able to update it.

We finished hooking everything up and reassembled the rest of the frame and ran cords and such. I quilted a small panel of fabric and then cut it up and serged the edges. I use these instead of the clamps for the sides of the quilts. I just pin this fabric to the backing sides and then the other end of the fabric is pinned to the elastic of the clamp. This way I don't have to worry about the machine hitting the clamps. 

Yesterday morning I finished doing the calibrations and quilted a small quilt! Huzzah!

I feel like I haven't gotten a ton of work done over the past week. I had an unfortunate incident with someone's backing and had to go buy new fabric to replace it. Luckily there is a store about 1/2 hour away that stocks every single Kona color (Indiana Quilt Depot), so I was able to make it right. That put me a day behind. Monday morning I had my one allotted annual appointment with my regular doctor. I spent the afternoon prepping some of the quilts I need to get done this week. I had to trim one and add borders and prepare binding. I had to enlarge a too-small backing for one which spilled into Tuesday, make a Frankenbatting for another, and I still have to make a backing and binding for one more. Plus quilt everything!

Here's what I've completed since last week: 

Susan's Pete the Cat, quilted with Stipple.

Susan's star quilt, quilted with Baptist Fan. (Susan, if you're reading this, please check your email 🙂.)

Maria's hand-sewn hexi, quilted with Ginger Snap. This quilt is the first to be quilted on Lucey 2. I still need to trim and attach the binding to the front.

It was interesting to see the differences between Lucey 1 and Lucey 2. Lucey 1 has an M bobbin and Lucey 2 has an L. Lucey 2 is older, quieter, and has a different frame, so the available quilting area isn't as big. The difference in the tablets is strange to me. It's all good though.

I was able to attend the big guild's sew day for a bit on Saturday. I made some good progress on my Forever Neverland quilt. I'll need to square up a few blocks and change the sashing on at least one, but still, I was pleased to get a tiny bit of personal sewing done. 

Meanwhile, my husband was busy demolishing the front porch. The cement came out way easier than I expected. He made some cuts, hit it with a maul, and it crumbled apart. He loaded it into a dumpster for cement recycling.

Oh look, we found the rebar that we provided the original contractor. Mostly just thrown in the hole. 😒

He's now removing the siding. We'll need to evaluate the damage. We know there's a least a little water damage and we think there is insect damage too. We also need to determine what to do with the hydraulic cement/mud jacking cement that we had inserted as a temporary fix several years ago. It reminds me of drywall mud. 

After addressing whatever there is to address, he'll form it back up. We've hired a cement contractor to actually install the concrete. You may notice we got a delivery in front of the sawhorse. The first few days, they would step around the sawhorse, step down into the hole, and back up to the step. Weird. 

Happy sewing to you.

Linking with Quiltery and Alycia Quilts.