Stories from the Sewing Room

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

It's been another week with no personal sewing. I spent a lot of it working on custom quilting. This isn't something I normally do for others anymore for several reasons: 

That being said, I did agree to do Connie's Looper quilt. She wanted graffiti-style quilting and really liked the look of one that Teresa Silva (@quiltingismybliss) had done. 

I have never done full-on graffiti quilting before, so it was very intimidating. Connie wanted to enter this quilt in a show, so I upgraded from her usual Hobbs to Quilter's Dream 80/20. Hobbs has a bad tendency to pop through the backing and that isn't acceptable for a show quilt in my opinion. This strategy worked--no pop throughs were found. That being said, I sort of wish I would have done a double batting so that the texture was bumpier. Often the double batting is a thin poly on the bottom and wool on the top. I didn't have either in stock and this project had a pretty short turn-around.

I used six colors of Glide thread: Tomato, Zaffre, Baby Blue (the background color), Prickly Pear, Starlight, and Periwinkle. I wound matching bobbins for each color.

I began by basting the entire quilt. This is not something I would normally do, and I'm not convinced it helped me a lot here, but I knew I wanted to roll back and forth to get the colors of the loops done in one pass. Basting also helped me empty a few bobbins that were close since I don't have many bobbins and I needed six empty bobbins for this project.

Next I quilted all of the loops. I alternated between a wishbone and a ribbon candy design. I basically copied Teresa here with a line 1/2" from one side and the design going right up to the seam on the other. I originally was going to stitch in the ditch, but due to the assembly of the blocks, the seams of one color don't form one continuous line. The loading of the quilt, basting, and quilting the loops took me one work day.

After that I had to do the background. Let me tell you, all that wide-open space was intimidating! I decided to start on the upper blue area first. I put in the sun motifs and then went back and filled in the space with different designs. I was pretty pleased with it. This took one work day.

The next day I needed to fill in the skinny strip of blue on the right side of the quilt and do all of the blue underneath the loops. I added two sun motifs and then started filling in the rest. I went from the bottom up on this part because I didn't know how to quilt some of the designs upside down. I eventually decided to add one more sun motif to the bottom portion. I was running out of ideas and for some reason the bottom seemed a lot bigger than the top even though it wasn't. I flipped through my books for some ideas and decided to quilt some of these "Bob Ross" designs. LOL. Can you see it? This also took one even longer work day. 

The fourth day I went back and cleaned up (ripped and re-did) a few areas I wasn't pleased with. This was an exercise in restraint, because there were quite a few more I felt I should have picked and redone, but I only did the egregious ones. I then had to make her binding and attach it to the front. 

Pictures were really difficult because the blue fabric didn't want to show up correctly. It looked cream or light gray in a lot of the pictures. I got it done, learned a lot, and sent it back home Monday morning. 

Enjoy this one because it is definitely a one-off.

I'm happy to be back in my wheelhouse of edge-to-edge this week. I trimmed, quilted, and then made and attached the binding to Maria's baby quilt. She selected Blood Orange Peel for the quilting. 

Then I started on Ann's large group of patriotic quilts. I quilted this one with Basic Swirl. I'll be attaching the binding to the front of all of them--there are five more after this one. 

Like I said at the start, I have not touched a single bit of my own sewing. I have been working on making my selvedge yarn in the evenings and the pile of selvedges finally looks like it's diminishing. These yarn balls are HUGE! I might have enough to knit two rugs. I really want to finish this before the end of the month so I have a finish on my PHD chart.

Other than that, I'm still plugging away at the designs I'm updating for my quilting website. I'm working through all the designs that start with S right now. In case you were wondering, way more of my designs start with S than any other letter. I may have mentioned before that the online compression tool I'm using limits me to 50 images every 24 hours. Well, S will take two days. I'll be so glad when this task is finished. I'm getting so close now!

I'll be back Sunday with the August OMG finish link up.

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Free Motion Mavericks.

This month's color assigned by So Scrappy is pink. Trying to plan ahead strategically with the amount of blocks I want to have and the scrap basket colors/amounts I have left, I decided to make four blocks instead of my usual two. I made light and dark blocks.

I have a total of 12 blocks sewn. I want to have 20 when I'm finished--I prefer oblong quilts over square quilts. 

I spent some time over the weekend working on my dress form. I'm not done yet, but I have until late Friday night to get it finished. I'll write about it more on the OMG link up post on Saturday, but I can say that I think my choice of fabric was a mistake. I used an upholstery fabric that seemed like the right texture. Despite fusing Shape Flex to the back of all the fabric prior to cutting, the upholstery fabric is unraveling at an alarming rate. It's making a giant mess! Also, although I'm pressing the seams open as directed and with a very hot iron, they are not staying open. Proof I am sewing. ⤵️

I've quilted just a few more quilts this week. Life has interrupted many times. 

The first one belongs to Penny. It's quilted with Diagonal Plaid Bias.

the next one is also Penny's. It's quilted with Sunshine Shells. 

Then I quilted Patricia's with a hand-guided loopy meander. This quilt is pieced front and back.

I started Toni's quilt yesterday, but don't have a picture yet. I'll finish it up today and then put the picture in next week's post. 

I also want to share the cutest little thing that Maria brought me when she picked up her quilts. She was visiting the Texas Quilt Museum and saw these little hens. She said a woman who's 85 years old makes them and donates the proceeds to the museum. Isn't it just darling? I should have put a ruler in the picture for scale. It's just over 1.5" from from to back! I hope I can sew that well when I'm 85.

I went to the guild sew day over the weekend and added to my Tessellations quilt. Another guild member who also took the class had hers almost complete. She went truly scrappy. I can't cede enough control to do that. 😬 I went with mostly coordinated fabrics.  Here's my progress so far.

I also cut out a quilt for a QAL that my daughter recolored. She helped me pick fabrics to meet her vision. We had everything but background. We bought that fabric since we couldn't agree on any from my stash. 

I will need to make a bunch of HST in the next two weeks. I'm determined to stay on top of this one.

Speaking of staying on top of things, here is my PHD report for March. I completed one more project toward my "degree" this month.

I've been busy quilting Jeri's quilts. The first one is called Algorithm. I think she said it's a GE Designs pattern. She picked Champagne Bubbles for the quilting.

Next is her flying geese quilt, quilted with Good Vibrations.

Finally, her Color Block Postage Stamp quilt, quilted with tiny scale Squatty Squared.

I am fully binding all three of these, so that's what I'll continue working on this week, along with more quilting hopefully. I have a bunch of appointments this week that are making working a challenge.

I've also been working more on cleaning up our house prior to the family invasion this weekend. The bedroom is completed. We have a few more things to move out of the way in the living room and need to hang a towel bar in the bathroom for them. Then it's just doing a regular cleaning of everything and we should be as ready as we can be. 

Take care, and I'll see you Monday for April's OMG linkup and then my regular post on Wednesday.

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, Alycia Quilts, and Ms P Designs.