I have gotten almost nothing done since last week. I think the cabin fever may be setting in.
I sewed a bit more of the Frolic quilt together. Here you can see what I have done versus how much is left. I'm nearing the half way point. It is just a lot of piecing and a lot of seams.
I finished stitching down all of the appliqués for the Julia Quiltoff class project. The next part of the class is the quilting portion. I bought the kit from Julia and the appliqué shapes already had the fusible applied and the shapes cut out. The kit also included batting, backing, interfacing, and binding fabrics. Really, everything except the thread. You may wonder why I might need more batting. Well, I have not worked with wool batting before, nor have I worked with a double layer of batting, and the kit had supplies for both! I am always interested in learning new skills. You can find the free class on Julia's Facebook page and look for kits in her Etsy store. Just search her name.
I have been really antsy and couldn't focus this week, so I decided to finish stitching together this group of blocks. This is an ongoing project using Moda Cupcake Mix papers and a variety of American Jane fabric lines. With the completion of these, I have two sets done and six or seven more sets to make. I think each set makes around 80 blocks. The blocks are 3.5".
I am happy that my fabric order finally came in so that I can start my friend Denise's quilt along, a few weeks late. Here are my fabrics--Petal Party by Island Batiks. I just need to decide on how I want them to appear in the pattern. It seems so hard to make any decisions lately. You can grab a copy of the pattern here.
No further progress has been made on either the Fig Tree blocks or the Bonnie Hunter Unity. I did finish my second quilt of the year, my Meadowland quilt. I haven't gotten any pictures of the finished quilt yet though.
My vegetable garden seeds are starting to sprout. Of course we had a freeze warning last night, so we had to cover the sprouts and hope for the best. Last week it was in the 80s and I was wearing shorts. This week it is a winter coat.
I have a few more flower pictures to share. Most of the daffodils are done, but there are a few hanging in there. I'm happy my tulips made it. We had a pretty strong storm last week and I was worried they'd get broken off in the wind. There are no surviving tulips at all in the front yard. While the tulips are gone due to critters, we had a lot of other plants that didn't survive the winter due to unknown reasons. Could be animals, could be something else. Not sure if I'll get to replace them this year or not.
I also have this little iris blooming. The flowers are almost right on the ground. I'm a bit stumped. Usually the Siberian iris bloom first, and they are nowhere near bloom stage. This is a regular iris.
One of my pear trees has blossoms, but not the other. I am doubtful we will have any pears this year. We didn't have any last year either, and only three tiny ones that disappeared the first year.
Speaking of pears, I really wanted to can some more. They are quite possibly my most favorite food on earth. Alas, they were not on sale, but pineapples were. So this week it was time to can some pineapple. It occurred to me on Monday that I hadn't checked whether I had lids for the jars. I had just enough for my project. No more canning for me until we can find lids reasonably somewhere. (I found some on Amazon for $12/package. They usually are $4/package.)
I also decided to try to root the three pineapple tops from the canned pineapples. Here they are in the drying out stage before I start the rooting stage. I am using the Empress of Dirt method this time. If any of these root, maybe I'll get another home-grown pineapple in five or six more years!
Have you grown any food from kitchen scraps before?
Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.
Last week I decided that since I have finished everything that had a firm deadline, I'd start on the antique blocks. I pressed each of them and was very discouraged. They were more stained than I thought, they were not as flat as I'd hoped and will require disassembly and reassembly to fix, and, most discouraging of all, when the iron hit them they smelled so bad that I felt more than a bit sick.
I set them aside while I considered what to do.
In the meantime, I thought that maybe I'd finally finish a top I made years ago. I'd found some matching fabric that I could use for backing and binding on an Instagram de-stash, so I figured that was a sign. I gave the top a good press and noticed that it was really wavy and bumpy and even had a bit of a curve to it. Big old sigh. I will be ripping it apart and reassembling it using proper measurement techniques so that it will be closer to flat.
Okay. Now what? I have stinky, wavy antique blocks, a wavy quilt top, and a lot of disappointment and disgust.
My friend invited me over for a sew day, so I thought this would be a perfect time to finish my dinosaur napkins. You may recall I mentioned a while back that we didn't have any more than four of any napkins except a set of Valentine's Day ones and I'd found this cute dinosaur fabric that I thought would be great. I had all eight cut, but the thought of doing all the ironing to prepare them wasn't appealing. It seemed like a great take along project though, so that's what I did. It was nice to counteract the tedium of all the ironing with being able to have a nice chat. And now I have a set of eight guest-ready napkins.
If you're wondering what my process is, it's to cut as large of squares as I can get from my fabric, which usually works out to 17-18". Then I press up a 1/2" hem all the way around. Next I fold in the raw edges so that I'm left with an approximate 1/4" hem. I then just topstitch down the hem and voila!
I'd also packed an ongoing project to work on, but the napkins took longer than I expected (don't things always?) and my day was cut a bit short since my husband sold our car while he was at work and had no way to get home! For the time being we are back to two cars and 2.5 drivers.
The ongoing project is making a quilt using a bunch of Cupcake Mix Recipe 3 papers and American Jane charm packs. I'd been collecting them for a while and this seemed like a good idea since all the fabrics from the various lines work well together. I'd had the first pack (her Bread and Butter line) sewn and cut for a while, but hadn't pressed them (since April or May, maybe?? Nope, March.) So I pulled out these to work on. I have my guild retreat next weekend and this is the project I'm planning to work on there as well. I'm using Kona Snow with them and will need to cut a bunch of 5" squares.
Well, as I'm pressing these I am seriously doubting my sanity. These things are tiny! And there will be a lot of paper to remove! Right now I am leaning toward making the Jacob's ladder version of the blocks, which appear to finish at 2.5". What!?!?!?!?!
Anyway, I found this quilt, with the pattern available for free here, as a basic outline of what I will do with my blocks. Though at this size it may be years before I get all of them sewn. This image is a screen shot of the quilt I'm using as inspiration.
Okay, so back to the antique blocks. I was Googling what to do with them to get rid of the smell. I found a few different products to try and then realized that I had one of them already. I figured that since I have something in hand it would be worth a shot. I used a small tote, four gallons of water, and 12 tablespoons of the Vintage Textile Soak.
The water started turning a gross yellowish color right away and the smell was not good either. The fabrics themselves had dark spots on them that I figured were from age. They didn't really looks like stains per se. Some of the backing fabric, which does appear to be from feed sacks, has black spots. I'm not sure if this is mildew, mold, or something else. The spots are very dark black and have a tar-like look.
Okay, so after the first several hours the water was looking pretty nasty. When I dumped it out to start fresh again it almost felt oily. The blocks definitely looked a lot brighter, but they still smelled terrible.
I left them soaking in the Vintage Textile Soak another 24 hours. Thankfully, none of the colors bled, though I found one that looked a lot lighter than I remembered. However, the black spots were still on the backings and the blocks still smelled pretty bad. Here you can see a few of the black spots. The giant white circle in the second picture is a reflection of the light above.
I drained the water, rinsed the blocks, added fresh water, and added vinegar and have left them for another 24 hours. I haven't checked them yet to see how that turned out.
So the question is, what is the black substance on the feed sack backings? And how should I proceed? If they still smell terrible I'm not sure that I should continue since I'd have to handle them quite a bit. And if the black stuff is mold or mildew, that's certainly not healthy to work with. Any thoughts?
Linking with For the love of geese (hey, look, my mini from last week is featured!) and My Quilt Infatuation.
