Stories from the Sewing Room

Another month, so many choices, so little time. I have plenty of things I'd like to work on, including the following projects.

I've had this mini kit forever. 

I'd like to make a sunflower quilt. It's hard to find good brown fabrics. My husband was near a quilt shop while returning carpet samples, so I had him stop and pick a few. 

I sewed half of this Chalk quilt top at my day retreat a few weeks ago. I'd like to finish it off.

I need to get these two projects done. The first is my small guild BOM program I ran last year. I need to cut sashing and assemble.

And this is my Macaron mystery. It needs to have the backing pressed and seamed and then be quilted. Obviously this won't be happening any time soon. 😐

Duty is winning out over wants this month. My goal is to finish piecing my Grassy Creek top. I am tired of it being on the design wall. The last time I worked on it was in January, so it is time. 

I have sewed absolutely nothing for myself over the past week. I bound five quilts for others. My goal was to quilt more than five quilts last week. I failed. I had a needle break and do damage on Friday. Luckily, it is all repairable/replaceable, but I do need to remove all the stitching I'd completed, which was about 1.66 rows. It's slow going and depressing. I was hoping to get a bit ahead since some people have been waiting a really long time, but now I am more behind. If you're one of the people waiting on me, I am so very sorry.

On the plus side, I did hit my minimum requirement of quilting five quilts. 

Here's Elle's quilt, quilted with Augusta.

Next up is Connie's cute little table runner, quilted with a modified version of Raindrops.

Another of Connie's, quilted with Midnight Sparkle.

One of Janice's, quilted with Ginger Leaf.

And another of Connie's, quilted with Hiding Out.

Some good things happened over the last week too. APQS has some machine maintenance classes scheduled and my husband and I will attend the one in July. I'm a bit nervous because other than a few trips to see our parents, we have gone pretty much nowhere since Christmas of 2019. I'm also excited because I will visit a state I haven't been to before and I will learn a ton of stuff.

Another nice thing is that our neighbors gifted us a bunch of Norway Spruce saplings, so my husband installed them along our lot line. Hopefully they will make a natural fence/screen for us. We've been told the trees can grow up to two feet/year. We'll see. You can see some white stakes in the back of the picture. That's just a few of them. They make a right angle at the furthest one out and then run along the line, but I didn't want to put my neighbors' house in the picture.

We have our building permit in hand and my husband is eagerly planning his new garage/workshop. If you have eagle eyes, you might see a few of his orange stakes marking his space in the picture above. He installed the required silt fence over the weekend. I supervised. In other words, I stood there and watched him work. 😏

Our garden is starting to look good. I do see some more of the stinking spearmint sprouting, but I am too busy this week to deal with it. And it's supposed to rain a lot.

I'm taking a class today with Cathy Geier, who spoke at my large guild last night. I will be learning how to make a landscape quilt. This is pretty out of my comfort zone, but it's good to learn new things. The class was very reasonably priced and includes all the fabrics! And though I really can't afford time off right now, the break will probably do me good mentally.

Our replacement carpet is scheduled to be installed April 25 - 27. This is a good/bad. Good because maybe it will be done for good this time, but bad because I can't get in my sewing room while the installers are here.

My lettuce is continuing to regrow. Not a lot, but still a lot more than I ever expected.

I haven't gotten the lettuce and peas sown outdoors yet. Maybe this weekend. Have a great week.

This one was definitely a stretch, but I finished my last block to meet my OMG yesterday. My goal was to make three blocks for the Flower Patch SAL and two blocks for #Trending.

You saw two of my blocks last week in my progress photo for Flower Patch--the cardinal block on the lower left and the lone block on the upper left. 

I also made an extra bird block. Only two more blocks left to make for this one!

For #Trending, I needed to make February and March's blocks. Here is February's.

It got combined with one of the bee blocks from a few months ago.

And the unicorn for March. I messed up so much on this block--sewed things in the wrong direction, cut pieces the wrong size repeatedly, trimmed pieces to the wrong size, etc. But I got it done! And it is a really big block! (Over 25" x 25".) I think there are only two more blocks to go on this project too. Again, part of a past month's bee blocks got sewn into this block.

Other than that, not much has been happening. I bound two quilts and delivered them to their owners on Saturday. 

My small guild had a quilt retreat and I was a day tripper (as usual). It was fun; I hadn't been around other people that much in a couple years. I got about half the rows for a throw quilt made and talked a lot; probably a lot more than I should have. ha ha.

I quilted five more quilts. 

One for Elle, quilted with Starry. The thread is actually light gold, but looks white in my picture.

Sara's memory quilt, quilted with Basic Swirls.

Amber's king size quilt, hand guided loopy meander. Loved all the seashell blocks and pretty batiks in this one.

Legene's, quilted with The Tempest. This one has some math symbols fabrics. You can see a bit of one in the lower left. I do love my math.

And Elle's, quilted with Hopscotch.

I'll be quilting a very large quilt for Elle today, along with binding some of Pat's quilts. And we have a visit to the orthodontist this afternoon, which will interrupt my work day.  My poor child has been in braces over five years. I hope we are done soon. Anyway, here is the quilt while I had it spread out on the floor to measure prior to loading it.

My goals for the next week are to get at least five more quilts quilted 😰 and complete all outstanding bindings. I'll be thinking about what next month's OMG should be. I have quite a few candidates. It will be want vs. need again.

We finished spreading mulch in the large garden over the weekend. I weeded the side garden and my husband spread mulch on that garden too. I still need to clean up the upper garden and maybe add some mulch. I found at least four saplings I'm going to need to cut out (thanks, squirrels). I might remove more of the lamb's ear too.

We haven't planted the vegetable garden yet because our weather has been garbage. It's supposed to be in the upper 70s today and the high tomorrow is in the 40s. I took pictures of some of the daffodils last night. Thankfully they've survived the heavy rains, light snow flurries, and temperature extremes this week.

I harvested my lettuce again. I'm not sure how much will regrow this time. I said that last time I harvested and was shocked to have a meal's worth again. Here's how it looks now. I'm expecting only one or two to have any growth. We'll see.

Guess that's about it. A few things of note: I became a great aunt. I helped my daughter file her first taxes. I have my taxes ready to file, pending final review. We selected the replacement carpet for the basement. Not the color I was hoping for, but hopefully the product will hold up better. See you next week with my goal.