Stories from the Sewing Room

What will be your focus project this month?

I have a lot of bindings to do on the work side, so even getting my quilt top made is going to be a stretch.

Now it's your turn to link up. The link up will remain open through April 7.

The One Monthly Goal accomplishment link up will be available on April 24.  Make sure you add a link to this OMG post so others can find the OMG link up from your blog--just copy and paste this link into your post:  

Stories from the Sewing Room One Monthly Goal April Link Up

Take a few minutes to visit others, offer encouragement, and make new friends!

Here I am, writing my weekly post a day early. I opted not to write an additional post last week after publishing the March OMG Finish Link Up. And tomorrow, my usual publishing day, the April OMG will post. So, let's get started with my March PHD report.

Linking with Ms. P's PHD program

I completed item three on my list, the History Center quilt. This one will be donated to the big guild's community quilts program next week. The quilt is large, finishing at 79" x 90". My quilt holders had to do this one sideways and it was still a stretch with two of them.

I completed item eight on my list, Nancy's Bonnie & Camille. I'm not sure what I will do with this one. It's around 51" square.

I also made progress on #23, the Linda J. Hahn class quilt, completing the top. I keep looking at that outer border and thinking it could be a hair thinner. I don't know.

Finally, I completed my new start, the Dresden plate mini quilt. 

That gives me a total of four completed UFOs so far. Not too bad. Eight more finishes feels like a challenge right now though. 

I have done no other sewing. 

I have, however, done a ton of quilting to try to catch up from my spring break time off. First is Ann's quilt, quilted with Frost. 

Next is another of Ann's, quilted with Flirtatious Leaves. The quilting blended really well with this one. 

Then I did a series of table runners for Jan and Brenda. This one is quilted with Fall Foliage.

This one is quilted with Maureen's Oak Leaf.

These two are quilted with Persian.

And this one is quilted with JK Celtic. I decided it would be fastest to baste all their backing fabrics together and only do one load. You may be surprised to know that each of the runners took around 45 minutes to stitch out. I was surprised. 

Next I quilted Deb's with Curlique. I always wonder if you pronounce that design as curly-Q or cur-leek. Anyway, I was pleased with how it turned out. 

Sara's is quilted with Cakewalk.

Barb picked Cassava for this one.

Donna chose Spaceman.

I also had some binding last week. I sewed the binding to the front of all of Ann's quilts. One didn't have quite enough binding included, so she had me sew what there was and leave a bit loose on each end so she could add more.

forgot to take an in-progress picture/this one is complete

And I fully bound Donna's. 

So far this week I have quilted Ginger Snap on Marsali's quilt.

And Cassava on Keetah's quilt. 

Moving into the "everything has changed" topic, Friday and Saturday we were at IU for the "Why Luddy?" event. Friday evening the prospective students spent time in the dorm with current students while the parents listened to a variety of panels. At the end, the parents returned to the dorm and some of us took advantage of the optional dorm tour. Saturday everyone was together for another series of panels. 

We learned that my son was awarded one last scholarship for being a FIRST alumni. We also learned that students living in the designated dorm get to take advantage of a number of additional opportunities. And we learned that our plan to compress the 4+1 BS/MS program into 3+1 is not really possible due to the structure of the class schedule. So all our planning has gone out the window. 

Since my son's scholarships now total more than just tuition, we feel that he would really benefit from taking on some debt for a year to have the additional experiences that living in the dorm for a year would provide. The original plan was to save that money by commuting, but again, he was awarded a lot of scholarship money, way more than we ever dreamed. So I will become an empty-nester much sooner than was planned. Most students stay in the dorm for one year only, so he will likely return home for the rest of the time. However, I suspect he may enjoy being away from us, so I can't make any firm plan for the rest of his college years. I can say that we cannot afford rent in town, so he will have to consider that. 

Besides the unexpected housing change of plan, we found out that the big scholarship (which is awarded to around 3% of incoming freshmen!) requires him to maintain a 3.5 GPA. I am concerned about that. The others are either a 3.2 or a 3.0. I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there. The overall experience of the weekend was very good, just a lot of unexpected change. 

In other news, my car has been out of commission for over a week. I'm hoping it will be back to fully operational by the end of the week. It's like I'm grounded. Not that I usually go many places anyway. I'm usually way too busy with work and chores. But still.

I am behind in my yard work. I need soil to add to my vegetable garden beds and I should have already had some things in the ground. (Broken car = no way to haul soil). I should have also started seeds, but I guess it's not super late. I need to start clearing the junk out of the neglected lower flower garden. I considered hiring someone to weed, but I can't find anyone that doesn't explicitly state that they do chemical removal. I want manual removal. So I guess it's on me. 

Finally, do you remember when I said that the chickens we were having hatched were in limbo since she lost power to her incubator? Four survived. My husband is bringing some home today, but I don't know how many he committed to. Some things are better unasked. 

I'll be back tomorrow with the April OMG link up.

We've made it through another month and it's time to share our progress.

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

Then I went to sew the spire units to the stars and WHAT?! They don't fit. I figured out that I had cut the center strips 1/2" too large, so I had to disassemble one row of spires on each, trim off the excess, and resew everything. 

I got the center unit completed.

Here I am auditioning the skinny and outer borders. The instructions call for 1.5" finished and 3.5" finished, but I went with 1" finished for the skinny border because I thought the other was too heavy. 

Here is my finished top. I'll probably do some light custom quilting on this one. It's around 33" square. 

This week I have two finishes to share. First is one of the projects from my UFO list, what I call the History Center quilt. I purchased this quilt top at the local history center's fundraising yard sale last year. It was quite inexpensive and I couldn't just leave it there. I shared recently that I had quilted it. I finished the binding on Friday so that I could share it at small guild before donating it to the community quilts program at the big guild in a few weeks. 

I wasn't able to get a good picture of the whole thing since the weather didn't cooperate and I didn't have a tall enough quilt holder (quilt measures 79" x 90"). So here is a poor picture of it on the floor. 

My second finish is my first new start of the year. I took a class at the IHQS at the beginning of March and here is my completed project, the Dresden Plate mini. I learned a few things on this one. One, it's really hard to get a nice, smooth center. Two, I had a lot of issues with the background fabrics shadowing through after quilting. I had accounted for it as best as I could with the center circle, however, I did not expect the backgrounds to show through the fans. Three, it looks like I didn't do a very good job of trimming since it is off-center. I have enough fans to make a second one, so some day I might try again with lighter backgrounds. 

I've been working a bit more on the Linda J. Hahn class quilt that I'd selected for this month's OMG. I was removing the papers prior to assembling since the marks show through the fabrics. I guess I pulled a bit too hard on this one. 😄

I'm finding the assembling of the star blocks to be beyond tedious. I have about a week left to get the top assembled before OMG opens up. Not sure I'll make it. 

Beyond that, it's spring break and I've been taking things pretty slow. 

I finished up Dawn's quilt and got the binding attached to the front for her. 

I finished quilting Annie's t-shirt quilt. You can see the Beavis and Butthead backing fabric in this photo.

I started on a group of Ann's quilts. This one is quilted with Cloud Nine Petite, but you really can't see it. I will attach the binding to the fronts of all of her quilts.

Another of Ann's, quilted with Flirtatious. 

Meanwhile, my daughter came for a visit over the weekend and we traveled to Goose Pond to go bird watching. We saw lots of pelicans, lots of ducks, including huge amounts of Coots plus a few others including Mallards and Northern Shovelers. We also saw plenty of crows and Red-winged Blackbirds, Ring-billed Gulls, some Canada geese, some eagles, and a killdeer. The naturalist at the welcome center told us to be on the lookout for Black-Necked Stilts. He said we are at the far northern edge of their territory. We found them! This is the first time we haven't seen any type of cranes. 

Pelicans and sea gulls

Black-necked Stilt

Pair of Stilts

Pelicans

In chicken news, my daughter got the chicken coop cleaned up. We were surprised that Peanut laid an egg the next day. She hasn't laid in months. We found a second egg this week too. I mentioned before that we are having some eggs hatched to hopefully add more hens to the coop. Unfortunately, the lady had a lengthy power outage during the storms we had this weekend and her incubators were down for more than five hours. She isn't sure they will still hatch--they had about two weeks left--so she has started another batch. That will take at least three weeks more. 

Finally, the best news of all arrived this week. My son was invited to apply to the Luddy Scholars program a while back. He wasn't sure he wanted to write an essay and wasn't entirely sure what the program even is. And he had just over 24 hours to get it done from the time of notification to the due date. I insisted he apply. Well, he was selected for the program and awarded a very nice scholarship. We believe that he now has more than enough to cover his tuition. What a relief! And an honor.

I'll be back with the OMG finish link up for this month next Wednesday. Depending on how things go, I may or may not make an additional, regular post next week.

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation and Alycia Quilts.

Nancy's quilt is completed! I'll take it to guild Friday to share. Sorry for the cruddy indoor picture. It's raining again.

This is my first completed quilt of the year. I've also finished two knitting projects.

I've also been making some progress on my Linda J. Hahn quilt from last year's IHQS class. Please tell me this is relatable:

At least I didn't trim off the foundation bit as well. I'm also glad it's just plain white fabric. Anyway, they are all trimmed and the one needs to be repaired.

I've trimmed the history center quilt so that it's one step closer to binding. 

I also have a new start. I took a class with Heather Kojan at IHQS Thursday. She is a fun, laid-back teacher, which suits my taste just fine. I don't need a high-stress, quilt police environment. I was really happy to see a few younger people (<45) in class. I heard there were quite a few young people and kids in the fabric dyeing classes. Anyway, I had enough time to sew all of the Dresden ring together and create the background piece during the three-hour class. 

I opted to sew the center at home where there is better lighting and a sewing machine that I am more familiar with.  

I added an additional layer of interfacing between the center circle and the background to help mask that script fabric behind the light center. As you can see, everything is sewn down and ready for quilting. I think I'm going to trim the background down an inch or two on each side.

I had been planning to start a knitting project, but I've been reading a Patty Lyons book, which I recommend, and now I'm thinking that I need to do the practice exercises in the book before doing something (else) "wrong". 😐

I've quilted just a few things since last week. First is Marsali's quilt, quilted with Baptist Fan.

Next is a quilt Dawn's mom made at some point that she recently found in her things. I'm pretty certain the top fabrics are all poly blends. She picked Lacey Loops for this quilting. I will bind it and she'll have a great memento. 

I've also started working on Annie's t-shirt quilt. I can't totally remember, but I think she said these are her brother-in-law's shirts. Many of them were threadbare, but she patched them up and we are going for it. Also notable on this one is the Beavis and Butthead fabric they provided for the backing (not pictured because I didn't get far enough on it for it to show yet). 🤣 Oh, I'm doing my standard Diagonal Plaid Bias quilting. 

Switching over to the garden, my first daffodils bloomed on March 7 this year. 

They really popped Monday--most of them are blooming now. When we first started the gardens, they all bloomed at different times over the course of a month or so. Over time they seem to have just all started going at once. I love daffodils so here are some more pictures. 

I also keep track of the date the first bloom happens. Here's my data: