Stories from the Sewing Room

Happy Veterans Day to those of you who have served.  

I'm back to being my mostly hopeful self this week.  Thanks to those of you who reached out.  😊  I'm looking forward to January 2021.

I've finished the custom quilting project (Fandango), but I will wait until next week to share it so that its owner gets to see it first.

After I finished Fandango I needed to switch my long arm back over to being set up for computer work.  Before I started on someone else's quilt, I wanted to test things out on one of my own.  I was planning to finally quilt Frolic, however, I pulled out the wide backing I had set aside and discovered when I unfolded it that there were grease stains in the middle.  I hadn't even unfolded it from when it was purchased, so that was not a pleasant surprise.  And of course it's been sitting around forever since I didn't use it for what I had initially purchased it for.  Luckily some treatment with Dawn and a trip through the washer took removed the grease.  Now I get to iron a three yard piece of wide back!  Yippee!  

Since Frolic wasn't a quick option, I pulled out a Civil War reproduction top that's been hanging around for several years (pattern by Bonnie Blue Quilts).  I bought backing fabric on New Year's, so yay me for quilting it in the same year as purchasing backing!  😏 The Civil War top was much smaller than I remembered, only 50" x 50".  I quilted it with Abundant Feathers and it looks pretty nice.  It will need to wait for binding since my goal this month is to make my "yarn" from selvedges and start knitting.

Speaking of that project, progress is being made.  I have two large balls of selvedge yarn and there are still more selvedges to go.  The balls are at least 6" across right now, and quite unwieldy. I have no idea how much yardage it will take to actually knit the rug.  I guess I'll keep on tying on more pieces until I run out and hope that there is enough there to finish my project.

I also had to repair one of my masks. The metal nose piece broke in half!  I decided to make a spare one while I was at it.  We each have an assigned fabric in our house.

Have I mentioned that my friend and I are running a block-of-the-month program for our guild in 2021?  I've been busy writing and formatting directions and my lovely friend is testing them to make sure they make sense and have correct measurements.  Kudos to all you pattern writers out there.  I'm finding it much more difficult to make quilting directions than to make instructions for all my doll clothing patterns.  

I'm about half way done with the monthly instructions and decided maybe I should make a test quilt too.  While I tried hard to use fabric from my stash, I was really struggling with colors on this one.  I ended up ordering fabric for my quilt yesterday (and my husband doesn't like my color choices, but whatever). 

We took some photos of my completed Water Drop quilt (pattern by Maeberry Square).  It's really hard to get a photo of it where the colors look correct.  The background fabric is Kona White.  The other three are Kona Cypress, Cyan, and Celestial.

My husband has put three of our windows completely back together.  Our master bath is completed and one of the bedroom windows.  It's nice to have a blind back on the window.  I tried to take a picture of it, but the picture came out terrible and I couldn't color correct it, so no sharing. I asked him to do our office window next because it's nearly impossible to work at the computer in the afternoons due to glare.  I really want the blinds back up in there.  After that, he'll move back to our remaining bedroom windows.

I guess that's it for this week.  Stay safe, friends.

Linking with For the love of geese and My Quilt Infatuation.

My goal for November is to transform all these selvedges into something useful.  I've been collecting them for several years.  Some of them were gifted to me via the #getyourquiltywishesgranted hashtag.

My goal is to at least start knitting my project by the end of the month.

Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal November Link-up

I've been working on a custom quilting job this week.  Here's a sneak peek.