Stories from the Sewing Room

I finally got a break from all the binding and got some of my own sewing done! 

I made the backing for Forever Neverland. I cut and applied the borders correctly for the quilt top. I got fancy and tried to match the print as best I could across the top and bottom borders.

It's ready to quilt!

I sewed more of the stitch-and-flip corners on the race car quilt blocks. 

I made good progress on Nancy's quilt, though all those foundations are going to take forever to trim. I have trimmed eight of 40 pieces so far. 

Meanwhile, I have spent a number of hours trying to figure out why I can no longer email people with Yahoo email addresses from first my blog domain and now my business domain. Ugh. No great resolution, but hopefully I can figure out something soon, especially for my business, where it's pretty critical. 

I've quilted a few things since last week. I love the variety of quilts that come through my door. 

First is Carol's, quilted with Cassava.

I quilted Radio Waves on Shelly's quilt.

Marsali picked 60s Mod Butterfly.

I had a great moment when I advanced the quilt and saw that the backing and the quilt top centers matched up perfectly. {She had requested I center the middle piece of fabric she used in her backing as closely as possible and I nailed it.}

I started quilting Diagonal Plaid Bias on Kayle's quilt. 

I quilted Paw Prints on Jae's quilt. 

Moving over to the rest of my life, the perimeter of our house has now been treated for termites. The porch is formed and ready for cement. Because the volume of cement for the porch isn't enough for a cement truck, my husband has been prepping a covered parking spot on the end of the barn as well. Hopefully those two together should be enough. 

We had a bit of a surprise when my husband fed the chickens the other day. 

Apparently none of us had checked for eggs in a week or so (or maybe four days if they both laid). 😳 I really thought I had checked, because I usually do when it's my turn to feed them, but I guess not. They haven't laid since then. LOL.

The garden is still hanging in there. I was sad to discover that all the cucumbers I harvested recently are inedible--super bitter. I think it's due to the crazy water fluctuations, but maybe the soil quality too. I have a ton of tomatoes; the picture shows only a fraction. The carrot tops were looking pretty raggedy, so I grabbed a couple and pulled out little carrots! This is the first time I've successfully grown them. I was super excited about that. 😄

We have a pumpkin that is growing up in the air. This picture isn't the greatest, but you can kind of tell. My husband put a block of fence post under it to support it. 

Here's a few other pictures I took the other day. 

Beyond that, my eye doctor and I have settled on a contact lens combo that is a good compromise to real the issues I was having. Not great, but good. I've been there three times in three and a half weeks. I still have the follow-up foot appointment next week. 

My son's developed an open bite over the last year, so it looks like we might have to do another round of orthodontic treatment. The poor kid already had braces for like seven years and his teeth are still totally straight and he wears his retainers as directed. We are switching providers since we weren't happy with the one who took over his original orthodontist's practice after he retired. I felt comfortable with the first place I called other than potential cost I was quoted was shocking. I'm debating calling a second as well. None of us is thrilled with this, but we need to fix it. 

Meanwhile, he has completed and submitted his application for next summer's internship. He's going to retake the SAT on Saturday. He's interested in a high-value scholarship where he has to apply to a selection committee at school with the hopes of being one of two who are picked to advance to the actual application at the college. He dropped the ball on that and it's due Monday, so not only does he have a lot of SAT studying to do, he also has to write three essays as part of the application. We haven't even made it to the actual college applications yet. It's going to be a busy few weeks.  

In other random news, I saw that Hulu now has Bewitched available. I thought it would be fun to watch--I used to watch it as a kid--but my son kind of pooh-poohed it. It turns out he really enjoys the show. It also turns out that the actor who played Darren lived fairly close to my aunt and my grandfather and is buried in the cemetery behind Grandpa's house. Who knew? 

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, and Alycia Quilts.

I'm feeling a bit panicky that it's already September. Completing my PHD this year feels like a long-shot based on my progress thus far. However, sewing is supposed to be fun and the point of PHD is to move projects forward even if I don't actually complete the PHD. Here is my progress for this month.

Linking with Ms. P Designs

I started and finished a cardinal mini that I gifted at the beginning of the month (start #5). 

I started Meadow Mist Design's Magnificent Mystery (start #6). I have all of the cutting complete. This project won't finish until 2026, so I'm not concerned about it.

 

I have not made any progress on the Linda Hahn class (start #1). It feels like forever ago that I took that class, but it was only March. 

I have made progress on Forever Neverland (start #2). I mis-cut the outer border fabric and had to order more. It arrived yesterday and I'm hoping to get it cut and sewn this week.  

I quilted Pink Grapefruit in Blue (UFO #7) and am working on hand-stitching the binding. I'm hoping to finish it off this month. 

I moved the race car quilt (UFO #11) very slightly forward by sewing and cutting more strip sets and dividing all the strip sets into block units. These block units need a stitch-and-flip corner added, which I am currently working on. I have one set finished and two more sets marked and ready to sew. I feel confident that I'll be able to finish this quilt this year. 

I have not made any progress on UFO #4, 6, or 10. These all just need to be quilted and bound. I do want to custom quilt them and occasionally try to work out a quilting plan. 

Those of you who are eagle-eyed may have noticed that I switched out UFO #8. It used to be alligator quilt, but now it's Nancy's quilt. In case you missed my previous post about it, one of my fellow guild members passed in May. In August many of us brought home her projects with the intent to finish at least some of them this year. This is a full kit that she hadn't started yet, so I'm gonna try to meet the guild challenge to complete it this year in her honor. 

Moving away from PHD, I quilted a few things since last week. I finished up quilting Box Tie on Sonja's quilt. This one took me two days to quilt. 

I attached the binding to Gina's king-size quilt. 

I made and attached the binding to Leslie's quilt. 

I stitched tiny-scale Threaded on Deb's quilt. This was a multi-day project. 

I stitched Triangle Meander on Maria's quilt after adding the borders and seaming the back. I'll add the binding to the front of this one too. 

I quilted Beaded Clam on Sara's quilt. 

So, on a happier note, my son took some fun pictures of the chickens the other night. 

Agatha

Smoky

Peanut

Henry

Thanks for indulging me with these. :) Hoping for happier days ahead.

Last week certainly didn't go to plan. I'd been battling a headache for multiple days and thought I'd kicked it after large amounts of medicine and caffeine on Tuesday. Thursday I wasn't feeling great. I attributed it to the after-effects of the headache, plus we'd eaten celebratory (one night early for end of the school year) Dairy Queen the night before and I am somewhat allergic to milk. 🫣 I was struggling to figure out how to orient my next quilting job on its backing and I was sure it didn't fit, which didn't make sense because she's always meticulous and sends generously-sized backings. More on this down below. The weather was weird and I just felt off. So I decided to take a rest and work on paperwork.

After dinner we decided to try going for our evening walk. I hadn't been out to feed the chickens yet because it had been raining all afternoon and I didn't feel good. Over the weekend my husband and daughter had moved the chicken coop to the other side of the original vegetable garden and created a pass-through for the chickens to move between the coop and the enclosed garden. (Pictures at the bottom of the post.) It's much harder to see the chickens from the house/driveway now unless you walk around the trees. My husband went to give the chickens their scratch and discovered that our sweet little Beaker had died. 😭😭

I couldn't bring myself to go see her after he found her. He buried her out by the one of the pine trees and placed a big stone over it--I keep thinking it's a giant turtle. I had to call my daughter and tell her the bad news. We all were pretty bummed out and I was rather sick. Writing about it isn't making me feel so great.

Friday was my son's first day of summer vacation and my husband had taken the day off. His original plans to do some repairs for someone had fallen through, so he was working on the barn retaining wall. 

I decided to start weeding the lower garden Friday morning so that I could feel in control of something. I made my son help. He mostly took handfuls of weeds I'd pulled to the garden wagon, though he did dig out a few trees. This sweetspire is doing amazing this year. There's also a weed sticking up in it. Guess I missed that one. LOL.

I have done some work. I completed Marsali's quilt that I shared last week. I did the binding on Annie's quilt from last week.

         

I quilted Paula's quilt with Mod Dotz. This is similar to one I did last month. We agreed on adding interfacing to the central panel of fabric, which helped tremendously with the stretchiness. I got to quilt with Dream Puff batting for this version and shipped it back to her Thursday. 

I found out that our post office, which is usually only open in the morning, will be open extended hours (all day) for the next few months while they repair the tornado-damaged one. We have a kid working in ours now and I'm in there enough that he now sort of speaks to me. He had difficulties with the computer system while scanning my packages Thursday. Eh, it happens. Once when I worked there the system would not recognize a certain area in Canada. Anyway, when I checked their status Friday morning, the tracking showed that I'd created labels but hadn't dropped them off yet. Thankfully I had a receipt.

Friday afternoon I decided to take advantage of the extended hours to drop off a few orders. I was hoping the lady from the other PO would be working and could help me discover what had gone wrong. When we got to the PO, the kid was sitting out in his car and there was a sign taped to the PO door stating that the internet was down. He did go inside to scan my packages and said that the tracking wouldn't update until the PO got their internet restored. Great. I tried. Luckily most of the packages had their tracking updated Saturday morning once they were scanned in Indianapolis. 

Saturday morning I woke up with extreme pain in my foot and I couldn't bear weight on it. I'm guessing I strained it by standing on the steep incline in the garden while weeding. I took some anti-inflammatory and sat around. By Saturday afternoon I was feeling really behind at work and finally convinced my son to help me figure out how the quilt went on the backing. (I'd been asking the men for help, to no avail, for several days.) We walked downstairs, I laid it out, and he's like, what's wrong with it? I looked at it and it fit just fine. 🤦🏻‍♀️ We are wondering just how out of it I was on Thursday.

Here is Cindy's quilt, complete with a totally adequate backing, quilted with Good Vibrations. Good Vibrations is one of those patterns that seems easy and straight-forward. It isn't. It's kinda a pain in the butt. Many people can't stitch it in both directions without their thread breaking. I don't have issues with my thread breaking, but I do think that the stitching looks different enough that I generally only stitch it from left to right, one single line at a time. It takes FOREVER. But I want to return something to the client that looks nice. 

This was a pretty big quilt, so I knew it was going to be a really long stitch out time. I worked on the borders to my race car quilt in minute and a half chunks while Good Vibrations was stitching or waiting for the carriage to move back to the left side. Now I have two sets of borders on! It needs two more sets of inner borders and a border of blocks that aren't pieced yet.

I was also able to get a skirt cut out, but haven't had a chance to sew it yet. I thought the cotton/poly blend would be easy to work with, however, it wasn't. I couldn't cut on the fold because the fabric is slippery and wouldn't stay lined up. So I did every single piece individually (except the pockets, 'cause who's gonna see those?). I'm hoping to get it sewn soon. Another update in the clothing area is that my Cashmerette guide verified that I didn't need any vertical adjustments to my sloper, so I didn't have to do anything for last week's class. I'm working through the material for this week--shoulders.

I also drew up my vexing FBF block in EQ8 and tried some different color combos. I'm not sure I found the solution. I think I'm leaning toward the upper left version, or maybe the one next to it. The original color way is the lone block on the right.

Here are the blocks I've completed so far.

Returning to quilting, Cindy brought a second, coordinating quilt that she wanted Good Vibrations on. This was Tuesday's project. It is a smaller quilt than the first, so I had under a minute for each line. I stood on my still-painful foot and nursed both along.

Yesterday my son started his summer SEAP internship. It's going to be weird being by myself all summer for the first time in over 20 years. Today he's already taking a day off and going on a school trip to an amusement park--a reward for earning Panther Plus awards. These are sort of like student of the month, but only given once a trimester. He received three his freshman year, none last year, and two this year. I'm sure he'll have fun. 

Here are the pictures of the coop/old garden. My husband thought the chickens would like going up in the tanks and rooting around, but they don't. They run around on the ground a bit and try to drink from one of the overflow spigots. Chickens are weird. 

We have bluebirds in the nesting box on the end of the old garden. 

The clematis are putting on a good show right now. 

I know that was even longer than normal. If you made it down here, thanks.

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, and Alycia Quilts.