Stories from the Sewing Room

The next few weeks are going to be really busy for me as I finish off this year's client quilts. I also have the market show/sale next week that will eat up a few of my days.  To help me keep calm and focused, I've been planning out all the things I might like to do during my time off.

I want to get at least several of my own quilts quilted. These include:

• apple quilt (circa 2000!), custom and for a Christmas gift
• blue/white Chalk quilt
• SCQG BOM 2021
• #Trending
• Grassy Creek, providing I sew those borders. I haven't even started yet.

I have eight other quilts on my personal to-be-quilted list, but those five are my priorities.

I've been debating for a couple years now, but I'm going to rip out the quilting I did on my Under the Sea quilt because I just don't like it. 

I could create new balls of selvedge yarn and knit a rug for us. My selvedge bag is overflowing.

I need to repair my son's favorite pajama pants.

I am going to make my daughter a dress shirt. She's going to need business casual clothes for her D.C. trip and she has basically none.

I want to make myself several shirts. 

I want to make several more donation quilts for Quilts for Kids. Even though I have other things I should be focused on right now, I did pull out a stack of fabrics I'd set aside for one and started prepping them.

I need to finish binding my Flower Patch SAL. I'm about halfway around it now.

I need to watch more of my IntelliQuilter classes.

I want to learn how to use ProStitcher Designer.

I really need to deep clean my house. 

I need to get back on my regular exercise plan and stop eating so much junk (stress eating, ugh). I think my knee is just about ready for the treadmill, but the rest of the exercise may need to wait a few more weeks.

There's so much here that it is verging on chore status. We'll see. My vacation should be relaxing, so if most of it doesn't get done, that's okay. It's good to have goals.

I did fully finish the In and Out mini. I quilted it with Abundant Feathers and did hand binding. It was 14" prior to quilting.

I've made it this far with the trimmings from the holiday runner. The blocks are 4" finished. I'm not sure where I want to go from here. Does it need additional borders? I thought about adding cornerstones and then another border, but I also thought about just adding top and bottom borders and calling it good. What do you think?

I have been working a lot in order to try to extend my break by a few more days. I've completed six more quilts and the queue is under 20!

I quilted this for Brenda. It took me two days as it was a fairly large quilt. Quilted with Basketweave.

Toni's quilt, quilted with Hot Nights. My husband said I needed to turn this quilt to make the flames go sideways to look like Hot Rods (hot rod panel in center of quilt), so I did. This is for someone he and Toni work with, so I figured that was okay. I also bound this one.

Marilyn's Deco quilt, quilted with Ginger Hearts. 

Marilyn's Ginkgo quilt, quilted with Even Flow. This one was also loaded sideways so that the pattern ran top to bottom when complete. I was very pleased with how her quilts came out.

Pat's quilt, quilted with Turbo. I also bound this one.

Pat's other quilt, quilted with Stipple. Another binding job. She wasn't sure this one was worth quilting, but I had a few tricks up my sleeve--pattern choice, scale of pattern, batting choice {Hobbs 80/20 batting will shrink 3 - 5% when washed and dried and should be quilted no further than 4" apart. Most Quilter's Dream battings will shrink 1 - 3% and can be quilted much further apart.}, clothes steamer, and some fabric manipulation when necessary.

Meanwhile, my initial thought that Henrietta chicken is a rooster seems to be true. Henrietta's comb and wattles, while not as big as Smoky's, are significantly more developed than the hens'.

Henrietta

Smoky (with his eyes closed)

Beaker, we think

 And Henrietta and Smoky have taken to crowing every few mornings. So Henrietta is Henry, I guess. My daughter is kind of devastated by this because she's concerned they will be too loud for the neighbors and also that 2/5 of the flock are roosters and these are her pets. I have basically no concern about the neighbors since the chickens crow around 7:30 or 8 am and we are very quiet, considerate neighbors other than this. I'm not sure how it will go with two roosters though. 

Speaking of neighbors, remember last week when I was complaining that the lot behind us chopped down basically every tree on 1+ acres? Well, to add insult to injury, their excavator spent two days burning all the downed trees. We consulted with the fire marshall and the county has no rules about burning other than no trash. 😒 The burning disturbed the chickens but luckily it didn't smoke too badly. The same can't be said for someone else who lives behind us and burns a fire pit pretty much every. single. night. Monday night it was so bad that the smoke infiltrated our house. There was a cloak of smoke hanging over more than five acres. Yuck. How obnoxious. 

Another neighbor story: we've discovered that one of the neighbors likes to walk around in his driveway in his underwear in the evenings! My next door neighbor growing up did this as well. At least the current guy wears a shirt and not tighty whiteys or a Speedo bikini. And I can't see him from our house. Do you have any unusual neighbors?

We also had this happen last week. Both times it happened we were at the post office instead. No injuries the first time, no real details this time.

If you've made it through, thanks. I think I'm one of the most boring people ever, so I'm always pleasantly surprised when people read my ramblings.

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

Well, I can't avoid it any more. It's time to make the string pieced borders for my Grassy Creek quilt. My goal this month is to piece all the string units for the border.

I have prepped all the foundations I need, so it's just a matter of cutting and sewing and then removing those foundations. I'm hoping I have enough variety of grays left since I'm trying really hard not to buy anything. I've used most of my darker grays. I do have gray fabrics in my stash still, but grays can be all over the place--green grays, blue grays, pink or purple grays--know what I mean?

This is such a dull picture.

I don't particularly enjoy string piecing, probably because I way overthink it. 

The colors for Bonnie's newest mystery were released Monday. I'll download the clues, but I'm not planning to make this year's quilt right now. I have Grassy Creek, Unity, and Rhododendron Trail in progress. 

The next clue in Cheryl's Meadow Mist Designs Melodic Mystery comes out tomorrow. Cheryl's QAL are so easy to keep up with. I'm still really pleased that I was able to cut out the entire mystery quilt top from stash. I'm trying to make a big effort to only use what I have and finish all those UFOs. Have you seen my UFO list? 😳😆 I'm making decent progress, all things considered.

I did finish my table runner that I shared last week. I quilted it with Sawtooth Offset. It is now ready to go in the guild sale. I do wish I would have switched the border and binding fabrics with each other, but I didn't feel the need to rip off the borders either. I might have quilted it differently too, but at least I got to try out a new pattern.

I did not have quite enough clearance with my backing fabric, so I asked my husband for an idea. He used some composite shims and made a wedge so that my throat plate could clear the leaders. It's not very pretty, but it worked great.

I trimmed all the HST trimmings the runner generated. I did have some waste with this because most, but not all, of the units could be trimmed to 1.75". Since they all couldn't, I ended up at 1.5" since I didn't want to deal with 1.625" units. I think I'm going to make a square in a square unit for the center of the green block. I'll probably end up going with a mini version of the table runner, though with a slightly different center block.

I still need to quilt the reproduction fabric mini I shared last week and make the second one too. The second one is a bonus, so I'll get to it when I get to it. Maybe I'll sew a bit of that and then a bit of the string units and alternate to alleviate boredom.

The quilting is coming along nicely. Here's what I've completed this week.

Heather's quilt, quilted with Sugar and Spice.

Paula's, quilted with 60s Mod Butterfly.

Jan's, quilted with Turbo.

Linda's, quilted with Spring Thing.

Linda's, quilted with Interlocking Rain Lines.

And Paula's, quilted with Othello.

All in all, a lovely and varied group of quilts. 

I'm feeling pleased with my progress. I laid out my schedule and realized that if I work extra hard in November, I can extend my December "vacation" a bit. Not that it will necessarily be a vacation since I have plans to quilt at least five of my own projects. But at least I can choose to work or not on those without risk of disappointing anyone other than myself.

I harvested all my AeroGarden lettuce and had enough for a few salad meals for myself.

We put down a deposit on six, 5 - 6 foot, Norway Spruce to try to regain some of the privacy we had before the lot owners behind us clear-cut their lot. I'm still upset about that. It was needless to remove so much. It really just makes me sick. Anyway, the local nursery is really busy, so we are looking at a month or more before they can install them. 

The kids and I got the updated booster shot Friday. We all fared much better than my husband did when he got his. We were all just kind of lazy and low-energy Saturday and I have my third boob in my armpit again, just like I did after the previous booster. Plus side is that since I'm still taking the heavy doses of Aleve for my injured knee, the swelling goes down most of the day until the med wears off. I'll take the sluggishness and swelling over the actual disease any day, thank you very much.

One brag...my daughter got selected to participate in the NF Young Adult Leadership program in January. My baby will be heading back to Washington, D.C., to learn about leadership and advocacy and lobby for continued funding for NF medical research, which is done through the NIH and the DoD Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (the DoD program, mostly performed by Army researchers, has been funded since 1996, though in these recent, divisive times, it's had a hard time passing, hence the urgent need for advocacy). 

See you next week.

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.