Stories from the Sewing Room

As you may recall, my sewing machine was out for a cleaning for the past few weeks. I was using my daughter's machine for the past week and made some pretty good progress on my For the Love of Geese quilt.  I'm only one seam away from completing the top.  I didn't think I'd be able get to this point or else this project would have been my OMG for this month.  Side note: my beloved sewing machine came back home on Monday.

Meanwhile, I have finished my official April OMG ahead of schedule! This is my completed Morewood Mystery quilt.

Meadow Mist Designs Favorite Finish

Here are the other Morewood quilts I have quilted so far. This first one is Connie's.

I've also been quilting.  Here's a very small sneak peak of one that I completed.  I used the Sweep design.

It's hard to believe we are snow-covered this morning (see finished quilt pic above).  The tulips in my window well were starting to open up yesterday.

I'm taking my daughter to get her second vaccination tomorrow.  That will be 3/4 of us protected.  Can't wait til my son is eligible too.  Then we may finally be able to reunite with family.  It's been a long, long time. Keep wearing those pesky masks (I hate them, but I wear them to protect others), and get the shot when you are eligible.  

Finally, if you are a Blogger user, you are probably aware that they are discontinuing the Feedburner follow by email service.  Ugh.  If you get emails to notify you when I have posted, you won't soon (June/July).  I will also miss this as a reader, because I need those email notices to remind me to go visit. 

I am unsure what to offer as an alternative. Bonnie Hunter is going to use Bloglovin'.  I haven't had great experiences with that service as a reader of blogs, so I hesitate to offer it. I've heard of a few other services, but have zero experience with them.  If you know of something that functions like the Feedburner service, please comment or email.  I'm feeling a bit desperate.  Let's help each other stay connected.

Linking with For the Love of Geese, My Quilt Infatuation, TGIFF at mmm quilts, and Alycia Quilts.

I've been really busy since last week.  I have quilted three and bound two quilts for others.  

Here are a few sneak peeks of Carol's king-size quilt, quilted with Basic Swirl. This quilt is really cool because it is reversible!

Also, I didn't know quilts could do this!  😆

I quilted and bound two quilts for Charlene.  Both are quilted with Frost.  I've quilted Frost onto four quilts in the past month.  Here are a few in-progress shots.

I made my Morewood Mystery units for this month.

I made a ton of HST for the Bonnie Hunter mystery.  

I cut this week's clue for Bonnie Hunter, but haven't gotten a chance to sew it yet.

 

I also quilted the little deer pillow I shared last week. I used the Modern Drift E2E pattern.  I made an overlapping backing and then added binding.  I'm super happy with how this turned out.

Prior to being stuffed with a pillow, the patterns somehow lined up nearly exactly.  Now, not so much!

I am on track to complete the first week of Bonnie Hunter's new mystery, Grassy Creek, on time. Something I like about her mysteries, besides using up a crap ton of fabric, is that she teaches with each step.  I think there were four different methods to accomplish the same thing presented in the first clue.  I chose the method I learned from Frolic, which isn't something I would normally think to do, but yields really accurate results for me.

My IntelliQuilter is supposed to be delivered this week, though I haven't yet received a tracking number and there's not much left of the week, so I've been trying to finish up lots of stuff so that I can devote all my time to quilting once it shows up.

I have both halves of my Water Drop quilt for the QAL finished.  The top half assembly was last Thursday's task and the bottom half will be this Thursday's task.  Shh...don't tell, but I have the whole top completed!

My daughter has been trying to steal a few minutes here and there in between class work.  She has the rows for the top all assembled and partially sewn together.  She has not made any of the bottom half of the quilt yet.

The Morewood Mystery clue for September came out last Thursday.  I had mine sewn and cut before Cheryl did the FB live on Friday, but I did go back and watch it and learned a new trick to use in the future.

I'm making several Quilts for Kids tops to practice with the IQ.  I got one top done and started on the blocks for a second, but I have spent a lot of time helping my kids with school work this week--I have one starting college and one in middle school.  Both are online this semester.  Our experiences have been positive. I've heard that many are struggling with the online format. Around 70% of the students in our district chose to return to in-person schooling on Tuesday despite a local 15% positivity rate, but we are committed to being home and staying safe for the semester.  I am fortunate to have the choice of staying home and also fortunate that we are able to help our kids with their work if necessary.  And maybe the 30% of the kids staying home are freeing up a little more space for distancing in the classrooms for those who can't or won't stay home.  

I had another large batch of tomatoes ripen all at once.  My husband tried making spaghetti sauce from scratch last time we had a large batch.  It was okay, but not like a normal sauce.  I found a recipe that showed the lazy way to cook the tomatoes.  I had mixed success.  Many of my tomatoes didn't really cook down.  Maybe I could have cooked them longer, or maybe whatever variety we are growing wasn't the ideal.  I was left with a mix of mostly intact tomato halves and some that looked like canned tomato sauce--really thin and runny.

I doctored it by pulsing the whole chunks in the food processor, straining what I could to remove as many seeds as possible, and then adding a can of tomato paste to it.  It ended up looking like jarred pasta sauce.  It could have been more seasoned, but it was edible, so....

I also made this cheddar zucchini bread twice.  I don't love zucchini, so we bought some at the grocery store.  I used a box grater to shred the zucchini and the bread came out great!  Oh, we also purchased the chives since ours didn't grow this year.

We have found one monarch chrysalis in our yard.  We have lots of caterpillars now, but the only other chrysalis we found got eaten by a worm.

We also found that we are growing a tomato plant out of our compost bin.  And it has lots of tomatoes growing on it!  We aren't great at composting and we tend to feed a lot of animals in our yard from the bin, but the tomato grew into the enclosed vegetable garden.

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