A Finish or Two

One new car battery acquired!  And while I sat in the dealership waiting room, I just kept stitching and stitching and stitching, until this was finished just before my car was ready:

The label has been corrected, it has been washed (losing almost no color to the color catchers!), and placed on Squiddle's bed, as he requested:

Disappointingly, at Squiddle's eye appointment, his amblyopia showed no improvement.  So treatment has been stepped up from "a couple hours a day with an eyepatch" to "as soon as he gets home from school until he goes to sleep at night with an eyepatch."  He has another appointment in two and a half months - hopefully the increased and stricter regiment will have an effect.  If not, we will pursue treatment with a specialist.

On a slightly happier note, I stopped at Joann's on the way back from the dealership, where I was virtuous, and bought NO fabric!  But I did pick up the floss I needed to finish this little project:

And the backside, for honesty's sake:

Here the liner is, back in its basket.  I E-6000'd a hook onto the back of the basket a couple days ago, so the whole shebang is now ready to be hung on Jazzy's wall and filled with diapers, getting their storage up off the floor:

Next, I sew together the backing fabric for the Cloverleaf quilt and get that quilted.

Guild Night!

Last night was the first meeting of West Sound Quilters at their new location, and though I'm not entirely enamored of the long tables setup the Elks Club has going, I think that being in a much larger room made the meeting more enjoyable (for me, at least).  The speaker was a representative from Hoffman Fabrics, who gave us a talk on how batiks are made.

I sat there through the meeting, quietly doing this:

I didn't quite get it finished, but given the binding was a quarter stitched down when I got to the meeting, and three-quarters done by the time I left, I feel that I made good progress.  I showed off that quilt, as well as the Disney Star quilt.

After I finish the binding, this is my next project:

It's the fabric liner for the basket in which I keep Jazzy's diapers.  I plan to hang the basket on the wall, and tried soaking this stain out of the liner, but OxyClean failed me.  So I thought, looks kind of like a storm cloud.  I'll just embroider on a sun and rainbow, which can faintly bee seen in blue wash-out ink on the left, and then it'll be fit to be seen.

The Orange and the Black

Wow, this post marks one whole month where I've kept up with blogging every single day!  (Some posts, admittedly, less stellar than others, but life ebbs and flows like that.)

To amuse: over the weekend, for whatever reason the topic of discussion turned to vampires.  Then I stopped, and asked Squiddle if he knew what a vampire was.  His answer: "A vampire is a scary person who lives in a haunted house.  Well, they're not really a person...."  Can't say he's wrong!

Is it Monday that's traditionally for washing?  Because regardless, yesterday I churned through four loads of laundry, filled the dishwasher twice, made dinner for five (Squiddle's friend Koltin came over to play after school), as well as muffins, and sewed the binding to the Orange Nine-Patch quilt.

The work du jour, all trimmed and awaiting its binding:

I ended up not having quite enough of the binding fabric to do my usual 2.5" binding, so I went with a 2" binding, here laid out on the ironing board, looking a bit like zebra stripes:

Now I just need to do twenty-four feet of hand-stitching the binding to the back, correct the label, and it'll be all done.  No problem, right? :)

A Finish, and Quilting Finished

Since we had a rare sunny day yesterday, I asked Wonderful Husband to hold the Disney Star quilt over the railing of our back (south-facing) patio so I could get a good photo before it's given away to Niecelet on Friday.

The quilt is bound in the darkest of the four purples, the one on the upper left.  And there's not much left of it!  And while I'm at it, here are the pair of pillowcases that are going with the quilt, one thrifted, and one made to match:

The pink fabric in the homemade pillowcase isn't in the quilt (I didn't have enough of any of the fabrics for the body of a pillowcase), but the other two fabrics are.  Given that Niecelet loves Elsa, I had to use one of the Frozen fabrics for the band, and I made sure Elsa-and-Anna (and Kristoff-and-Sven) were centered.

And my final accomplishment yesterday was quilting all twenty-four remaining nine-patches in the Orange Nine-Patch quilt:

Please note how much thread is left on the spool.  Not much!  I'll finish it up sewing the binding on.

Small Things

Ugh.  I didn't get much done yesterday other than migrating a few of the Stitch plushies onto the shelves of Wonderful Husband's office.  (I have a vision of him on video conference calls with his coworkers, with a wall of Stitches behind him.  Fortunately, he also finds this image amusing.)  Well, I also went through my bookmarks and managed to purge a couple dozen.

Wonderful Husband, on the other hand, shifted furniture around in Jazzy's room and hung the book dinosaurs print on the wall in there.  Progress in making this house look lived in!  Now I just need to fix up that bookcase I bought for Jazzy, and then I can call his room done.  (And hang up the diaper basket so it's no longer sitting on the floor.)

And if I change out the walking foot for the hopping foot on my sewing machine, I can get back to work on the orange nine-patch.  Which Squiddle has asked me if it was intended for anyone, and when I said no one in particular, asked if it could be his.  The dimensions of it make me think it was intended for a twin bed, but I can certainly put it crossways on his double bed, so, sure.

Also, a random thought: Quilters By The Bay may be farther away and across a toll bridge, but they're a good deal more organized than the West Sound Quilters.  Because if I read the website correctly, the WSQ have our next meeting this Tuesday.  Yet the website still lists last month's (cancelled) meeting as the next, and the newsletter for this month hasn't come out yet.  I suppose years of working with Sandy and Jamie from the Orange County Quilters Guild spoiled me for competency and timeliness!

Blah Saturday

Not much to post about today, really.  I finished quilting the sashing on the orange nine-patch quilt, and tied off and buried all fifty-two thread tails.  And I went out and measured where I was considering putting garden beds around the back of the house, so I have numbers to look at and chart out and use to figure out how much this project would cost.

New Day, New Project (Kinda)

After getting both boys off to school and seeing Wonderful Husband off to the dentist, I got to work and hauled all the stuff I wanted immediately outta the way out to The Barn.  Then I put that last set of shelves together out in the garage and started organizing things.  I've got most of it done now, including about half those boxes from the family room out on the shelves.  Unfortunately, I discovered why I had stacked them in front of that wall: holes and level lines from where the last set of owners had their TV mounted to the wall.  Sigh.  I need to spackle and paint....

After that spate of productivity, I finished the pillowcase to go with the Disney Star quilt and tossed it all through the wash with a couple color catchers.  Both of which came out magnificently pink!  Which is why I use 'em.

Then I started in on the next project:

I have no memory relative to acquiring this quilt top.  It's a hand-sewn nine-patch, made probably in the 1950s or 1960s, going by the fabric.  There was one place I had to patch a rip in the sashing, matching the orange as best I could.  It's already partially quilted - my label on the back indicates I expected it to be finished in July of 2018.  I'll clearly need to be making a correction to that!

Thirty of the nine-patches are FMQ'd.  Twenty-four more to go:

But for the next couple days, I'll be tackling straight stitching in the sashing.  Hooray for the walking foot!

Painty Painty Paintingness

Last night, after the boys had been put to bed, Wonderful Husband and I hauled the shower room door out to the garage and I painted one side with base coat.  Tonight I'll go the enamel coat, let that cure for twenty-four hours, then tomorrow night flip it and base coat the other side.  While I was doing that, Wonderful Husband wrangled dishes and laundry and taped off the trim inside the shower room, so then I base-coated that.  I also pulled out the chippy over-the-john I'd bought for $4 at an estate sale several years ago, gave it a quick sand, and base-coated that as well.  It'll look good over the toilet in the shower room.  This all went so quick and easy (two hours, start to bedtime) that other than the massive home improvement burnout after fixing this house when we bought it, I'm left wondering why we haven't tackled these projects years ago.

Ah, inertia.

Since I'm on sort of a roll here, I'm seriously considering also painting the two small bookcases white during this eight-night painting spree....

But for now, I'm going to go wind a couple more bobbins for the orange nine-patch.

Busy Day

I spent some time working in the garden today, finally getting the herb bed amended, planted, and mulched.  At the end, it looked like this:

The boys and I took some of the scrap bricks and made a little path to the fountain.  Right now there's oregano, two Italian parsleys, a bee balm, a couple clumps of garlic chives, a lemon verbena, and some lemon thyme in there.  The new plants have tomato cages over them to protect them from small boys and cats until they're established.  I'd like to add a lavender plant and some flowers.  And put one of my mint plants in the big planter behind the verbena, now that I've moved the chives out of it and into the bed.  Only two more beds to go!  (Three or four if you count the ones in front of the house....)

I also pulled this project out of the garage:

This is a Singer Featherweight card table I bought at an estate sale many years ago for $8.  It was in rough shape - holes, gouges, duct tape residue all over.  Knowing what it was, I snatched it up for a learning project.  I sanded it down, filled the holes and gouges with wood putty, and set it aside.  For a long time.  Today I pulled it out of the garage, dusted it off, conditioned the wood, and stained it.  The light bits are the "stainable" wood putty.  (It lied.  I've touched the putty up with a brown and a red marker so it blends better now.)  Tomorrow I start putting the first of two poly coats on it.  I don't have a Featherweight, nor am I particularly interested in acquiring one, so I texted my friend Debi and asked her if she was still looking for a Featherweight table.  She is.  So hopefully next week she'll come take a look at it and buy it from me.  Last time I checked they usually go for around $100, so that's what I'm asking.  Given that the sanding, staining, and finishing supplies cost me around $40, it's not as much of a markup as the original purchase cost of the piece might make it seem.

And, finally, this is what's under my needle at the moment.  I've just about run out of the orange thread I've been using to quilt the blocks, though, so I've stopped until I can hit up Joann Fabrics in the morning and get another spool.  Since there's so much blue and green in the nine-patches, that's what colors I pieced together for the back.  And I'm thinking a dark brown print I have, if I have enough, will be perfect for binding it eventually.

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.