Sick Children and Sewing On.

One and a half sick little boys.  What fun!  Particularly since Jazzy, who is still nonverbal, is much the sicker of the two.  A regular little snot factory at the moment.  Nonetheless I hied all three of us out into the garden this afternoon to do some cleanup work and let them rob the blueberry bushes.  Squiddle, at least, can be told to only pick the blue ones.  Jazzy as yet has no such discernment.  On the other hand, Jazzy will happily eat tomatoes, while Squiddle still just makes a face and spits them out....

I got the vintage orange-sashed nine-patch basted today and around one-fifth of its blocks quilted.  I only have maybe one quilt's worth of batting left on the roll.  Plus a king-sized packaged batt I bought years ago.  Plus some scraps I could maybe Frankenbatt together into a wallhanging (as I did for Christmas Landing).  I might be batting-free when we move, which would be well-timed.

Today I also typed up the minutes for my guild secretary job and sent them out to the other board members to beta-check before Tuesday's meeting.  I'm not looking forward to telling them that I may be moving out of the area mid-term. :(  But I did bite down and enter Nancy's Quilt in the Orange County Fair.  Given the reactions to it from both my guilds, I have a good feeling about its chances.

Busy Weekend

Biting the bullet and accepting that it's time to move means starting to do all the little things to the house that will shiny it up to entice buyers.  Like painting the exterior where the water heater tank hut used to be.  And accepting that even taking a sample in still doesn't mean a perfect paint match, alas.  Still, it's a lot better than the gaping unpainted patch it was.

Also out in the side yard, I pulled the dying blueberry bush from the garden bed and replaced it with a healthy one of the same variety.  And planted more leek and bean seeds to help remedy the patchy germination where cats decided to sprawl, roll about, and god knows what else shortly after the initial planting.  I've also dug amendments into about half the herb/fountain bed, the rest to be done tomorrow.

I completed the Christmas Landing wallhanging and plan to enter it in the Orange Grove quilt show this year:

I also completed my block for the President's Quilt for Orange Grove:

And I went through my stash of mostly vintage quilt tops and pulled out one that will be relatively easy to quilt - sashed nine-patches, with just one tiny repair to do on the border.  I pieced together a backing and wrote out the label... and just need to sew it on and get it basted.  But today I kind of lost my mojo and had to push through things to get stuff done.  No sewing..

Results; Efforts

Chalk pounce: dismal failure.  I'm willing to try it again on something that's not a string-pieced border and see if it works better there, but for this project... yeah.  Nope.  Nonetheless, I got the Christmas Landing all quilted, and I pulled bits of fabric from my Christmas scraps bin and made a scrappy red binding, which is maybe a quarter sewn down to the backside now.

The boys have been so admiring of the volunteer pumpkin plant at Nana's house (one of the pumpkins is already the size of a basketball) that I told them if I could get the big bed cleared in the kitchen garden, I'd put some pumpkins in it.  I got it three-quarters cleared yesterday. I also finally got some straw mulch put onto one of the unmulched beds.

Today, since we have a realtor coming to give us advice tomorrow, I'm trying to tidy up the house a little.  It's an uphill battle all the way, but I've got at least the master bed and bath looking decent.  The boys' room is okay.  Now I just have the rest of the disaster areas to consider.

And, of course, there's the little voice in the back of my head pointing out that if we're going to move, I'm not going to be here to enjoy the garden, so why am I trying to put effort into it.  I shut up that voice by pointing out that I don't know when the move will occur, and a healthy, flourishing garden will look better as far as selling than a dead, weedy one.

Busy Stuffs

Over the weekend I got the Christmas Landing wallhanging basted and I have it about half quilted... just the two borders to do.  I pulled out one of my grandmother's cable templates out and will be using that for the outer border.  I got a chalk pounce for $2 at last month's Orange Grove Quilt Guild meeting, so I'm planning to experiment with that and see how well it works.

We've been wrestling with several things lately.  One of which is getting Squiddle toilet-trained.  He's been doing so well with not wetting himself overnight that last night he got to wear big boy undies to bed, rather than the overnight diapers.  So, of course, this morning he wet the bed for the first time. :/  Sigh.  We invited Murphy in, I guess.

We've also been dealing with the school district.  Squiddle's supposed to start Transitional Kindergarten (pre-K) in fall, but his assigned school is very poorly rated.  And the system is sufficiently labyrinthine that we missed the deadline to request a transfer.  So now we need to decide - does he not go to TK (it's not required), do we try for a fall transfer (which means he goes to that school for 2-3 weeks and then gets uprooted to a better one), or do we let him attend the assigned school for a full year and then transfer him (it's only TK)?

Corollary to the school district woes, we've also accepted it's time to move.  We want to be in a better school district, in a house with either one more bedroom or a dedicated office.  The thing is, I love our home and all that we've done to it in the last eight years, and all that we could still do to it, but... even if we built on to it, we can't improve the schools.  So now we're faced with cleaning, repairing, selling.  The realtor who helped us buy Greenwood is coming out on Friday and we hope he can tell us where we should be focusing our money on improvements prior to selling.  On the bright side, this is sure helping me decide to lighten the load and purge stuff!

Finally Friday

The reorganization of the sewing nook has taken it out of me.  However, it's now mostly done... just the one heap of stuff lined up along the back of the sofa that needs to be sorted through and dealt with.

That said, how is it that I keep getting rid of huge heaps of stuff and it never makes my remaining stuff take up any less room????

Grar.  Whatever.  In celebration, I finally took 3" off the too-long Lilo and Stitch pyjama bottoms I'd made Wonderful Husband for Christmas.  And yesterday I got some stitching time in and got these two sets of blocks finished:

The first set is a Rail Fence variation for Block Lotto. I already had my box of 2.5" squares by the machine for a scrappy Double Irish Chain I'm slowly working on, so why not?  The white strips are from the leftover scraps of the dishtowels that had the embroideries for Nancy's Quilt.

The second set, the blue Friendship Stars, are for the Orange Grove Quilters Guild block of the month for next month.  The blue came from this set of scraps that I snagged from the Orange County Quilters Guild freebies table:

(And, no, this is not the reason why the sewing nook refuses to compact.  Most months I don't get anything. My theory is that rearranging everything makes it fluffier.)

I've pulled out the next time-sensitive project, a block for the President's Quilt for OGQG, which will also come from the above set of freebie scraps, but it's that time of month so we'll see if I can get any sewing in today or not....

A Late Spring Cleaning?

Two patches out of seven sewn on to the king-sized quilt top.  I didn't get anything basted today, but I did tear apart and start reorganizing my sewing area.  This act included two totes' worth of fabrics (and some beads and cross-stitch patterns) to be dumped on the freebies table at guild next month, with whatever is left to go to the Bargain Basement at Costume College.  And two bags of yarn to give to my guild president, since I know she crochets.  The sewing area is only about half back together, and I know there's more still I should cull, but already I'm feeling a bit lighter.

My aunt called this evening to let me know that her mother loved the quilt, and that "they all agreed" ("they" here meaning, I assume, all four sisters and their mother) that I should enter the quilt in the county fair.  Well... why not?  For my own mother, the boys and I got her some gift cards to the garden center, which she seemed pleased by.  I think she has a project in mind.

And Mom also recently passed on to me The Shop on Blossom Street, by Debbie Macomber.  I've been curious about her books, since I see them in passing at the thrift shops often enough.  And reading it, it fit very well into the milieu of craft-themed books that I enjoy, even though this was focused on knitting and I don't knit.  I may've stayed up late last night, completely absorbed in the last quarter of the book....  At any rate, if I find other of her books for cheap, I'll probably pick them up to read and pass on to my mother in turn.

From No-Jo to Sew-Jo

I thought I wanted to take some of the fabric I got from the freebies table at guild and see how large a top I could make from it.  I really did!  Vague plans to donate it to the Quilts For Kids table, etc.  I even started cutting.

But then... I just had no mojo.  I found part of the kitchen counter.  I pushed the boys on the swings. I did dishes and dishes and dishes.  I finally sterilized the toys that were in the tub when Jazzy pooped during his bath.  So I was productive.  Just not with anything that fed my artistic soul.

So when Wonderful Husband asked what I wanted for Mother's Day, I thought I might ask for the time/space to get a couple quilts basted.  I have the Bonnie Hunter Jamestown Landing wallhanging ready to go.  But if I'm asking him to, say, take the boys to the park for a bit, I want to get at least one bigger quilt prepped too.

And then I remembered that, in among the way too many quilt tops I have made or acquired, I have two my grandmother made that I really should do something with.  So I pulled things off my shelving unit (they're still all over the floor), found the correct bin, and dug to the bottom.

One is a sampler quilt which, hey, now I know where I got many of those fabrics from!  Wonderful Husband agreed with me when I mentioned maybe adding some borders onto it.

The other is a king-size finished top alternating Puss in the Corner blocks with Kaleidoscope blocks, all in that wonderful late '80s/early '90s dusty rose and blue palette.  (And, again, playing "hey, there's that fabric from my stash!")  Only, two of the Puss in the Corner rectangles and five of the Kaleidoscope kites have torn/been cut/shredded.  They're none of them the same fabric or tear pattern, either, so I don't know!  But I found some close-enough matches for the rectangles, and picked out one fabric to do all the kites in.  One rectangle is now whip-stitched over the shredded one, and the other is pinned and ready to go.  The kites will be trickier, as I'll need to template them first, but I think they're doable.  And I have a king batting I've had set aside, and I think I've even got a length of yardage which might do for the backing.  I might not have this ready to baste this weekend, but hopefully soon.

But hoo boy.  This is going to be the biggest thing by far that I've ever tackled quilting!

Small, Silly Things

My boys, Squiddle and Jazzy, have real names that start with "A" and "P."  Thus Wonderful Husband and I have come up with various nicknames to call them.  Alligator and Pterodactyl. Apple and Potato.  Etcetera.

This week I suggested adding Applique and Piecing to the list.

Wonderful Husband laughed. :)

The block of the month I do for Orange County Quilters Guild is now online!  You can check it out here.  Over last weekend we had a small heatwave leading to temperatures of over 90 Fahrenheit, and our house doesn't have air conditioning.  You can understand why I was craving ice cream, which in turn led to this Neapolitan Log Cabin block.  In hindsight, though, looking at the handout, I should have chosen a bolder pink for the center square...

o/~ I'm going quilting in the morning~

...ding-dong, the bells are going to chime!
Don't want to miss her, pack up the scissors,
get me to the workshop on time!

(With apologies to Stanley Holloway.)

Yesterday was my annual workshop!  It was a close thing; Squiddle is undergoing potty training currently, and getting to spend the day with Nana and Gampa both for my Wednesday guild meeting and the Thursday workshop was presented as a reward.  Fortunately, he seems to have gotten the peeing only in the toilet part down.  The pooping only in the toilet... well, that one remains a work in progress. :/

But!  He met the conditions Wonderful Husband and I had set, so he and Jazzy spent time with my parents and I took a workshop from Deanne Eisenman.  It wasn't packed - there were only nine other students - so we got a lot of individual attention.  The workshop project was one of the wallhanging quilts from her book Blooming Patchwork.  I liked the blocks in the wallhanging, but even more, I wanted to start learning hand applique.

Deanne's version of the quilt was done in lovely Civil War reproduction fabrics, but I decided I wanted to try working with the batiks I've picked up here and there over the years (seriously, I have no idea where I got most of them), with a few mottled tone-on-tone prints to make up the gaps.  I think I'd read somewhere that the tightly woven nature of batiks made them excellent for applique, maybe?  Plus I want a bright wallhanging.  The two I've done so far are both on the darker side.

Here's the pieced block I completed in class:

And here is my first foray into needle-turn applique:

(Yes, I deliberately fussy-cut the blue so the star would be in the center of the medallion.)  I've finished this medallion and moved on to the second one, and it's a bit weird how I can already tell that I'm better at it this evening than I was this afternoon.

But for now, as I write this, sleep calls, especially since I've been shorting myself of it the last two nights... on the evening end by frantically pressing and cutting pieces for the workshop, and on the morning end by getting myself and the boys up and dressed and fed and out the door so I could drop them off at my parents' place in time to get where I was going.

Sleep!

Nancy's Quilt, Finished

I wrote out the label yesterday morning, stitched it on by hand, tossed the quilt through washer and dryer (I'm quite pleased that there was little color bleeding onto the Color Catchers), and delivered it to my aunt.  So here is the finished project!

Laid out here atop my and Wonderful Husband's bed, the finished size is 74" x 88".  This entire quilt was made from my stash.  The only thing I purchased to make it was a spool of variegated blue thread, specifically to quilt the blue string blocks.

My aunt approached me last year with a set of six dishtowels, embroidered by her great-grandmother circa 1957 (for her parents' wedding) and asked me if I could make a quilt around them.  I pulled out a pad of paper and worked out a sketch while we talked over possibilities.  After a good soak in Oxiclean powder to remove the age stains, and a run through the washer/dryer, I ended up cutting 12" (finished) squares from the dishtowels, centering the embroideries as best I could.  I bordered those each with a 1" gold frame (which is actually harvest fabric... pumpkins, cornucopias, etc.... but cut this narrow, you can't really tell).

Next I sewed lots and lots (50) of Bonnie Hunter-style 7" diagonal string blocks.  My aunt said her mother's favorite colors were blue and green, so I worked my way through all my blue strings.  Then I pulled out all the blue scraps in my hatbox of scraps, and my bins of 1 1/2" and 2" strips.  I deliberately tossed in everything, trying to get color and contrast, value and variety (a Bonnie-ism!) in each block.  I especially made myself use up bits of fabric I was saving "for a special occasion."  When my grandmother died, we found some very nice clothing in her drawers, never worn, because it was for a special occasion.  I'm not going to hold out on myself like that!  I arranged them so the strings made zigzags, trying to make sure I didn't have the same fabric touching itself anywhere (I failed in two spots) and then outside of that all I put a 2" frame of the gold.

I had originally planned to use the green here as the outer border, but I didn't have enough of it for border, backing, and binding.  So I dug through my stash and found this vintage (36" wide) primarily blue and green print, which Wonderful Husband agreed was just right for the 7" border.  As it's directional, I made sure to cut the side borders along the length and the top and bottom borders along the width, so it keeps its orientation.  I sewed the binding down by hand - usually I stitch it by machine on both sides, but it looks a little nicer doing it this way.  You can see here that I quilted a vine with heart leaves into the outer border.  I used a green silk thread I had for both sides in the border.  For the string blocks, I used a variegated blue (my only purchase for this quilt) and just swooped back and forth across the strings.  For the gold frames, I used my walking foot and gold thread in the top - one line in the 1" frames, two in the 2" frame.

Here you can see the texture on the back.

For the embroidered blocks, I did use white thread in the bobbin as well as on the top.  I didn't want any dark thread shadowing on the white cloth.  And I didn't quilt on top of the embroideries, only around them.  The cotton batting I used allows for up to 8" between lines of quilting, so it should be fine.

I am very pleased with this quilt, and my aunt is as well.  It will be given to her mother next Sunday.  I mentioned that, if I was keeping it, this would be my entry in the OC Fair this year.  My aunt seems to think entering it in the fair anyway wouldn't be a problem.  Hmm.  I must think on that....

Sewing By Hand

I finished sewing the binding down on Nancy's Quilt yesterday.  It only took two days!  Fortunately I remembered to do some stretches, so my right arm isn't killing me today, though there are a few faint twinges.  I also trimmed up the dishtowels the embroideries came from, and did quick hems on the cut off side so I can hand them back to my aunt.  And I ironed one of the cut-off bits onto freezer paper, so I can write the label today.  Then attach that by hand!  But then it's done, goes into the washer and dryer, and gets delivered.  Good thing, too, as Mother's Day is a week from today!

Other items on my quilty to-do list: sew up Block of the Month samples, take pictures, import them into the directions sheet I just finished writing, print those up.  Cut out and sew up at least eight giant Flying Geese for that exchange.  And get everything prepped for the workshop I'm taking on Thursday.

Items on my non-quilty to-do list: fifty pages of editing for Wednesday night writing class, and coming up with salty/heathy snack items for said class.

Friday, I can collapse.

Busy Busy Busy!

Ugh.  I've been pushing through on some projects recently because they have deadlines coming up.  For instance, I made up ten scrappy Noon and Light blocks for Block Lotto for April (the limit is nine, but they were easiest to make by pairs so I donated the extra):

And apparently I won the Lotto for the month, so at some point I'll have 27 more blocks heading my way!  I did a quick counting sketch, and I think a sashed on point setting might give me a nice quilt... and only need me to make four more blocks.

I also typed up and sent out the April meeting minutes for my guild.  Officers meeting tonight!  I need to print out copies.

Yesterday I cleared off my doubled sewing table (I have my Singer 15 set up in front of my grandmother's sewing desk so I have a large surface to support quilting).  Right now I have Nancy's Quilt under the needle.  I got all the gold frames and border done (straight-line quilting) and all the blue string blocks (free-motion back and forth lines across the strings).  If I can quilt the six embroidered panels, the outer border, and get the first pass of sewing on the binding done today, I'll be good.  Mother's Day is just over a week and a half off, and I'll still need to hand-sew down the binding, make and attach a label, wash and dry and deliver the quilt.  Augh!  (And this weekend is scheduled to be Toilet Training Boot Camp for Squiddle, so I need to be done by then.)

Plus I have writing class tomorrow night (60 pages to edit), Member's Prom at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific on Thursday night (okay, just an excuse to go on a date and dance with my husband a bit), and Limited Class selections are due for Costume College by Friday.  Plus I need to write up a handout and sew up a few samples for Block of the Month for guild on next Tuesday, and get everything prepped for taking a workshop class next Thursday.  Busy busy busy!