Stories from the Sewing Room

First off, I failed my OMG once again. I know there are still a few days left of the month, but I don't see any possible way to get all those Grassy Creek string borders pieced in the few days remaining. I'll be working on the shirt my daughter needs for her trip next week and I will be back to quilting for others as well.

If you stopped by last week, you might remember the car drama. We were able to rent a car, albeit a much smaller one than we reserved, and made the trip to Michigan prior to the storm moving in. Here is the view on the way to my parents' house just as the storm started. 

And here is how it looked as we left. It doesn't look much different. I think they got about six inches of additional snow and it was significantly colder. 

Meanwhile, the car dealer was busy doing tons of diagnostic testing and replacing the spark plugs (which only had about 30,000 miles on them--we suspect we unwittingly bought fakes last time) on my vehicle for a total of $756. They didn't find anything else, so I guess it will be good for another 161k miles? Beats buying a new vehicle. We returned the rental and picked up my car yesterday. I'm very happy to have my own car back.

Our chickens survived the frigid, sub-zero temperatures while we were gone. Our young neighbor did a great job of caring for them. Here's a few pictures of them from a week ago, prior to the snow and cold. 

1. The post with the most views. This post had around 14 times more views than the second most viewed post of the year. My Tall Tales quilt top and trip to Iowa and APQS were featured.

2. The first post that included the chickens. I also finished my SCQG BOM top.

I can't believe I'm done with a week to spare! Especially with how things have been going lately. More on that later. My goal this month was to finish piecing and quilt my Flower Patch quilt from Denise's SAL. Here is it is fully pieced.

Quilting in progress (quilting design is called Wishing):

A few detail shots with poor late evening lighting.

I hope to find some time to make binding soon.

I've also been working on piecing a test quilt, but cannot share pictures.

I've been working really hard to get lots of quilts knocked out. I had a few challenging ones recently that caused my longarm to skip a tooth on the belt. The needle bar also needed alignment and then we had to retime the machine. It took Tuesday - Friday to address everything. After all that, I thought I'd work on a baby quilt of my own to make sure everything was functioning properly prior to getting back to work. So I was all full of hope Saturday and working along on the quilt. 

You might remember this quilt from past posts. I made it 16 years ago and the quilting was less than ideal, so it got abandoned part way through the quilting process. For your viewing pleasure, here is how it used to look.

I ripped it all out this spring, removed some really odd batting--no idea what it was, but it was weird, and replaced it with a nice piece of Quilter's Dream 80/20 in white (my favorite). I quilted this with a combination of hand guided ruler work and Intelliquilter blocks.

I stopped to research border quilting methods using Intelliquilter and also to take a walk before more rain moved in. Well, we got part way into our walk and it started dumping rain, so we had to run back through the edge of the neighbor's property to get back to our house. Yes, we did check the radar before we went, and according to that, we should have had about an hour. Pretty much as soon as we got back in the house the rain stopped. I was watching a video and reading a tutorial when the power started blipping. And then it was out. A brief but very strong storm moved through and there was no more power for the next 16.5 hours. I am fortunate to live in an area where we rarely lose power, and if we do it is usually not more than an hour or two. So the 16.5 hours really sucked. We were able to get our generator running (for the first time in about nine years) so that we could power the fridge and freezer. Turns out one of our neighbors had a bunch of trees fall on the line. They still had power, but everyone south of them did not. 😒

Sunday afternoon I was able to get back to quilting. First I finished the pink and green quilt. Here's what I've done since then:

My Flower Patch (see above).

Keetah's baby quilt, quilted with Play Baseball (wouldn't recommend this pantograph).

Two baby quilts for Amber, quilted with loopy meander.

Finally, Keetah's huge, beautiful quilt, quilted with Plumeria (this one took 8+ hours! 🤯).

I have an abundance of milkweed everywhere. 😆 Unfortunately, I still have an abundance of spearmint infiltrating this garden as well.

Thanks for stopping by. Come back next week to find out what my June goal will be.

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

I have completed my Flower Patch top! I made block 16 and joined it into the top over the weekend. I'm so thankful that I removed the foundation papers as I went along.

I have been sewing as fast as I can, which is admittedly pretty slow, to get the border done. I finished it around 8:30 last night and luckily we had just enough light left to get a photo.

My next goal is to get the backing made. I will need to press eight yards of fabric and then get it seamed. I shared the backing fabric in last week's post.

My small guild is working on a charity quilt. We are making Crimson Tate's Letters From Home since we all have a copy of the pattern from our last retreat. Here are my contributions. Note that the corner triangles are missing since I haven't received the fabric yet. I tried to make use of fabric from my scrap bins. I swear, no matter how much fabric I use from the scrap bins, they never seem to get any emptier.  I've seen pictures of blocks that several others have made, and they are amazing. Mine are...eclectic?

I've completed another group of quilts. This first one belongs to Elle and I used Terral on it. Salmon Glide thread is the perfect neutral for brightly colored quilts.

Then another of Elle's, quilted with Sugar & Spice. I used Glide Calico thread on this, which seems fitting for a quilt that has quilting-themed fabrics.

Next is another of Elle's, quilted with Stacked Snails.

One more of Elle's, quilted with Knit 1, Purl 2.

If you felt my anguish last week about the horrendous basement carpet and were wondering what happened, they are now planning to order more of the original carpet we selected. They are going to run the seams perpendicular to how they were before, though I'm not sure that's going to make much difference if they still can't make an invisible join. In the meantime, I broke down and vacuumed the entire  carpet because I was tired of us tracking carpet fuzz everywhere. I see why they said the round 2 carpet is defective, because there are really strange lines all over it. One large swath looks like crumpled up fabric--you know that wrinkled look cotton gets after you wash it. The installation is sub-par, but yeah, the carpet isn't right either. So we will see. Not sure what quality installation I'll get for round three, but at least this butt-ugly, horrible carpet from round two will be gone.

We have transitioned into summer here. Just like the last few years, we have gone from pleasant spring weather directly into summer's heat and humidity with no transition. Just spring one day and evil summer the next. The flowers are looking nice. We spent Saturday evening pulling more spearmint. The irises are starting to bloom. This one is called Flying Circus. Photo courtesy of my daughter.

I am always amazed by how different the blooms of Iris Batik look on the same plant. The white one in the back is Immortality.

Columbine and a volunteer iris--we evidently missed a few rhizomes when we pulled them all two years ago. At least this one is pretty.

The strawberry beds are covered in blossoms and fruit. I cannot wait for the strawberries to ripen! There is no comparison between them and store-bought strawberries. 

The peas and lettuce are visible, but not any outstanding growth. We weeded Saturday and you can't even tell. We planted the rest of our crops too--green beans, beets, chives, zucchini, and cucumbers. We tried throwing an overripe tomato in the garden; we'll see if it grows. We have volunteer dill, so we are waiting to see what else comes up before sowing more. We have some thyme my husband planted a few years ago that has somehow survived for several years in the top wooden box pictured below and we actually harvested it and used it in dinner this past week.

I am very excited because my Bartlett pear tree has lots of fruit! And my other pear tree, which has never had any, has a few! We weren't sure what we'd have this year since we sustained so much cicada damage last year and did a very heavy pruning on both (we originally thought we had fire blight before realizing it was cicadas boring in). I wonder if we will be able to harvest any. Last year we had a few pears growing, but they disappeared before they got big enough. Squirrels? Birds? Raccoons? Anyone have growing tips?

First fruit on this tree, though it doesn't look healthy.

Look at all the cute baby pears!

I also learned this week that rabbits eat dandelion stems and dandelion fluff. I had a hard time capturing it with my phone, but I enjoyed watching this one eat. If you look really closely, that stupid walnut is still hanging in the shrub behind the rabbit. 

We still have the grosbeaks, lots of grackles, two hummingbirds, lots of orioles, and all the regular birds. I was excited to see an indigo bunting Saturday while we were weeding the lower garden. I saw one again the other night. They have such amazing color, particularly near sunset when the light hits just right. We used to have lots of buntings, but as we got more houses and development in the neighborhood, we got less buntings. We used to have tons of goldfinches and now there are only a few. I have been seeing meadowlarks around more frequently, so that is nice. The red headed woodpecker population seems to be growing as well, but I'm not seeing as many of the other woodpecker varieties as we used to. At least I always have my flamingoes. 😁

We're almost done with this one! The final block pattern releases today. I can't wait to get this project wrapped up. I ordered some fabric online for the backing. I really hope it matches or at least kind of matches. Especially since I ordered like eight yards. 😆 I'm planning to add a few small borders and I should have plenty of fabric left for binding too. This picture shows blocks 13, 14, and 15. You can look back a few posts to see the top three rows.

I've been making progress on other projects too. I ordered two different fabrics as possible borders for my art quilt. One is way, way, way off. Here is the other, along with the dark green I want to use as a skinny border. I think the fabric is beautiful, but maybe not the best choice for the border. There's not enough contrast between the skinny inner border and the outer border and the outer border isn't really the right color.

I'll save discussing this one until next week, but here is what my design wall looks like right now. ‼️

I've been making some pretty good progress with the quilts too. I've finally neared the end of all the binding, which is a huge relief! That was a pretty intense stretch of binding I had.

Here's my round up of last week's quilts.

First, Elle's t-shirt quilt. One of the most fun things I've done in quite a while. (Read last week's post for more info.) Quilted with one of my all-time favorites, Diagonal Plaid.

Next is a comfort quilt Toni made. She requested ribbons and I found a design in my iQ that fit the bill. 

Next up was another of Ann's quilts, quilted with Circle Drama.

Then Ann's Macaron Mystery, which is amazing. She chose Hooked Up and it was totally worth the seven-hour stitching time.

Lyn's Succulent Garden quilt, quilted with Sugar & Spice.

And another of Lyn's, quilted with Graceful Vine. I'm so lucky to have such lovely quilts to work with all the time. 

I'm feeling pretty good about getting seven quilts done. I think I need to insert a quilt or two of my own into my schedule soon. We're most of the way through my small guild UFO challenge and I've only finished five things. Last time we did a challenge I think I finished 20 or more. Of course, I was not working full time then either.

Our carpet re-do is scheduled for the beginning of next week, so I'll be enjoying some guilt-free time off. 

Maybe I can get some yard work done. We need to weed again. The 🤬 spearmint is sprouting again. I took some photos around my yard yesterday afternoon. First, we have a lot of walnut trees and the squirrels are so great about leaving walnuts everywhere we don't want them, particularly right up against the foundation, where they always grow. Here's one I can see out my sewing room window.

We've found them wedged between tree trunks and the deer guards around the trunks. We found several in old bird nests, including this nest that fell sideways in a storm a year or so ago. It's sort of like going on an Easter egg hunt. You just never know where you'll find one.

We've had so much rain lately, but the temps have been all over the place. The last two nights we've had freeze warnings. Needless to say, while things are greening up, nothing has come up in the veggie garden yet. I planted peas and lettuce in this tank.

My lettuce indoors is just about ready to harvest again. Amazing!

Until next week--

Photo courtesy of my son.

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