A Finish!

Haha, last night I finished sewing the binding onto the Spiraling Geese quilt, and finished dating the back.  It still has to go through the washer/dryer, but here it is:

It's still a bit wobbly at the edges (which it shouldn't be, as the striped/branch parts of the spiral were cut from the length of the fabric and therefore should not stretch), but I'm hoping that's just because of handling while sewing the binding on.  I'll wash and dry it today and see if the issue persists.

And here's the backside, with all the extra geese blocks pieced in so that I could stretch the blue backing material and make it enough.

Next, I think, is looking at the various orphan blocks I have and figuring out if I have enough to make a strippy quilt out of them....

Sunday Sunday

Not much sewing got done yesterday, other than continuing to work on binding the Spiraling Geese quilt.

In the evening, however, I broke out the book I bought from Edyta Sitar at Road to California (I will not get to attend her class in April, waaah! ;_;) and paged through it while the boys sequentially bathed.  This worked until Jazzy splashed water at it.  It is currently drying on the kitchen counter with paper towels between the pages....

We did take my parents out to dinner for my mother's birthday (which is actually today!), and some yardwork and laundry got done.  As did the relatively important transfer of the boys' birthday height markings onto a painted board which will be taken with us.

Stress Bunny!

If all goes well, our escrow will close on this coming Friday.  And then we have 29 days to pack up, find a new place to live up in Washington, and move out.

This is, as you might imagine, a tiny bit stressful.  So much so that I could not get to sleep Thursday night.  I finally gave up at a quarter after one in the morning, and got up.  And started cleaning and tidying what I could without being loud.  Went back to bed at half past four, finally fell asleep some time after five.  Friday night I slept somewhat better, but still not great.

Yesterday we started reaming out the garage, so we can get it organized and retrieve our things from the storage unit, as there is no way a moving van could get into the storage unit area.  A carload of stuff got taken to Goodwill, and our recycling and trash bins are now full.

Quilting-wise, I went through my bag of binding scraps and pulled out all the blue ones, as well as one piece of green to make up the length, pieced them together, and stitched it on to the front of the Spiraling Geese quilt.  I've started hand-stitching it down to the back.

A Few of My Favorite Strings...

Life.  Stuff.  Things!  But I have been forcing myself to sew (and to get in some Swedish and Japanese practice each night on DuoLingo).

In lieu of anything more project-oriented, I've been working on my project for this year's Rainbow Scrap Challenge!  Which is taking my three big jars of scraps and turning them into 8.5" blocks.  Here they are as of last night:

I have nine red blocks and seven yellow blocks and not enough left of either color to do even one more.  So I'm counting that as a win.  They haven't been tugged and trimmed and pressed yet; I figure that can wait until further along in the process.

I am currently undecided as to whether I'll pick out another color and keep going for the week and a half until March's color is announced, or turn my energies in another direction.  Of course, I could try and catch up on the Tiny Tuesday blocks....

Tic-Tac-Toe

Fighting against not enough sleep, between pre-7am wakeups (cat, little boys) and staying up late working on finishing a story that I've left abandoned since 2013.  But that's done now, at least.  So, bed early for a while.

Yesterday I cut and sewed a sample block for Block of the Month at guild on Tuesday:

It's called Tic-Tac-Toe and I adapted it from a Quilt magazine pattern from 1995.  The original block was 15"... mine is 9.5".

That said, I switched back to the Singer Rocketeer for this, put on a new foot, and forgot to check my seam allowances.  So the sample block is about 3/8" too small.  Grr~!  Well, teaches me a lesson.  I used it for the picture on the handout, and will chuck it into my collection of orphan blocks.  I've cut out the pieces for three others (there's room on the display board for three blocks plus instructions) and will sew those up today, being more careful of my seam allowance.

Wednesday, Wednesday...

In escrow for the third time.  Had our house inspected yesterday for the third time.  Blargh.

In happier news, I pushed through and finished the quilting on the Spiraling Geese quilt:

Ginormous feathers in the ginormous geese!

As part of keeping myself busy during the inspection, I trimmed the quilt and pulled out my bag of bindings.  I have enough of the bright bindings already pieced together to do it, but I'm not sure.  I'll look at it all again later.  Right now I need to fill my head with a Pink Floyd song (Learning to Fly) in order to write a climax scene (narrative climax, not sexual) so that I can stop thinking about that one scene and go back to working on the stuff leading UP to that one scene!