Finally, Some Sewing

I haven't stitched an inch since well before the move.  I've embroidered some, which is its own pleasure, but not the same for me as taking fabric and making it into something.

Last night, in particular, I was going to be missing one of the local guild meetings.  Again.  This time because Wonderful Husband is in San Francisco at a conference.  So maybe I'd just hit my tipping point of enough, because I plugged in the machine, pulled out the box of fabric that came to the apartment with us, and dug out one of the two projects in it, which is foundation-pieced 8.5" string blocks.

I was doing them as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, so I had sorted out all my green strings into a ziploc back in early March.  And fortunately my box of thread had ended up at the apartment as well!  So I threaded up the machine and set to sewing as I could and as little boys allowed.

So far, four green string blocks!

And when I finish them, I will only be two months behind on the RSC (blue and orange, apparently).  I wonder if the rest of my strings are maybe in one of the semi-accessible boxes at the front of the storage unit....

Kissing Frogs

According to my dad, house-hunting is like a fairy tale.  You kiss an awful lot of frogs before you find a prince(ss).

He's not wrong.

Our tally so far: weird layout; structural damage; too far away; weird layout; structural damage.  Plus two that accepted other offers the day we were to go look at them, and one (foreclosure) where the (bank) owner didn't respond to our realtor for an entire week, so we never got to see it.

Another Moving Day

Finally, two weeks after we moved into the apartment, our stuff arrived yesterday!

The boys' room is all set up.  Our bedroom is half-done (hooray for no longer sleeping on an air mattress on the floor!), and I have at least my main sewing machine and one box of fabric to play with.  And a cutting mat.  The location of my rulers, thread, rotary cutter, etc., have yet to be determined.  Many boxes to open and sort through here, as well as a storage unit stuffed to the gills.

I Aten't Ded

(Post title borrowed from Terry Pratchett's work.)

In short, we have sold our house in Anaheim, California, and moved our household up to an apartment in Gig Harbor, Washington.  Where we are now camping and hoping the moving company will call us one day soon and tell us they'll be delivering our stuff to us.  Thus, not really much going on beyond varying flavors and degrees of stress....

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.