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 sticking with my to-do list format for a while until I feel like I have things more under control. 

1. Forever Neverland 🔜

I attempted to finish this over the weekend, but I neglected to read the instructions. As a result, I messed up the outer border fabric and had to order more in order (an ordeal in itself; not everyone shares my shipping timeframe standards) to get closer to the look I wanted. You know what happens when you assume...🤦🏻‍♀️

2. Race Car quilt 🆗

I have created all the strip units and paired them with their stitch and flip corners. I'll start on these after I finish all my work binding.

I did watch more of the video content from the class. I have one video left to watch plus all the tweaking of my own sloper. I don't mind the sewing part as it goes pretty quickly, but getting the muslin ready to cut each pattern version feels like a lot of work. 

4. Work on the postcard from big guild 🚫

5. Cut Meadow Mist Magnificent Mystery quilt ✅

6. Figure out the Beach Bumz class quilt 🚫

7. Continue working on the behind-the-scenes tasks for business 🚫🔜

I have found a plug-in that should do what I want for one of my more major tasks. It does cost money, but on the plus side, it's not subscription-based. I do have to learn Java and/or CSS in order to use it. It will probably take quite some time to implement, but it will be easier (I think) than what I was planning to do as a work-around. I have a few smaller tasks to complete too.

Here are the quilts I've completed for work over the past week:

Annie's, quilted with Hopscotch. It looks like I used a light thread, but it's actually 60 wt. Bottom Line Tan, which is a light gold color. 

April's, quilted with loopy meander.

Sara's, quilted with Unwind.

Leslie's quilt, quilted with Diagonal Plaid Bias. I need to fully bind this one.

Mary Ann's quilt, quilted with In the Swirls. She wanted fuchsia thread to match the cornerstone fabrics that are not pictured. 

I started quilting Box Tie on Sonja's quilt. This is a more advanced panto that requires care to align, particularly since there are so many seams to take into account. 

I have completed the binding on one of Gina's quilts. 

I have 2.5 more quilts to bind at the moment. I'm looking forward to getting them finished so that I can sew my own things.

If you're wondering about how my podiatry appointment for my injury went, I ruptured/tore my plantar fascia. I should have been in a boot at the time of the injury (late May), but it's too late now. I have various orthotic options to explore, some stretching exercises to do, and have been instructed to buy new shoes as well. I already had a new pair of shoes, but hadn't switched over yet. I had been feeling pretty good, but all the prodding of the foot hurt and set me back a bit. Additional shoes and various orthotics have been ordered and a follow-up appointment scheduled. 

Meanwhile, the optometrist has me trying some different contact lenses that I'm unsure about. I have a follow-up on these this week. This middle-age vision change stinks.

Out in the garden, we had a surprisingly large harvest of cucumbers and tomatoes. The cucumber plants are burning out. The tomatoes all appear to be intact, so maybe we really did have just the two hornworms? Seems odd to have just a few, but I'll take it. We also harvested one green pepper and have one other that's just about ready. 

The pepper looks somewhat like a cucumber in the above photo. 😄 I actually have about two pounds of tomatoes, but they didn't all make it into the picture. I added two pounds of grocery store tomatoes and made spaghetti sauce. It turned out okay, but not great. It's very bland. The grocery store tomatoes probably didn't help. They were labeled on the shelf as local, but when I got home, I saw that they had product of Mexico labels. Oh well. We did not starve.

We have four watermelons that look promising. I'm super-excited about this because I don't think we've ever successfully grown a melon. Two of the three pumpkins are already changing color and we found a fourth start that might make it. I might get one more zucchini. I've harvested six this year, which is a record for us. I grated the three I had in the fridge, made a loaf of bread, and froze the rest.

My husband has thankfully cleared the debris (all the damaged wood and foam insulation boards) out of the front garden, so I have to weed that part in preparation for the termite treatment. He finished the last of the house repairs over the weekend and is moving on to prepping the porch for new cement. Hopefully this nightmare will be over soon. That being said, we will still have to replace the drywall in the dining room and office once the outside is done and that will be a different kind of dusty nightmare. 

A few other, random things that made me smile:

I caught my car's odometer at just the right moment. Don't worry; I was sitting in a parking lot and happened to notice the mileage. My car needs to be detailed. 

This hummingbird sitting on a hummingbird. Sorry it's blurry. I was taking the picture through the screen.

Two female hummingbirds sharing the feeder instead of fighting each other. 

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

It's time once again to share your finished goal for the month.

This link up will remain open until July 31 at 11:55 pm EST.

This month really got away from me and I realized Tuesday that I needed to work on my post for Friday (and really, Thursday night since it goes live at 12:05 am). That was apparently the motivation I needed to start working on this project. Tuesday I fixed the parts of the blocks above that needed addressing and sewed them together.

I trimmed the panel to the correct size and then fudged it a little so that I didn't have any of the white showing. I find that a lot of panels that come through here tend to be parallelograms. This one was fairly on-grain, so that was nice. 

I cut and created the other borders.

As of Wednesday night, I made it this far. Everything lined up nicely except for the border I cut 1/2" too long. Oops! Just two borders remain. 

While I don't think I can fully finish this quilt before the end of the month, I feel pretty confident I can get the last two borders on and get it quilted. 

Now it's your turn to share your finish (or your progress if you didn't quite make it to the finish line).

Take a few minutes to visit others, offer encouragement, and make new friends!

This link up will remain open until 11:55 pm EST on July 31. Make sure you add a link to this OMG post so others can find the OMG link up from your blog--just paste this link into your post:  

Stories from the Sewing Room July One Monthly Goal Finish Link Up

Nine weeks after bringing Lucey 2 home and six weeks after buying the used iQ, everything is finally all working together. The last remaining cable we needed was set to arrive last Friday, so I thought I'd update the tablet to the current software version. Well. I got an error that required the coin battery inside the tablet to be replaced. After replacing it, you were supposed to follow a set of instructions to get to a menu that allowed you to reset the date and time to whatever day it is. We were able to reset the date, but it didn't go past the error message upon restarting. I was having a meltdown because I'd already spent so much money and I didn't want to have to buy a new tablet (plus wait however long the wait currently is) right now. 

I contacted support and she had me do the same thing we had already done. 😩 Oh, I forgot to mention that you also had to attach a corded keyboard to the tablet. I don't have one, but my tech-loving son has a few. He had left to go pick through computers to be discarded at school with his friends. I had small quilt guild, so it was at a standstill. The next afternoon, he was urged to look at it again. And fixed it in a few seconds. His fix was to set the date a year ahead. Why that worked, I have no idea. But it worked, I was no longer locked out of the tablet, and I was able to update it.

We finished hooking everything up and reassembled the rest of the frame and ran cords and such. I quilted a small panel of fabric and then cut it up and serged the edges. I use these instead of the clamps for the sides of the quilts. I just pin this fabric to the backing sides and then the other end of the fabric is pinned to the elastic of the clamp. This way I don't have to worry about the machine hitting the clamps. 

Yesterday morning I finished doing the calibrations and quilted a small quilt! Huzzah!

I feel like I haven't gotten a ton of work done over the past week. I had an unfortunate incident with someone's backing and had to go buy new fabric to replace it. Luckily there is a store about 1/2 hour away that stocks every single Kona color (Indiana Quilt Depot), so I was able to make it right. That put me a day behind. Monday morning I had my one allotted annual appointment with my regular doctor. I spent the afternoon prepping some of the quilts I need to get done this week. I had to trim one and add borders and prepare binding. I had to enlarge a too-small backing for one which spilled into Tuesday, make a Frankenbatting for another, and I still have to make a backing and binding for one more. Plus quilt everything!

Here's what I've completed since last week: 

Susan's Pete the Cat, quilted with Stipple.

Susan's star quilt, quilted with Baptist Fan. (Susan, if you're reading this, please check your email 🙂.)

Maria's hand-sewn hexi, quilted with Ginger Snap. This quilt is the first to be quilted on Lucey 2. I still need to trim and attach the binding to the front.

It was interesting to see the differences between Lucey 1 and Lucey 2. Lucey 1 has an M bobbin and Lucey 2 has an L. Lucey 2 is older, quieter, and has a different frame, so the available quilting area isn't as big. The difference in the tablets is strange to me. It's all good though.

I was able to attend the big guild's sew day for a bit on Saturday. I made some good progress on my Forever Neverland quilt. I'll need to square up a few blocks and change the sashing on at least one, but still, I was pleased to get a tiny bit of personal sewing done. 

Meanwhile, my husband was busy demolishing the front porch. The cement came out way easier than I expected. He made some cuts, hit it with a maul, and it crumbled apart. He loaded it into a dumpster for cement recycling.

Oh look, we found the rebar that we provided the original contractor. Mostly just thrown in the hole. 😒

He's now removing the siding. We'll need to evaluate the damage. We know there's a least a little water damage and we think there is insect damage too. We also need to determine what to do with the hydraulic cement/mud jacking cement that we had inserted as a temporary fix several years ago. It reminds me of drywall mud. 

After addressing whatever there is to address, he'll form it back up. We've hired a cement contractor to actually install the concrete. You may notice we got a delivery in front of the sawhorse. The first few days, they would step around the sawhorse, step down into the hole, and back up to the step. Weird. 

Happy sewing to you.

Linking with Quiltery and Alycia Quilts.

Please join me in selecting a goal for July. 

New to One Monthly Goal?  Welcome!  To join, share a photo of your project plus some words about what you want to accomplish in a blog post or Instagram post and add that photo to the link up.  Return at the end of the month and share your results.  (Results link up opens for the last 7 days of the month.)

This month I would like to make progress on my Forever Neverland quilt. I currently have three star blocks sewn and 11 that are laid out, ready to sew. After that, it's time to start assembling the top. 

Now it's your turn to link up. The link up will remain open through July 7.

The One Monthly Goal accomplishment link up will be available on July 25.  Make sure you add a link to this OMG post so others can find the OMG link up from your blog--just copy and paste this link into your post:  

Stories from the Sewing Room One Monthly Goal July Link Up

Why is it that the more I try to simplify my life and commitments, the busier I seem to be? 

We are now officially done with robotics forever. The tournament we hosted went pretty well and people seemed to have fun. Two teams didn't show up. On our own team, we were already down one kid (vacationing out of the country) and another fell ill the day of. That left us with two kids, the ones who typically showed up and did all the work, which seems a fitting way to end our coaching career. Our very last match ever was kind of a train wreck, but the boys had fun and laughed through it, so I will call it a success. They even managed to win one of the individual event trophies. 

Robotics typically takes up 6 - 8 months of each year and has for 12+ years. What will we do with all our free time? My husband wants to volunteer with Habitat. I think that's great, but like I said above, the more things we edit out, the busier our schedules seem to be. We still need to address the porch, the landscaping, finish the barn, get rid of things we're done with, and so on.

We did start setting up the second longarm. We moved the lights my husband made me from my existing machine over to the new/used machine because the lighting isn't as good in that area. This frame is 10 feet, so the lights overlap a bit since they were fabricated for a 12-foot frame. My husband installed his fabric advance bypass system. He 3D-printed me a bracket to hold the laser. The laser cable for Lucey 2 is really long compared to my original and would be in the way. Luckily we found a reasonably priced, shorter version online. We also had to order a Tripp Lite since that didn't come with the used iQ, and also a UPS. I suspect we might be buying an additional surge protector as well. I will need to sew in channels and dividers to hold my beloved SewTites Magnums, which means removing the leaders. That part won't be fun. Hopefully I'll have this thing up and running by next week. I'm looking forward to it.

My to-do list feels somewhat insurmountable right now. It looks something like this:

• make 15 guild items (secret)
• bind one client quilt
• keep up with quilting workload
• figure out what to do with sloper for class/attend live class later today
• tighten elastic in tiered gingham skirt & hand sew shut the weird waistband gaps
• make progress on Forever Neverland quilt
• table runner?
• figure out fair entries (I have two weeks.)
• make progress on race car quilt (I have like 12 days to get this done before I need to do the OMG link up post.)
• mend shorts
• find & apply correct fertilizer in vegetable garden
• weed all three flower gardens--my foot and the rainy weather are slowing me down
• figure out how and where to transplant things I want to keep from the upper garden to prepare for porch repair
• continue to work on business website issues
• make muslin of shorts pattern to see if they fit/if so, make some shorts (Why are all the shorts I see this year so short--like 3" inseams? I'm too old for that.)
• continue working on things needed to set up second longarm & iQ

Besides doing all the tournament prep and resting my foot as much as possible, I made a small amount of progress on my Forever Neverland quilt kit. As you can see, I have three blocks totally sewn. I have the HST sewn for the rest, but still need to cut and trim them prior to assembling the blocks. The prints for these blocks are mostly directional, so I've been trying to make sure to orient things correctly.

I added a few more rows to the knit blanket I shared last week. No picture because it looks just about the same. I now have 5/12 rows done.

I quilted Tina's quilt with Paw Prints. I fully bound this one.

I quilted Kristie's quilt with Boho Boxes.

I quilted Sherri's quilt with small-scale Ginger Snap and will be making and applying bias binding to this quilt.

My hummingbirds are finally starting to come in to the feeder. So is this woodpecker. LOL