Stories from the Sewing Room

While waiting for my (futile) turn at registering for classes at Quilt Con, I finished binding my Strawberry  Social quilt. At least something good came out of my time. This quilt was originally meant for my daughter, who loves strawberries. She selected all the fabrics, I assembled it fairly quickly, and then it got set aside because she thought I should custom quilt it. It's been so many years that she's no longer interested. I picked an edge-to-edge design, and here we are. 

A few details: the pattern is called Strawberry Social and is by The Pattern Basket. I quilted the Van Gogh design by Anne Bright on it. It measures approximately 53" x 66". 

Now that this one is finished, I can start my tiny little Nessie cross stitch!

I haven't accomplished any personal sewing other than removing the papers from a few of the Grassy Creek border units. 

I did quilt several quilts for others. The first one belongs to Annie, but I can't share it publicly until after Christmas! It's a Chilhowie, quilted with Elkweed.

The next two belong to Deb. She picked Good Vibrations for her Stars & Stripes quilt (pattern by Missouri Star).

I've also been working on a custom quilt for Vicki. I'm hoping for a finish on that one later today. I have the center panel and the dark blue inner borders left.

Here's a few of the blocks in closer view. She wanted them to look like snowflakes. Hopefully she sees my vision. 🤪

In other news, we have a neighborhood pigeon. It has a red band on its leg, which typically indicates that it's being used for racing and has gotten lost or abandoned. My daughter is trying to rescue it since the racing pigeons typically can't survive on their own in the wild. She and the neighbor almost had it yesterday afternoon. They captured it in the evening and next thing I know, my daughter is walking up the driveway with a pigeon in her hands.

They put it in the tote with wire lid that we used when the chickens were chicks and gave it some seeds and water. They then could get a photo of the tag and enlarge it. The tag had a company name and an ID number. She contacted some pigeon federation and found out that the company is a supplier out of Pennsylvania. She will call them when they open this morning and hopefully find out who this bird belongs to. 

The Rose of Sharon has tons of blossoms. 

We've been finding all sorts of fun rock specimens, including fossils and pyrite, in the crushed limestone gravel by the barn. 

That's about all I have this week. 

Linking with My Quilt Infatuation, For the Love of Geese, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Alycia Quilts.

Good grief, I have not been able to stay focused lately. I have too many things pulling at my attention. 

Before I get into everything, I want to brag about my daughter for a minute. She's been spending her days off working on drawing seamless patterns. She has them all uploaded to Spoonflower in her Seamless Stardust shop. We discovered that Spoonflower requires you to purchase all of your items, including different color ways, on a product prior to them allowing you to list them. She did the fill-a-yard thing. Here is one of her fabrics, based on our rooster Henry. I cannot draw at all, so I'm in awe here. She will take requests as well. :)

Ok, back to my stuff. I quilted my strawberry quilt. I'd originally made this for my daughter probably seven or eight years ago. She helped pick all the fabrics and then wanted custom quilting on it, so it sat. She is no longer interested in the quilt, so I picked the Van Gogh design and I think it looks cute. I'll work on binding this over the next few months. I am halfway around my #Trending quilt and I don't usually want to sit under a quilt to bind in the summer.

I decided to empty out the drawer that I keep my to-be-quilted tops in so that I could put all my Glide thread in it. My husband said it wouldn't fit, so my daughter was eager to help me prove him wrong. 😂 We were all a little wrong. Most of my thread did fit in the drawer, though I did have some overflow. The nice thing about the "new" drawer is that it fully extends. It is much easier to see (and use) the threads now. The upside down cones are the duplicate, partially used, colors.

I was keeping my thread in an IKEA Alex unit, but I had a serious amount of overflow. {I was gifted a very large amount of thread and prewound bobbins from a very sweet lady last year.} Also, if you are familiar with the Alex cabinets, you know that the drawers don't open all the way, which makes getting to the thread in the back a challenge. I now have my neutral Glide threads in here (fifth down), along with the prewound bobbins and other threads I don't use often (drawers 3, 4, and 6). The top drawer is all the longarm parts and accessories and the second drawer is longarm rulers.

The only issue with all this is that I had to find homes for my unquilted projects. Looking at them, I have three that I am planning to edge-to-edge and seven that I would like to custom quilt. I'm hoping to get to the three over the next few weeks. I am very, very slow on custom quilting--it takes me quite some time to come up with designs that I am satisfied with and usually about a week to complete the stitching on a lap or larger quilt. Anyway, I moved most of the custom ones to the lower drawer, which is where I usually store completed mini quilts. There was plenty of space. Wouldn't it be fun to completely finish all the to-be-quilted pile though?

I've also been trying to learn Pro-Stitcher Designer. I have been watching some classes I purchased and I thought I knew what I was doing. Nope. I have spent so much time trying to figure out a design. The artwork looks good, but when I change it to stitches, all my curves are gone, leaving ugly, jagged lines. I cannot figure out where I've gone wrong and finally had to just set it aside for now and get back to other things.

I've been wondering if I want to do some updating on my business logo, website, and/or colors. I for sure want to make better business cards. I paid someone to design them the first time around and I didn't like how the cards looked when printed. So I have to decide what to do and how to do it. Too. many. decisions. Also sidelined this for a bit.

I have not even begun working on my OMG yet. 😒 I need to get a move on because we had a surprise robotics competition pop up that we will be traveling for this month. Maybe it will dispel the ennui (Wordle's Monday word) we seem to be trapped in lately.

I have completed the astronaut Quilts for Kids. This one is quilted with Driftwood. Quilts for Kids projects are good for trying out new designs.

I have also completed all my remaining guild secretary duties with the exception of handing over the binders to the incoming secretary at the board transition meeting in a few weeks. 🎉

Just a few client quilts to share this week:

First is Deb's bow tie quilt, quilted with Stipple.

Next is Trish's jelly roll race quilt, quilted with Ginger Snap.

Finally, Jae's quilt, quilted with Cakewalk.

Out in the gardens, things continue to be extremely dry. This morning is the first time in probably three weeks that we've had some rain. Most things are holding their own, but there are very few flowers, other than the clematis, catmint, and lamb's ear. Lamb's ear grows like weeds here. You can throw a hunk on the ground and it will start growing and spread everywhere.

After nagging my husband a bit, he got the solar-powered watering system running again (it was on hiatus for a growing season or two) for the vegetable garden. The lettuce has a few leaves that are of harvestable size. The peas, zucchini, and beans are growing well. I think I see the start of flowers on the beans and zucchini. The cucumbers are there, but off to a slow start. Beets seem okay right now. I planted tons of bell pepper seeds, but I have only found three things that I think are peppers. We did find a bunch of one weed with purple undersides that we pick out of both flower and veg. gardens regularly. My son used his "Picture This" app and it came up with nightshade! Eek! I guess tomatoes and peppers are also in the nightshade family, as is horse nettle, which grows all over the place here. Wouldn't that be funny if I pulled out all my pepper starts thinking they were weeds? I should have started them in the Aerogarden.

Speaking of the Aerogarden, I decided that the tomato starts were ready to go outside. The thyme looked close too. The dahlia seeds were pretty much a failure--I'd planted 15 seeds and only three germinated. Of those, only one had any size at all. I made the perhaps rash decision to skip the hardening off. Well, the tomatoes and thyme are doing fine and it looks like only the mid-sized dahlia might survive, though it's quite questionable. 

Look at the growth from one day to the next. It was shocking! 

Our strawberry harvest was a major bust. We had a small handful of ripe berries and the remaining ones disappeared. There just weren't that many this year. 

We have been heavily watering all the Norway spruce to try to keep them going in this drought. They are guaranteed for the first year as long as we water them regularly. We did find a bunch of poison ivy on the ground near them. Usually the poison ivy we find is on the trees, so that is unusual.

Other unusual things--my husband found a 42" snake in one of our trees. I declined go outside to view it. Just the picture on his cell phone made my hair stand on end. Yuck. We've also had several neighbors tell us that they have seen a bobcat roaming the neighborhood. Good thing our chicken coop is pretty secure. And how about this weird picture? This moth(?)  was actually no more than 2" at the widest part, but my picture made it look huge!

Most of the walls are up on the barn now. We've had one fall off the ladder and three tool casualties so far. 

Linking with For the Love of Geese, My Quilt Infatuation, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Alycia Quilts.