Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Finishes 13, 14, AND 15!

 I finally got to add some things to my finish list! 



The baby quilt I needed for this weekend is finished. I think the backing and the front coordinate well enough that no one would ever know the backing was my only purchase. Stash for the win! 


This quilt top has been quilted for a couple weeks, but it still needed a binding. The binding is on now so it's a finish.


This herringbone quilt was what I was FMQ when my Janome went haywire. I finished quilting it on my Bernina, and got the binding sewn on too. 

I haven't heard a word about my Janome, but they warned me it could be a while. Both of my July deadline quilts are ready to assemble now, so I'll work on getting those together and basted. I think I'm going to grab a couple of the smaller quilts from the quilt closet and gets those basted as well. I'll likely wait to get the deadline quilts quilted, hoping my Janome gets back in time to quilt them on that. I don't want to seriously lose momentum on quilting though, so if I can quilt a couple/few baby quilts on the Bernina while I'm waiting that's forward progress. I had planned to start working on Christmas projects in June, and if I'm quilting on the Bernina, that screws up my plans for that. I could always work on getting everything for Christmas cut out though, so when the sewing machines are back to their normal tasks I'll be ready to go. Honestly, I am so anxious to get that Janome back! Having dedicated machines makes my life much easier. 

As for my goal of finishing 40 quilts this year, I am a little bit behind. To finish 40 quilts in 12 months I would need to average 3.3 finishes a month, and I'm at 3 even. If I get my Janome back soon, I think it's an amount I could make up. If not, I'll likely fall further behind, not just on quilt finishes, but also on other projects. 

Right now I've got two machines set up, my vintage Singer 201 for piecing as usual, and my Bernina which usually I use for assembling quilts (it's in a better cabinet for that than the vintage machine). I also do all regular sewing on the Bernina, whether that's garment making, pillowcases, home dec, gifts, etc...Since the Bernina is set up for FMQ, and I can only FMQ an hour per day, I'm getting a lot more piecing done than I expected. 


I was assembling a large quilt on the Singer 201 today, and it sews great, but the lack of cabinet space made assembling such a large quilt a challenge. This was only a portion of the quilt. I did finish assembling the quilt center. 


I think I'm going to use that dark teal as the inner border, then that purple/peach/pink tye dye as the outer border. Funny thing about that tye dye, I bought myself a fat quarter of that fabric last month, then DD#2 bought me another fat quarter of the same fabric for Mother's Day. I couldn't find anything in stash I liked better than that for the border. I checked to see if I could buy yardage of it, and they are out of it in yardage both locally and online. My local store is out of it completely. Online they do, however, have more fat quarters of it. So now I'm waiting for several fat quarters to come so I can cut up all the fat quarters for a border on a queen sized quilt! That's quite a change for me, as I usually buy 3 yards for a border, so I can cut the borders length of grain and not piece them at all. 

We had a huge blessing this week! We had called a plumber last week, and he was saying we had to have a MAJOR plumbing job done, replacing the pipes from the house to the street, which meant major digging, trenching through the driveway and $$$$$. We have insurance covering the outside plumbing, so we called them. They not only verified that our underground pipes are NOT leaking, they replaced the leaky outdoor faucet and the shut off valve that was stuck open. Cost to us- $0 Could our underground plumbing fail at some point? Yes, and that's why we'll be keeping that outdoor plumbing insurance. They showed DH the pipe parts that they had to cut off to fix things, and although the outside of the pipe looked pretty worn, the inside looked fine, with quite a bit of thickness left. Our house it older than I am, so replacing the plumbing outside will likely occur at some point, but it could last for years longer. Our house is old enough that inside we have all copper pipes, which will likely outlive me. I'm glad we are aware of the potential problem, but I'm also glad it's not a problem we have to tackle right now. So another home repair is crossed off the list! No more leaky outdoor faucet! 

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