Stories from the Sewing Room

I am going to try a few new things this year. First, my scraps are overflowing, so I'm going to try to join in with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. The color for January is green. Most of my greens are...meh. I keep wavering between a few projects. Right now I'm leaning towards Sandra's slab star tutorial because I have a lot of skinny strips and tiny pieces in my baskets. 

Next, I am going to try to complete a PHD--Projects Half Done this year. Here is my proposed list for the year. If you've followed me for any length of time, you've seen most of these projects multiple times over the past few years. You may even be sick of hearing about them. Maybe even as sick as I am of looking at them. Perhaps this is the time for me to finally finish the things.

1. Grassy Creek quilt

This is the Bonnie Hunter mystery from 2020. I got stalled out at making string pieced border units. They are now made, but not attached. My OMG this month is to get the top completed. I'm hoping to pull off a miracle and get this pieced, quilted, and bound in time to enter it in the IHQS. Entries close February 5. I'm not sure I have enough of any fabric except the green left for binding and I don't love that choice. 😕

2. Log Cabin Stars

I joined in a QAL last fall. I haven't had time to finish the top. I do have backing, binding, and a quilting plan ready.

3. Dress form

I purchased this custom pattern as a birthday gift to myself last summer. I have not had time to make it. 😭

4. Macaron Mystery quilt

5. Quilt & bind art quilt

6. Bias binding onto jacket

This has been hanging around for months (actually years, but my daughter claimed it last year). No good excuse for why it's not done.

7. Batesville BOM 

This project has been in progress for 16 years or so. I made the remaining blocks last year. The setting is challenging, so I've been putting it off. It's also not really my taste, which makes it even harder to want to finish.

8. RSC

No photo; see green scrap bin at top of post. My scrap bins overflow. Time to try something new to actually use some of them.

9. In and Out mini

This has been ready to sew for over a year. 

10. one donation quilt using a Frankenbatting

11. one item of clothing, tbd

I have many options. All waiting on the dress form. See photo below. The clothing fabric is in two piles on the lower right in the photo, one pile on the floor (plaid), one spread over some of the bins.

12. one quilt top just for fun, tbd

Lots of projects to choose from. I alternately think of this as my closet of shame and my closet of possibilities. I did pretty well in 2023 with making things only from what I already had and trying to buy less and use more. I'd like to stay on that path.

13. Make selvedge yarn

Then I quilted Sara's quilt with the Moon & Stars design. She's been so good at using her scraps.

Next was one of Mary Ann's, quilted with Flirtatious and purple thread.

I also need to paint the underside of the filler caps (like 60 of them) we bought on Amazon because they look really gray when installed. We will need to glue them in place since they don't fit snugly. I can't believe IKEA doesn't sell something for this.

I spent a good part of the weekend filling most of the remaining holes with Variera plugs. I did have some help from the family, but did a lot myself because I was motivated to be done! My fingers and thumbs are pretty sore. I switched to using the handle end of a screwdriver the second day. Should have been smart enough to do that the first day.

Happy New Year!

I have a few projects to show that I finished before Christmas. First up is this Easy Charm Baby Quilt. I used fabrics from Stacy Iest Hsu's Jungle Paradise line and a free pattern from Jessica Dayon. I quilted it using the Jungle Party design and lime green thread. 

Next is a panel project, Ponderosa, also from Stacy Iest Hsu. It makes a barn, stuffed horses, and stuffed hay bales. I made it for my niece's child. It was kind of difficult, especially when it was left until the last moment.

Sooo hard to turn right side out!

Overall, I think it turned out cute. I hope she likes it; I haven't heard anything at all from them.

I think I have the final layout for my Log Cabin Stars quilt.

I'm a bit behind on my Malted Mystery quilt. I have to make a ton of pinwheel blocks for December. I have them laid out, ready to sew. The next clue comes out tomorrow! Like I always say though, it's so easy to catch back up on Cheryl's quilts if you get behind. I am confident I'll be back on track with both clues done by the end of January.

I'm ready to start sewing the Grassy Creek borders too. Just need a minute. Once everyone is back and work and/or school it should get easier.

Sadly, I still haven't had a chance to work on my dress form. I really thought I'd be able to knock it out over the past week, but no. 

Which leads me to the biggest thing--after waiting for 18 months (nine months to gather all the parts, then nine months of waiting on my husband to be willing to work on it), my master closet redo is in progress!!!!!!

We emptied everything out and hauled most of it downstairs last week. No before picture because it was embarrassing. Our closet was kind of a catch-all. I really need to reduce the number of quilts in my home. And old pillows? Where can you go with those besides the landfill? 🤔 After the closet was emptied, my husband removed the wire shelving and the base trim. We debated cutting back the carpet and building frames for under the cabinets, but decided to just build right on the carpet. I painted the walls--I guess we only put on primer before moving in. At this point we were two days in. I was only supposed to paint partway down on two of the walls since they're behind the cabinets, but I ended up painting all the walls during the second coat.

Suddenly the chickens were crowing and carrying on. Why? Oh. There's a squirrel sitting on the sawhorse taunting them by waving his tail around. 

Back to the cabinets. The leveling feet weren't quite long enough, so someone made extender feet for them. 

We made a trip into town to buy lumber to make trim. My son and I sat in the car waiting because we really wanted to see who this car belongs to. Sadly, it will remain a mystery. (Guess what we've been watching on PBS? Endeavour!)

We are now six days into the project. All the cabinets are in place. We have put in most of the drawers; one had some issues, but it's been so long that we cannot return it. We still need to put in the shelves and rods. My husband has built filler pieces for the sides, custom base and crown, and some new base trim. He's in the process of priming and painting it. We were in need of a specific paint and had to wait two days for the store to reopen. Once all the trim is on, we can finish installing everything and move our clothing back in. I ordered a bunch of hole filler pieces from IKEA to plug all the extra holes. I even counted wrong and ordered like 300 extra! 🤪 😳 They didn't include anything to cover the large metal cabinet cam locks, and they don't sell anything either. I found some on Amazon. All the covers should arrive tomorrow if all goes well. 

I made a new soup recipe the other night that I thought was really good. It's called Bavarian Lentil Soup. The only change I made is adding about 1.5 cups of water during cooking since the broth was absorbed really quickly and the lentils weren't done cooking.

I saw this at the grocery store and thought it was funny.

I haven't quilted anything in about two weeks. I'll be back at it starting today. Oh, if you're interested, I quilted 205 pieces for other people last year and completed 22 of my own quilted projects. My most quilted pattern for the second year in a row was Stipple. 😄 Diagonal Plaid came in second for the second year in a row. If you need something quilted, my wait time is really short right now. 

Last week we took a trip to one of my favorite places. 

We got really lucky because every single thing we went in for was in stock or able to be ordered and delivered within a few days. You might recall me discussing our 10-month quest to gather parts for a closet remodel. {Which hasn't even been started yet...} I've noticed that a lot of things have really gone up in price here, too. But I still love the simplicity and use of space.

We underestimated the size of some of the boxes. Everything just barely fit in the car.

My son was very excited that the desk he wanted was in stock. We didn't think that would be the case based on the website. It said the desktop wasn't in stock. They had tons. We did get the last Alex unit though. He has resurrected our ancient Mac (not pictured) and made himself a little workplace.

We are doing some customization on all the other pieces we purchased. My husband's been hard at work in the garage. Hopefully by next week I will have a clean living room with new, customized furniture that I can share. 

I had a bit of an accident with my sewing chair last week. It had been making horrible noises  every time I moved for a few months. I was talking to my husband on the phone, told him my chair felt funny, and boom. Down I went. The chair broke in half. I did not drop the phone, but my daughter was upstairs and heard me thud onto the floor. I bruised up my arm/elbow pretty good, but nothing else. The chair base used to connect there.

I already had a replacement chair picked out, but it turns out it is discontinued, so no chair for me. My husband found (he thinks) a replacement part for my existing chair. It's on order and I might get it within a month. We'll see. I'm back to using my antique bench, which is quite comfortable, but stationary. So I keep moving it back and forth between the computer and the sewing machine.

I've done a very small amount of personal sewing this week. I made some small throw pillows for our chairs.  This project has been in the purchased-but-not-started category since November. That's actually a pretty short time for me. The big delay came because I couldn't figure out how to insert the zippers. I finally found a tutorial here that made sense. 

Even though I lined up the zippers and matched centers and edges and so forth, when I sewed the zipper using the invisible zipper foot for my machine, the pattern did not line up. I took more care with the second pillow than the first and it still did not line up. Perhaps this is where the built in even feed on some machines would be useful?

I was successful at lining up the pattern on the tops of the pillows, so that was good enough.

The only other personal sewing I achieved this week is completing the next two blocks of the Loves Me, Loves Me Not QAL.

I did quilt a few quilts.

First is the quilt I teased last week. Paula expertly pieced this one and it is my most favorite quilt I've been sent ever. 😃 It's a quilt full of Harry Styles! How fun is that!?! The quilting design is Interlocked Orange Peel. 

This is an interesting pattern because the line drawing looks like this:

But when you zoom in all the way, it looks like this:

So the challenge is to try to get the intersections to line up as closely as possible to give the illusion of touching, but they will probably never touch. Here's a detail shot of one of my own quilts that I used the same design on. Can you see how they don't quite touch?

The next quilt I did is Ann's t-shirt quilt. This one, like Harry, has a minky backing. Ann graciously let me quilt Diagonal Plaid on it. 

Next I quilted Baptist Fans on Lyn's Irish Chain quilt. 

And then Swirling on Ann's Melodic Mystery quilt.

These last three are all very large quilts!

The only other things of note this week are that something ate all my tulips before they had a chance to bloom. 😭 This is the only spot in the yard I can actually grow tulips (until now).

The link up for OMG finishes opens on Saturday. Stop back to see if I will complete my goal or not. 😬

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