Stories from the Sewing Room: customer quilt

Showing posts with label customer quilt. Show all posts

Just a Little Quilting

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

I haven't worked on much over the past week that I can share.

I quilted and bound Charlene's quilt over the weekend. The quilting design is called JK Celtic.

Here are a few more pictures of Cindy's quilt that I shared last week. I'm still marveling over how precise and flat her piecing is.

I completed this month's clue for the Meadow Mist mystery quilt. It's definitely not too late to join in. You get one clue per month, which is very manageable. The first picture is this month's clue and the second picture is last month and this month.

I don't think I've shared my completed Lucky Charm quilt. Here it is. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. This was a kit from Primrose Cottage on Etsy. It's quilted with Pumpkin Seed.

Switching over to gardening, I think my baby pineapple is dying. :( It does not look good. The stem holding it up is dying and the pineapple itself has changed color. I haven't found much information online on growing pineapples in pots, so I'm not sure what we should have done differently.

We had a frost the other night, so we brought in the other two pineapple plants that we started a while ago. I had what I expect is the last garden harvest of lettuce. My fall crop has struggled and there was enough for one small salad. There are still a few green tomatoes out there, so I'll need to bring those in to ripen. We do have part of our potato crops that can be harvested, and two small onions left. Oh, and my husband never harvested the majority of his banana peppers. I don't think I ever shared our first onion harvest, so enjoy these lovelies. :D (Yup, that's a standard paring knife for scale.)

Finally, a monarch update. About half of the chrysalises we found have hatched and the other half did not make it. It's more than we've had in the last few years, so we are pleased to have hosted at least a few.

Until next week--thanks for reading!

Linking with For the love of geese and From Bolt to Beauty.

September and October OMG

Wednesday, September 30, 2020

I finished my September goal--bind two quilts. I'm happy to have these completed finally!

Linking my finishes: Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal - September Finish Link-up

Here's some eye candy. :)

My October goal is to sew together at least one quarter of my For the love of geese quilt. When I made the outer ring I did not sew some of the background fabrics onto the ends, so I need to do that first.

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal October Link-up

You can see the next quilt I'll be working on, made by Charlene. I love the design she selected and look forward to sharing it with you.

I have been busy with quilting still. I completed two client quilts this past week. Here's a sneak peek of Cindy's quilt, quilted with the Soho pattern. The other is a secret for now since it will be gifted. Look for it in late October.

I'm also binding all the stuff. Here's another completed Quilts for Kids quilt. I shared the quilting on this one last week.

My guild makes quilts that serve as fundraisers for local charities. The current project involves each of us making two blocks in Christmas colors. We are all making the same block. Here is my first attempt. Oops!

And here they are, corrected.

The only other thing I have to share this week is this yummy comfort food recipe for chicken and rice. While it took me longer than the 30 minutes the recipe says, it was easy to make and tasted great.

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

August Goal

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

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.

Homebound, Week Six Thousand

Wednesday, April 8, 2020

Or something like that. Is anyone else losing track of what day it is?

In the last week I have made small progress on a number of things. We got our vegetable garden planted. Luckily I had bought snap pea seeds a couple months ago. Everything else we planted was from leftover seeds, so hopefully some of them germinate. We have planted beets, baby bok choy, snap peas, and lettuce so far. We have some green bean seeds, but it's too early to plant them. I'd like to pick up a cucumber plant and my husband would like a jalapeño plant. We need to replenish our strawberry plants too. Maybe in the next few months we'll be able to go get some plants. I'd love to go flower shopping.

I've done a lot of math with my kids. I teach my son a half hour of Algebra four days a week and I help my daughter fill in the holes with her pre-calculus. Other than that, I hover and make sure they are completing all their assignments. We found out yesterday that our school year will now end on May 7, about two weeks earlier than if we'd been having a regular schedule. Thus my daughter's high school career goes out with a whimper. Just think how much more interesting this story will be than a standard school story though.

Our solar power generation is going well. We've had a couple of really nice days and our production is more than our consumption. It will be interesting to see how our first month's electric bill comes out.

In sewing news, I have completed most of the first week's clue of Bonnie Hunter's Unity mystery quilt. I haven't added the borders yet. Maybe I'll sew week 2 and then see what I think should go between. Also, I ordered several pieces of fabric that I was short on and I am still waiting on one order to come in. Of course it's the piece I need right away. 😞

I sewed a few more blocks with the Fig Tree fabric. I'm a third done with the initial block plan.

I started sewing together the Bonnie Hunter Frolic quilt top. I have the upper left corner done. This thing has a lot of seams! Also, as I was staring at it on the wall, I noticed that I had sewn one of the pieces in the top row in the wrong direction. I'm glad I noticed it and could correct it before the whole thing was sewn.

I am watching Julia Quiltoff's free online appliqué and quilting class on Facebook. I bought a kit from her and started working on it over the weekend. I did make a mistake by not exactly following her instructions. I was supposed to stick each individual stem down, then stitch it down, and then build and stitch from there. I made this way harder than it needed to be by sticking down almost all the pieces at once. Also, my machine appliqué skills are really rusty.

I also worked on Bethany's t-shirt quilt. This is the first time I have quilted a t-shirt quilt and it was much easier than I anticipated. I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

I managed to finish absolutely zero of my nine proposed quarter 1 finish along projects. I guess I can repeat those projects for quarter 2 and try again. I also missed posting an April One Monthly Goal. Gah.

I have one project that I really want to start and can't, because I am still waiting on the fabric order I mentioned above. I am planning to sew along with my friend Denise's For the Love of Geese quilt. Paper piecing is always challenging to me, but Denise has started publishing tutorials and videos that really make sense to me and I am itching to give it a try. If only my fabric would come.... You should go check it out too! Here is the link to the second week. It's definitely not too late to join in.

Finally, I looked out my sewing room window yesterday and saw this!

It is a squirrel lying there with a walnut hanging in his mouth. So weird. After a while, he sat up and started nibbling the walnut. I'm hoping that he nibbled the whole thing and didn't plant it. We find planted walnut trees sprouting in all the wrong locations thanks to our furry critter friends.

I hope anyone reading this is doing well. Feel free to email me if you need to chat!

Linking with For the love of geese.

Quilter's Creative Touch for Juki

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Over the weekend my husband got the computer hooked up to my long arm. I have figured out how to turn on the tablet, though it took me a bit to figure out how to unlock the screen (thanks, Google). You should know that you have to call Grace to actually register the program. No code comes with it. I have imported design files, but haven't quite mastered how to set up a pantograph. I've joined a Facebook group and watched lots of video tutorials. I think I'm going to sew up a few Quilts for Kids quilts and then practice the quilting on those before I tackle anything fancier.