Stories from the Sewing Room

After visiting with family in Michigan for several days, I'm taking this week off. I decided to alternate between sewing and doing chores.  Sew a little, clean/sort a little. I'll start with sewing since that's usually what people want to see. I have been very slowly plugging away at the test quilt I'm working on, but can't show that yet. I also cut out clue two for the Bonnie Hunter mystery. Here it is, cut and ready to sew.

I started sewing yesterday afternoon and got half of the units done. I have to admit that I found these mind-numbingly boring. That's why only half of them are done. I guess I'd rather sort through boxes and put things away than sew. 🤷🏻‍♀️ I like how they looked in progress.

Here's the first half of the units. As always, visit the Quiltville blog to get your own copy of the instructions. Sorry for the kinda weird picture. I forgot and took the picture on my cutting mat, so had to remove the background.

I unloaded boxes of books into the newly finished bookcases. I'm pretty certain most of the books have been packed up for 10-15 years due to moving a lot and then having the basement under construction. At some point I had stashed some memorabilia from my grandparents in one of the boxes. There are a lot of postcards, some addressed to my grandma and some blank, with the blank ones all being tourist-type cards of landmarks or scenery in various locations around the US. Here's a selection (you know I had to include the flamingo one!) of the postcards. I'm guessing the ones with the kids on them are from the 1920s.

There were also some pictures of my grandpa during WWII, a mostly unused ration book, forms indicating how much pay my grandma would receive while Grandpa was away, and other war-related miscellany. I have no idea how I ended up with this collection of things, but I sure did enjoy looking through them. Here are some pictures of Grandpa along with a rupee that was in the things. I believe he was stationed in India and China.

Many of my fellow bloggers are recapping their years, so I will join in and add my top five posts of the year.

1. The post with the most views is this one from August.

2. The post that brought back happy memories for me is this one from April.

3. Something I am proud of.

4. This post from May because my garden looked really good.

5. This post from November that deserved more views than it got.

I've had a bit of a strange week. I feel like I'm saying that a lot lately. ha.

Friday night my husband and son were at a robotics scrimmage, so I forced my daughter to go on my evening walk with me. I noticed a strange, light orange, vertical line in the sky that looked like airplane exhaust, but it was pitch black out. We were looking at it, and suddenly it became a UFO! It was a line of very bright lights that was fairly slow moving. There was an airplane flying near it and the airplane looked like a speck in comparison. It was so eerie. My daughter thought to pull out her phone and video it. It hovered and then slowly faded away. We wondered what it could be. Our best guesses were something to do with the military or some drones. What do you think it could be? {Answer at the bottom of the post.}

I got a few more quilts completed. The first one is Jodie's Charley Harper quilt, quilted with Bora Bora. I also bound this one.

Next up is Connie's beauty, quilted with In the Swirls (I think this is my most popular design of the year?). This one also was bound by me.

Then I quilted an absolutely huge quilt for Dee. It barely fit on my frame. I'm not sure I will quilt something that large again as I really struggled with having enough space to quilt to the edges.

Finally, this antique one belongs to Beth's family. I quilted it with Diamond Loops and I still need to bind it.

I also took some time to myself and completed the first clue for the Bonnie Hunter mystery. It may be the only time I'm up to date on this one the whole time. 😕

And I took a step towards finishing my OMG for the month. I have block two of #Trending finished. It's a little wonky, but I will make it work. 

We had nice weather Saturday, so we got the flower gardens cleaned up. I do need to pull out more of the 🤬 spearmint since I abandoned my weeding part way through the summer when I got super busy with the client quilting, but most of the rest is ready for winter--just a few more weeds to pull out of the big garden. I got chased away by a mouse running amok.

I'm planning to finish up my last few client quilts of the year over the next week, and then I'm on vacation the rest of the year! I'm hoping to get caught up on more of my UFOs. Have I mentioned that my small guild is having a UFO challenge in the new year? We all know I have plenty of contenders for this challenge. (See my list of UFOs in the tabs at the top of my blog. I called them WIPs).

Oh, I almost forgot. Our UFO sighting was actually the SpaceX Starlink satellite. You can use this tracker to see when it will be visible over your area. It's worth seeing. We were able to see it again on Saturday night with the whole family, though it was definitely not as bright the second night. It looks like this is by design, based on the info on the tracker website.

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation, For the Love of Geese, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and TGIFF.

What should December's goal be? So many choices! My list looks like this:

1. Get caught up on Flower Patch SAL--had to fix block four, need to sew block six to get current. You'll see in this picture that block four is now looking correct. :)

2. Get caught up on #Trending--need to sew October, November, and December's blocks.

3. Get caught up on Macaron Mystery--at this point, it's only November's clue, but December's comes out tomorrow.

4. Work on Rhododendron Trail--haven't done anything besides choose the fabric. I would love to stay current on this one. I'm just not sure it's feasible with my quilting schedule and other commitments.

5. Sew test quilt--Fabrics are selected, but I need to cut and sew the entire thing. This will be happening this month, but it will not be December's goal since I can't actually share any pictures of it until the pattern is released.

6. Sew together blocks from this year's SCQG BOM. This is a program I ran for my guild mates in 2021. The final block got sent out to members today. I had instructions for 13 blocks and will be using 12 of them in this version.

7. Sew together the Grassy Creek top that is currently taking up the entire design wall.

8. I would love to sew a shirt for myself. I've had piles of fabric waiting for several years now and I just never get it done (because I find fitting difficult and intimidating).

My official goal is going to be option number two: get caught up on #Trending. I am hoping to get much more than that done because I am planning to take off most of this month! I have several more quilts to finish for people and once I finish those, it's vacation time! I have so many things to catch up on, sewing and otherwise.

                    Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal December Link-up

Now that the basement is finished (minus one slider door, which finally got delivered Monday after waiting for months), I need to go through the bedroom where we piled all the stuff, sort through it, put away what I'm keeping, and donate or sell the rest. 

The basement has been a very long project, five or six years maybe? The carpet got installed a month or so ago, but we had to have the installer back to fix the seams since most of them were very visible. He came a week ago Tuesday and it's looking much better now. I asked my son to vacuum since there were lots of little carpet strands everywhere. I about died when I saw the marks from his vacuuming job. Maybe you can see if you look closely?

I did a work on a few quilts over the past week. I quilted another of Toni's memory quilts. Poor lady, she's gotta be tired of making these. She told me she has one more.

And I did custom quilting on three tree skirts. On the first one, I did cross hatch in all the squares and feathers on the star points. I even got fancy and used three different thread colors.

On the other two, they requested that I only stitch in the navy star points. I felt like it needed a bit more to hold everything together, so I learned how to use the Intelliquilter to stitch in the ditch. The thread looks white in my pictures, but it is actually Glide Mercury, which is a silver color.

Now for some more personal things. I am very sensitive to artificial smells and am allergic to dogs and have apparently become allergic to cats in my middle age. Despite my efforts, sometimes I receive quilts with strong fragrances or an excessive amount of pet hair. My solution has been to have my husband shake out the hairy quilts outside, open my window, and/or wear a mask while quilting. Then I vacuum my leaders and Swiffer and mop my floor to suck up hair and dander. If my leaders smell, I have been spritzing them with this Lysol Fabric Mist to knock down the scents. You can see that my bottle is almost gone and it appears they don't make this product anymore. Do you have a suggestion for a fragrance free fabric mist that does the same thing?

My husband gifted me this lovely HEPA air purifier over the weekend and it has made such a huge difference in the air quality in my sewing room. The difference was noticeable to me within 24 hours. I often get congested or get a sore throat while quilting, due to dust in the air or sometimes the scents or allergens. My symptoms have nearly disappeared since plugging it in. We hit Cyber Monday and ordered a few more for upstairs.

We were able to get our booster shots over the weekend. The only symptoms I had after the first two were a little dizziness, fatigue, and minor body aches. This time, I had a horrible headache the first day. It quickly went away once I broke down and took Tylenol near bed time. My arm was sore near the injection site and I kinda looked like I had some Hulk muscles due to a bit of swelling (kinda enjoyed that, need to make more time to get back into my exercise routine) Monday. By Monday evening, my armpit swelled up and became very tender. It's quite annoying because I can't comfortably put my arm against my body. That being said, getting the booster shot is exactly the right thing to do and the benefits are worth the minor pain/inconvenience (and looking like I'm growing a third boob in my armpit). Please do your part to help end this pandemic. So many lives have been needlessly lost. Get vaccinated, and if you still refuse, then at least have the decency to mask up. Masking reduces your risk 53% according to newly released studies. Please protect those around you. You never know what health issues those around you may have. Save a life. I worry every time my parents go out because vaccination rates and masking are very low where they live. They are celebrating their 50th anniversary this month. Also, my mother would probably be mortified if she read my blog and saw this! 😄

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

Hello! I hope you are doing fine on this holiday week. Things have been weird and hectic around here. That's starting to be my normal mode. Not sure how I feel about that.

I've finished several more quilts. I had several very large quilts that I needed to either bind or partially bind, so it won't look like I've accomplished much even though I worked every single day this past week/weekend.

Here's Sharon's Irish Chain quilt, quilted with Two Simple.

Next, Amber's Periwinkle Christmas quilt with hand-guided loopy meander.

And Sara's memory quilt, quilted with String of Triangles. Photos blurred to protect privacy. 😀

I've been sewing late and early to try to catch up on Denise's Flower Patch SAL. Hence all the poorly lit pictures. The link up for blocks 4 and 5 is open today.

Oops. This doesn't look right. Time to selectively seam rip.

Here is my completed block 4. My eyes are telling me this isn't quite right. 🤔

Oh, darn it! Now I see what I did wrong. Well, I'm going to link up anyway and then go back and fix it after work today.

I am quite proud of my fabric placement on my cardinal blocks. 

Side note: Denise told me she uses newsprint for paper piecing. I couldn't find any in stock locally. Bonnie Hunter has some linked on her website and I bought her recommendation. (Amazon, despite their many failings, is just so convenient. Sometimes I feel like I shouldn't support them, but I like that things just come right to me and I don't have to venture in public or take time out of my day to go track things down. Side note: when making my holiday work schedule for quilting, I neglected to leave myself time to get a haircut. Ugh.) So, the paper is fantastic. It tears away so easily. I was using copy paper prior to purchasing the newsprint. The newsprint is so much better! My only complaint is that you can't see through it for alignment. You could solve this easily enough by working near a window or using an inexpensive light box. 

Denise said we could sew together row one now, but I may wait. I'm contemplating removing the solid light blue blocks from the cardinals and inserting some more flying geese. I'll wait to see how more of the quilt looks before deciding.

Meanwhile, I haven't made any additional progress on Grassy Creek and Rhododendron Trail starts Friday! Here's the state of my Grassy Creek.

I'm hoping to sneak in some sewing time tomorrow to move this closer to a finish.

Here are my final fabric selections, minus the aqua, for Rhododendron Trail. I'm a little concerned that a couple of my pinks are too close to the "garnet", but I can always leave those out or add more of the darker "garnet" fabric to make up the difference if I remove the lightest one.