Happy Earth Day!
I'm pleased to share with you my finished Meadowland quilt, my second finish of the year. My finished quilt is 70" x 85". I added four inch borders around the outside of the finished top, but other than that, I sewed it exactly as the pattern, by Then Came June, instructed. It's a pretty easy pattern to sew. I think it would be fun to make a half-size or smaller version. I do love working tiny. :)
I quilted my top with the Wishbone pantograph by Threaded Quilting Studio and used white Pellon cotton batting. As a member of the Longarm League, I am offering 20% off edge to edge quilting on Meadowland tops through the end of July. Hop over to my quilting website, Quilting by Anne-Marie, to sign up. Or send me a message. I'm pretty easy to work with.
I'll throw this out there too--are you a quilt pattern designer? I'd love to partner with you for a project or two (or more!). Message me or leave a comment and let's talk.
I'm still slowly moving along with projects. Many of my mornings are still spent doing math with the kids. I'm teaching my son Algebra and trying to tutor my daughter in pre-calc/trig. Although I can't remember much of the trig, we are doing pretty well with it. I think we have two weeks left. My daughter will be done after that (she's a senior!), but my poor son will be stuck doing Algebra until we finish the book we are working through. I'm such a mean mom. Ha. Lest you think I am torturing him, he absorbs math more quickly than just about anyone I've ever worked with. Did you know that I have a degree in math? I taught math and English before my kids were born.
Anyway, back to the projects. I finally finished sewing together the main part of the Frolic quilt. That feels so, I don't know, epic? What a lot of work. This coming from someone who actually completed the 365 quilt in the 365 days. Now on to the borders.
I have not made any further progress on the Unity quilt, the Fig Tree blocks, or anything else. I did finally figure out a color layout for the For the love of geese pattern. I need to print all the foundations for that. (Had my husband buy a case of paper when he went to Sam's last week.)
I did cut, sew, and quilt another Quilts for Kids quilt. I cut and sewed the majority on Monday afternoon and added the two remaining borders and quilted it yesterday morning. I used a pattern that came with my software. I'm calling it "boxes". We thought it went well with the robot fabric. I used a remnant of Quilters Dream Blend batting. I'll try to bind it this week, and then it will get added to the pile. I'm looking forward to the day when I can finally ship in all the quilts I've accumulated for them.
I just love when you can work from stash and create something of value. I will admit that I have a bit of a problem of "saving" special fabrics. Or most fabrics. I am working on shopping my stash first. It's worked out pretty well over the last few months. It doesn't do anyone any good to just put the fabric in a box and put it in the closet.
I've spent several days this week working on my sister site, Quilting by Anne-Marie. I'm hoping to debut its snazzier look soon. Also, I would like to upgrade to a larger long arm machine, so I am selling mine. If you know anyone who may be in the market for a computerized workhorse, let me know. It's great for charity quilts with the robotics and it loves doing custom freehand work.
Let's move on. My couple tulips outside my sewing room window are blooming. I've noticed a few of the irises are starting to bud. Many of the seeds we planted in the vegetable garden are sprouting. One of the crabapple trees we planted last year is covered in blossoms.
We've found a bird nest in one of the clematis. The clems are popular nesting sites in our yard. I believe this one is a cardinal nest. Speaking of cardinals, we have a male attacking his reflection in pretty much every window on the back of the house. We have placed stuffed animals in the windows and added lots of window clings in an effort to make him stop. Ugh.
How about something happier? Food? Does anyone else feel like you just sit around and eat constantly during quarantine? I have gained a few unwanted pounds. We are cooking a lot more, of course. We've been trying new recipes since we have nothing but time right now. Here are a few recipes we made last week that were really good.
Sesame Ginger Beef--I really liked the green beans cooked like this. We used a one inch chunk of ginger rather than the three inches it called for.
Sour Cream Chive Bread--This bread machine recipe is so good we've made it twice this week. Did I mention that we bought some chives from a local farm and got way more than we expected? I think we had at least two cups chopped. Half a cup went into the loaves of bread. :)
Do you like to cook? I have several recipe boards on my Pinterest account. I haven't made all of the pinned recipes, but I've made many of them. I'm always happy to weigh in on what we liked or not. I do delete the ones that we really didn't like.
Linking with For the love of geese, My Quilt Infatuation, From Bolt to Beauty, and Finished or Not Friday and Meadow Mist Designs.
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.
I am working on a secret project. I cut all the fabric as directed, started sewing, got to the trimming part, and thought, "What on earth? What did I do wrong?" We make an assumption or trust that the instructions are correct when we use a pattern and sometimes, unfortunately, that trust is misplaced. I didn't do anything wrong other than blindly follow directions. The cutting directions in the pattern were way off on the initial sizes to cut and sew.
The pattern picture seems to indicate that I'd just be trimming a small margin off to end up at 1-1/2" squares. I cut around 1/2" off each HST. This is why math matters. There was so much waste. I'm all for making HST slightly oversized to trim and get super-accurate. I am not for making them so large that you could have made several more blocks just from the trimmings.
It brought to mind an interview with John Urschel, a former pro football player who is pursuing his PhD at MIT, that I read this past spring in TIME magazine. I will freely admit that I hadn't heard of John Urschel before reading this article. I don't follow football. I am, however, a fan of math and reading and smart people, and this piece caught my attention. I've been thinking about something Urschel said in the article ever since I read it.
“Some people will sort of joke about, ‘Oh, I was never good at math.’ But people don’t joke about being illiterate. Being mathematically illiterate is quite a dangerous thing.”
This statement really got me thinking. And while being a bit off on some quilt math isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, being math illiterate is a big deal in one's life. As a society we need to do better at educating kids in math, not just the facts, but the thought processes and understanding, and the practical uses of math. It's not just Algebra and computation. It's how we relate to the world, how things work, and being able to make good decisions based on facts.
Along this same vein, we also need to do better at information literacy. So many people blindly believe everything they read/hear from their chosen network. People need to learn to think critically and evaluate the motivations behind why someone may present the information they do. Are they trying to sell something? Why would they say this? What do they get out of it? How do we know what information to trust and what makes some information more valuable than others? It all fits together, math and information literacy and critical thinking.
So, anyway, let's get back to sewing. I'm most of the way done with the piecing on my son's NASA quilt. I had to get his approval on the direction of the last set of borders. This top is a kit from Riley Blake. We swapped some of the fabrics since we'd previously bought some yardage of other prints in the line.
I am trying something new with piecing the backing using a panel as well. The fabrics all shrunk when I washed them, so I think my calculations are going to be a bit off. I think I'll still have enough yardage to make the back work. You can see that I'll need to trim a good inch off the panel to make my side yardages work. It'll be close, but fingers crossed it'll be enough. It'll be fun to see how centered the backing ends up too. It's hard to predict backing placement with the long arm.
I need to finish off my mystery sewing project since that has a deadline.
I'm also planning to make some napkins. We had company recently and I didn't have more than four of any napkin except Valentine's Day, which wasn't appropriate for August. So I'm going to use this dinosaur fabric to make eight napkins so that we have enough for most situations where we'd have guests.
My friend gave me this Christmas flamingo fabric, so I'm going to make some fun napkins with it too.
Do you use cloth napkins? What things do you make to reuse in your house?
Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.
P.S.--I have a hold on John Urschel's book at the library. I'll let you know how it is. :)
