Showing posts with label For the love of geese. Show all posts

March OMG

March!  Hard to believe it's a year since the world kinda stopped.  Other than two trips to Riley last July, I have not been further than 20 miles from my house in the last year.  I go weeks at a time without even leaving my neighborhood (my husband does most of the grocery shopping).

My goal for March is to finish the remaining individual units for the borders for my For the Love of Geese quilt.  If I get really ambitious, I'll maybe have time to sew them together.  But for now, I will settle for just getting the units made.  There are 40 individual units to be made and I currently have 12 done.

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal March Link-up

I have been really busy quilting lately.  Here is my next project--an antique quilt that will be receiving hand-guided, light custom quilting. The owners estimate it to be 50 years old.  I think the fabric looks a bit older than that, but I don't really know. It's entirely hand-pieced.

Here are sneak peeks of a few recently quilted projects. This first one is my Morewood Mystery quilt, quilted with Overlapping Crop Circles.  This is next up in the binding category.

These next two are Sonja's quilts.  The Irish Chain is quilted with Marmalade and the Flying Geese, Good Vibrations.

This is Odie's Morewood Mystery, quilted with Eddy.

I have lots more to share soon.  Lots.  Watch Instagram for more photos. It might take me forever to get them posted, but they'll make it there eventually.

I finished binding my National Parks wall hanging.  I generally work on binding in the evenings and I've been too worn out by that point in the day most evenings lately, so it took me about a month to bind. This is my fourth finish of the year.  I've only finished small things, but at least I've finished something.

                                

This is a panel from Riley Blake and I was really happy that it was not distorted. (I've purchased panels in the past that were really crooked/off grain.)  I chose Malachite for the quilting and I love how it gives the impression of a topographical map.


Something else I accomplished this week that I am proud of, but should have happened much, much sooner, is that I shipped 11 quilts I made over the past two years to Quilts for Kids. I wish I would have taken a picture of the stack of them before I shipped, but I forgot.

Oh, I can finally share a project I worked on last fall.  This quilt is made from the Charming Pirouette pattern from Yellow Umbrella Quilts.  I made my version using pinks and greens from my stash.  I added in a white fabric printed with little bows for my background and a Christopher Thompson Blossom print for the backing.



There are signs of spring all around us.  I can't wait.  Spring is my favorite.  The skies were so blue yesterday.  I took this picture while out on a walk.
Finally, I leave you with an image of my sewing room that I call "detritus."
If you need me, I'll be quilting.  If you can arrange for more hours in a day, send some my way.  :)




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Borders

I haven't made much progress sewing-wise.  My time this past week has been filled with painting and paperwork and correspondence. 

I have two coats of paint on approximately half of the basement walls.  I was worried when I started painting because the paint looked peach.  This could be because my only lighting was a halogen work light, but it made me nervous.  The paint dried into a nice, boring beige, so I can live with it.  Some day when there's lighting installed I'll try to remember to share photos.

I have successfully filled out the FAFSA within the deadline.  My taxes are getting much closer to completion.

Now that the days are getting longer and sunnier, we are starting to generate a lot more solar energy again. The snow is melting and many of the trees have buds.  Soon I will need to clean out last year's debris from the flower beds. I don't enjoy that part, but I do enjoy the flowers.  Spring is my favorite.

I did start work on the outside borders of my For the Love of Geese quilt.  As you may recall, these are the fabrics I decided on.

I will need to make 40 units to complete the borders.  I have six done so far.  Here is a little photo progression from when I was working on them the other day.









I'll be busy quilting this week and will share when I can.  I'll have a wide variety of beauties to share eventually, including a hand-pieced antique quilt.  :)

Have a wonderful week, and thanks for stopping by.

Linking with For the Love of Geese and My Quilt Infatuation.



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October OMG Met

My goal for October was to get at least 1/4 of the center of my For the love of geese quilt assembled.  I'm happy to say that I got 5/8 of the center sewn.  It went from this:

To this:




                Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal - October Finish Link-up

As a reminder, this pattern is by Denise at For the love of geese and you can buy this pattern here. I recommend this pattern because it is not boring to sew, looks amazing, and goes together nicely.

My brain struggles with flipping the diagrams and relating them to the pieces, so it took me a while to get into the rhythm of assembly.  Quality time was spent with the seam ripper.  😬 I was really relieved when I realized that I had inadvertently switched the orientations and that my color layout really would work as planned!  I'm looking forward to getting the last few sewn and then moving on to piecing the borders.

I finished the secret project from last week.  Though it really tried my patience, it came out really cute.  I should be able to share it soon.


I finished binding my larger Water Drop quilt.  It's another gloomy day here in south central Indiana, so I will wait to get a better picture, but here's a teaser for now.


Someone in the house had a birthday last week and I spent literally all day making the foods they requested since due to current conditions we did not have access to some of the things I would normally purchase.  My husband helped me make Chicken Kiev from scratch.  It was good, but it would have been so much easier if we could have gotten the frozen, processed version.  I know, I know.  Sometimes we eat really heavily processed stuff and it is good.  

I made a German chocolate cake from a mix and had to do the frosting from scratch since we couldn't find any anywhere.  We also struggled to find sweetened coconut.  I thought I was going to have to sweeten some myself, but luckily we found some at the last minute.  Side note--I didn't realized that sweetened coconut is very much an American thing.  The homemade version of the frosting is definitely better than the canned stuff and is worth the effort.  I also made a small batch of chocolate buttercream.  Here's my final product.

We brought in and cleaned the hummingbird and oriole feeders since they are gone for the year.  I also saw a Junco, which are only here in the winter months. 😒  My husband filled the seed and suet feeders and we immediately had tons of birds.  Probably should have gotten to that chore a bit sooner.  I noticed we had a flock of small birds that I wasn't familiar with.  I got out the camera and started taking pictures to help me identify the birds.  I finally determined (and had verified by my dad's bird guru friend) that they were Pine Siskins.  According to my bird book, we are in their winter range, but I don't recall ever seeing them before, and certainly not in a large flock.  So that was cool.  I also took a lot of awkward nature photos!  LOL.  I will share one so you can see what they look like.  There's also a goldfinch on the feeder with them.

I met with one of my clients to pick up some quilts in the JoAnn parking lot yesterday and then went into JoAnn.  I have rarely been shopping since March.  I've been in a few places briefly where, although they have "Masks Required" signs, the employees are not wearing masks or only if they are near a shopper.  I have a massive problem with this and will not return to those places.  The JoAnn in town is nice because the few times I have been there--three times since March--every employee is wearing a mask at all times and 99.9 percent of the shoppers are too.  Plus, there haven't been many shoppers in the store at all--usually under five.  It helps if you go right after they open.

Anyway, I hadn't been shopping for anything besides groceries and household needs for so long and I went a bit crazy with buying completely frivolous things. I got a bunch of Harry Potter fabrics, some Dwight fabric, and this book of beautiful knit projects.  I wish I had the skill to make them.  I can only knit very basic things like rectangles or really beginner-level hats.  Good thing I picked up those quilts, because I think I already spent the profits! 😳  I did a lot of damage in 15 minutes, but I sure had fun.

I've been working on another of Charlene's quilts.  She has sure given me some beauties to work on recently.  Once I get the binding sewn down, this project will be complete and I will be on to the next one:  a custom job on a Fandango quilt.

Just a few more things before I go--my husband harvested my compost tomatoes.  They are about the size of cherry tomatoes.  I don't care for cherry tomatoes, so I know that's not what they grew from.  They don't look like Romas either, so maybe they were the "tomatoes on the vine" that the grocery store sells?

I got a newsletter from one of the guilds I belong to and I was totally surprised that one of my quilts from Show and Tell (via Zoom, you submit pictures ahead of time) was featured right under the header!  My name was attached to the picture, but I couldn't fit it all in the screenshot.
And finally, another sunset picture for you.  My son took this with my phone while we were on our nightly walk.


Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

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Food & Fabric Prep

I had big plans for sewing.  Life has had other plans.  First, it seems like everything has ripened at once in the garden.  I made another seven jars of sweet relish and four of pickled banana peppers.  I made another batch of eight containers of freezer pickles as well, but for once did not photograph them.
Then the tomatoes finally started ripening.  I am the only one in my house who eats raw tomatoes (or cooked, unless they are well-disguised in sauce form) and we only have one plant, but it has tons of tomatoes growing on it. We had some more banana peppers ripen as well, so we thought we'd try making Zesty Salsa from the Ball Guide to Preserving book.  Well, even though we'd decided on a half-batch, our peppers were not enough.  Plus we needed jalapeños and more onions. Off to the grocery store we went.

 The grocery store only had Hungarian wax peppers, not banana peppers.  Way too hot. I weighed out what we needed for jalapeños using the scale in the produce department.  Got to the check out, found out we had double what we needed.  Found a farmer's market right at closing time and got fresh banana peppers. Went home, started cutting everything.  I learned the hard way why you should wear gloves when handling jalapeños.  About the time I was ready to cook the salsa my hands were starting to burn.  
By the time I was done with the canning process my hands were starting to be quite painful.  I washed with hot water and soap several times, took off my rings, washed some more.  I made a baking soda paste and that helped a little but was really messy. I kept changing that out, but the pain kept growing.  My husband suggested pouring nail polish remover on my hands since that cuts oil.  It worked fairly well, but I still had moments where my hands would feel really hot and numb.  24 hours later it finally subsided.  Lesson learned.  Here's the finished salsa.  The family tells me it's good, but I'm a bit scared to try it.  I can't handle the heat!
One more food thing before I move on to sewing.  I struggle with making yeast bread not made in the bread machine.  I found a recipe for brioche bread that was very detailed and my daughter and I made these loaves.  They turned out!  They were very tasty!  It only took two days, six eggs, and two sticks of butter! 😃

Okay, now on to the sewing.  My daughter and I are participating in Maeberry Square's Water Drop QAL.  I'm also offering 15% off edge-to-edge quilting of Water Drop quilts through the end of November.  We both decided to go with Kona solids. I got the bright idea to cut up my Kona card so we could choose colors more easily.  I neglected to have a plan for what to do with the 365 little chips after I was done cutting.  Oops. Luckily I had this lovely leather tray to store them in temporarily.
Here are our selections with the cover of the pattern.
Here are the fabrics in real life.  I chose Celestial, Cyan, and Cypress with a white background.  K chose Ferndale, Kale, and Emerald with Noble Purple for the background.  We have a fun edge-to-edge pattern selected for her quilting already.  I'm not sure what I'll use on mine.  
K is starting college next week, so we got started on her sewing this week.  She brought her machine to the sewing room so I had company down there.
Meanwhile, I've been working on more pieces of my For the Love of Geese pattern.  I ran a bit short on the color I am using for the second round since I'd already used it in one of the outer rings.  Luckily I found more (it seems to be from an older line?) and it came yesterday.  Crisis averted!
I also did all the cutting for the Morewood Mystery quilt.  I put in a new blade before starting and it was so fast and easy to cut everything.  Why do I always wait way too long to replace the blade??
I was planning to sew all day Sunday.  Instead I went and bought a new washer so that I could continue with my laundry.  The old one made it about eight years.  I was trying to stretch out getting a new one a little while longer, but it wasn't in the cards.  I could handle things having rust on them, but I draw the line at things coming out still dirty.  So far, so good on this one. 
Oh, and I decided it would be nice to slide all the little Kona chips into sleeves so they are easy to see.  I found these coin protector pages on Amazon that I'm going to use.
Let's hope this next week is a little less eventful.

 Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.
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August Goal

My August goal is to finish at least one more round of my For the love of geese quilt.
Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal August Link-up

I will also do all the cutting for the Morewood Mystery quilt.  You can still join in the QAL. Cheryl writes great patterns, there is a very active Facebook community, and best of all, it is free!

 Another project I will work on during August and September is Maeberry Square's Water Drop pattern.  This is a great project to join in on if you want to perfect your half-square triangle game and/or try making 32 HST at a time.  The pattern releases tomorrow!  There will be a QAL starting next week as well.  Sign-ups start tomorrow.  

 There's a few behind the scenes projects too. Meanwhile, I'll still be quilting as much as possible. I'm really hoping my new robotics shows up SOON. I've been watching all the training classes in preparation.  

 Last week I got to quilt Annie's Unity quilt.  As you may recall, the Unity quilt was a quilt along hosted by Bonnie Hunter earlier this year.  Annie and I started at the same time.  She got hers done.  I stalled after the central unit--aka the first block!  Anyway, check out this beauty!  She had me quilt it with Knit One, Purl Two, and it is just beautiful.
My friend had a birthday last week. I made her an ultra-tiny mini, a 6" mini, and included a wooden ruler box and a seam presser my husband made, a charm pack, Wonder Clips, and threw in some food goodies as well. It was so much fun to put together a surprise and sneak it onto her porch, though I wish in-person get-togethers were an option. 
I have my closet mostly under control now.  There's a lot of large bins I need to go through, but all the quilting fabrics are sorted by color and/or projects. The kids and I sorted my scraps into baskets by color. Based on what was there, I use shades of blues and whites the most. We also sorted all the batting scraps into totes by our best guess at type (not pictured, but stacked up on the right side of the closet).  I need to make an effort to seam and use them on smaller projects.
Switching gears, we've had several smaller green bean harvests.  We had a sizable one the other night and I thought this picture was quite attractive.  My husband thinks it's weird that I take pictures of food from our garden. I think the veggie pictures are pretty. 
Finally, in the weird category, I happened to look out the window at just the right time to see this crazy chipmunk.  Chipmunks have been wreaking havoc in the flower gardens this year and now this one has discovered the oriole feeder.


Next week I'll be discussing scrap management, so be sure to stop by and see some of the crazy things I've tried.

 Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

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