I finished sewing up what I was working on in the living room, so I packed up the sewing machine I had in the living room and converted the space over to a cutting area.
Now that I'm tackling the 2.5" strips, I looked through my jelly roll patterns and chose a few that I think will work with novelty strips. I pulled out all the novelty strips I had, and I'm working on busting those first. Novelty prints get weird sometimes when you cut them up, and so do large scale prints, so I am planning to use those strips up first. Any strips that mostly read as a color I'll tackle later on, because they are easy to use. I also pulled out my neutral background strips that have a lot of color in them. I chose a pattern to use those up as well. I'll be needing to cut some background fabrics for some of the quilts, but I cut yardage on my cutting table in the basement. Sub-cutting is easy to do while sitting down, and since I'm only cutting three different sizes right now for the patterns I chose, it's even easier.
Time to show some of what I was sewing up in the living room.
I decided to sew the six inch red/cream blocks into four patches. Here's four of the now 12" blocks so you can get an idea where this project is heading. I'll need the design wall to be empty before I can sew this together any more. This busted all the cream tone on tone strips I had in 2.5", but I've still got plenty of red. I really like the way this one is looking, so I might cut more cream strips and make it bed sized.
I've been wanting to make a blue and yellow quilt for a while, so I pulled some of my blue and yellow 2.5" strips and made a bunch of these 8" blocks. I could make a throw with what I've got done, or I could make more blocks, but I haven't decided. I have more blue and yellow strips, so I could do either easily enough. I think I have 51 blocks now, so I could set them 6x8 with three blocks left over, or make more. I haven't decided on whether or not to use sashing or borders either, and both of those will affect the finished size.
I needed to get the sewing machine put away because I will have two of my little grandsons for the weekend. They aren't safe around a sewing machine, but I can easily put up the rotary cutters until they are in bed for the night, so by switching my living room sewing space to cutting, I can work a bit at night, with no risk of them getting hurt. I keep my sewing room door closed while they are here, and they rarely go in the basement anyway. I know I won't have any time to do anything while they are awake, these boys are high maintenance, but I love them so!
I finally started working on my oldest grandson's cape. I'm using the Bernina because it's a champ with all the difficult fabrics. I worked on the liner today, and got a good reminder of why I hate working with satin. It's SO slippery and it frays SO much! Since the satin I'm using is repurposed table runners, I had to sew the skinny lengths together so it would be wide enough to be a cape lining. I made all flat felled seams so there will be no fraying once the cape is finished. I need to unsew the rod pocket of the curtains I'm repurposing to be the outside of the cape, and I figured I could do that while watching TV tonight. I'm hoping to get quite a bit done on the cape tomorrow. I still haven't cut out the hood, but that won't take long. I'm not lining the hood.
I did manage a little sewing time in the sewing room on quilts in the past week, and I've got the first quarter of the king sized wedding quilt sewn into rows. I've got the second quarter up on the design wall. The way the layout works for this quilt I can make each quarter of the quilt identical, then turn them to make the design line up right. I figured I'll sew all the quarter rows first, then sew the rows together for each quarter, then sew the quarters together and it's a top. No border on that one. If my design wall could have handled the whole quilt, I'd have rather have sewn the whole rows, but this quilt will be 105" square, and my design wall isn't that big.
I don't know exactly what it is, but it seems like housework has been taking a lot of time lately, and it's not because I've become a neat freak. I have been cooking more, which means more dishes, more cleaning the kitchen, more food prep time, etc... I've had a lot of grandkids spend the night lately, so I keep having to change beds, wash linens, etc.. I guess it's just that, but it seems like more than that. I have been changing the way I prep food, now that most of the time there's just two of us in the house. For example, I bought a 10 pound bag of onions at Costco, and today I took the time to chop all 10 pounds and freeze them. I never use raw onions because they don't agree with me, but I use lots of cooked onions, and frozen onions work fine in cooked dishes. Speaking of food prep, it's time to start dinner, and it's breakfast for dinner tonight, biscuits and gravy for dinner! DH loves breakfast, so he never fusses at me serving him breakfast at dinnertime.
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