One Step at a Time

My main priority right now is the quilts I have ready to quilt, not piecing a new quilt. The thing is, I know my arm does best when I limit my FMQ time to one hour per day. I can handle some other sewing on top of that, but I haven't cut out any of my new deadline quilts yet, and I don't want to start a brand new project aside from those. So what's a quilter to do?

Well, my solution is going in a couple different directions. My main piecing project right now is actually just assembling UFO's I had at block stage. 

I finished assembling this Crayon box quilt top this week, and I have a second scrappier version mostly assembled too. Once I have a quilt top done, it gets hung in the closet and waits its turn in the quilting queue. I am assembling three quilts right now, and my leader/ender project is a split nine patch that's also a UFO. I don't have to finish a UFO in one go to make progress. Getting a UFO to quilt top stage is an important step. When I have a basting spree, I usually quilt baste until I'm out of pins. It's pretty easy to slip a few UFO's into the quilting queue that way, along with finishing up the deadline quilts. 

My late night project is not a UFO. I'm pretty tired by days end, and I don't want to have to fiddle with making things super accurate, or anything complicated. I've found string blocks are a great way to get in a bit more piecing, without anything taxing. 

I wanted to make Miss S a new quilt, since everyone else in her house is getting a new quilt. I don't have a ton of extra time to work on it, so I decided on a purple/blue string quilt for her. I bought a ream of 8.5x11" newsprint, and I'm just making the blocks that size. I need half the center strips going in one direction diagonally, and half in the other to get diamonds. My method is to make two blocks at once, one in either direction. Some days I'm too tired and don't make any, other days I make two blocks, which is my goal. A couple nights ago I didn't want to work on assembling UFO's so I made six string blocks. There is no deadline for this quilt, I just wanted Miss S to know I've got a new quilt in the works for her. I've got more blocks than this made, I just haven't trimmed the other ones and torn off the paper. 

I'm having a hard time getting myself to cut out the next quilts, so I'll just keep working mostly on UFO's. I'll get them done, one step at a a time. 

Bargello Busted

I finished the fourth of five overdue wedding quilts today! The bargello quilt is busted; quilted, binding on and DONE! 

I am ready to start quilting the last overdue wedding quilt tomorrow! I do have a nephew getting married in December, and his quilt isn't started yet, but getting the overdue quilts finished was absolutely my priority. It feels so good to be making serious progress on the backlog of quilts. 

Yesterday I ended up cooking dinner for 15. It was a bit unplanned, but worked out fine. We had a good visit with the people who were here. 

DH has been working a ton, they are short-handed at work, so I've been having more days to sew than usual. Even with the quilting by timer restrictions, I'm still getting a LOT accomplished, and I find that very encouraging. 

Sometimes when something is dragging you down, you may realize it, but not how much it's weighing you down. These overdue quilts were a big stresser for me. I hate to be late for anything.  I knew it was bothering me, but I hadn't realized how much that was affecting the non-quilting areas of my life. 

Our treadmill was packed away when we had so many people living here, and then it was in the guest room, which was easy to forget about. I figured I'd be able to get right back into walking on the treadmill once it was moved to my sewing space. The thing is, I still couldn't get myself to do it. It wasn't until I had the last two overdue quilts basted, that my desire to get back on the treadmill came back. I think I had started to feel if I had time to myself, I had to spend it catching up on overdue projects. Now that I can see the light at the end of the quilty tunnel, I'm feeling free to balance my life a bit better, and hopefully in more healthy ways, both physically and mentally. 

Since I've become quite used to FMQ for an hour every morning DH works, I decided to just tack on my treadmill time right after. I literally get up from the longarm when the timer goes off, go straight to the treadmill, and walk for 30 minutes before I take a break. After sitting for an hour straight, it feels pretty good to get my body going right after. When I sew later in the day, I tend to get up pretty frequently anyway, so this is a good system for me, and it's working pretty easily into my schedule. Who knew overdue quilts would affect my desire to exercise? 

Oh, I had some good news this weekend. DS the Younger had been told the box he mailed home after deployment had been lost. It had the Army quilt I made for him in it. Well, nine months later it showed up, just in time for him to be deployed early next year. I told him to make sure he takes the quilt with him, and if it gets lost again, no worries, by the time he returns from the next deployment, I'll have the quilt I started as a replacement finished. 

10 Years!

I find it pretty hard to believe, but I've been blogging for 10 years! It's my ten year blogiversary! 

What did I blog about ten years ago?

I blogged about the quilt I made for my parent's 50th anniversary. It was them having their 60th anniversary that made me realize I've been blogging 10 years. 

Their anniversary quilt was the first quilt I designed myself. I still think it's a cool idea, but I'm happy to say my quilting skills have improved aver the last ten years! Practice makes perfect, and my quilts are far from perfect, so I must be still practicing.

Speaking of practicing, that's exactly what I've been doing this week. I started quilting on the bargello quilt. I knew I wanted to quilt the center in a manner that focused on the waves in the bargello design, and my first thought was to quilt it on my Bernina with a walking foot. I could have done that, and it would have looked just the same as what I actually decided to do. 

I have some quilting rulers that I had yet to use with my Tin Lizzie. I knew there was a learning curve to using rulers for quilting, and I decided that quilting diagonally across almost 2,000 various sized rectangles would be great practice on how to manage a ruler, and how to line it up 1/4" away from where I wanted to be. 

I have several quilting rulers in various sizes, but I decided starting with these might be easiest because they have handles. The handles make them quite easy to hold in place. If you are wondering where I got these, I purchased them here.

I just hit the halfway point on quilting the center. I'm still debating what I'll quilt in the border. 

I haven't done a whole lot of sewing besides quilting on the bargello. I have been trying to deal with all the batting and backing scraps left over from pin-basting six quilts last week. If the batting scrap is big enough, I'm cutting out burp rag shapes from it. If it's too narrow for that, I'm cutting 2.5" strips, because I'd like to make a few jelly roll rugs. I won't be making the rugs in the near future, but it takes a lot of batting strips to make them, and I'd like to have enough ready to make a couple rugs before I start. 

Long Line of Love

Today is my parent's 60th wedding anniversary! I had hoped to go out to see them for it, but it didn't work out. 

I've been thinking about their anniversary, and it really amazes me with how few couples make it this long. I'm not referring to divorces, but of one of the couple not living this long. I know several couples that I'm sure would have made it to 60 years, but death took one partner before that. I'm not trying to be morbid, just in awe of the blessing this event is. For marriages this long lived, it's not just a matter of choosing to work it out, but being blessed with long lives. With people getting married later and later in life, this will become an ever rarer event. 

As I've been mulling over their anniversary, this song kept coming to mind.



I'm sure my long marriage is partly due to the fact that my parents and my in-laws were examples of happy marriages. THAT is a priceless inheritance!

On a quilty note, I'm in the middle of a basting spree. I've got the two remaining overdue wedding quilts basted, and one of my grandson's quilts. I have another grandson getting a quilt and it is next to be basted. I might have enough pins for one or two more smaller quilts, but I don't have anything matched with a backing, so we'll see. I need to have the basting tables down by Sunday, because I've got company coming. 

I'm not doing much sewing while I'm doing all this basting, but I am assembling a couple quilts. The design walls don't stay empty around here. Just getting a UFO to the next stage is progress, even if it isn't a finish. I won't be doing any cutting until I've finished the basting spree. 

I'm also in a purging mood. I realized I haven't read a paper novel in four years, even though I'm an avid reader. I read everything on my Kindle Paperwhite. Cookbooks and quilt books I want in physical copies, fiction books I'm ready to let go. 

I've been doing some re-organizing in my house too. With this repetitive stress injury lingering, I've realized I can't reach as high as I used to. I've moved heavier objects to the bottom shelves, and put lighter stuff on the second shelves in baskets with handles so I can just pull the whole basket down. So far I'm finding this much easier to use. Work smarter, not harder, right?

Multi-generation Quilt

When DH's maternal grandmother passed away, I inherited most of her fabric, and some misc quilt parts. One project bag had a bunch of units, and some notes scribbled on a piece of paper. From what I could tell, she had planned on making two throw sized quilts from the units in the bag. 

We didn't have a quilt made by Granny, so I decided to use these units to make a quilt for us to keep. Most quilts are out the door as soon as they are finished around here, so any quilt I keep is notable. 

I don't know how she intended to set her units, I just did what looked best to me. I decided to make the largest quilt I could from her units, so I could hopefully use it on a bed. When I used all the units up and it was still too small, I added an inner border from my stash, and then made a piano key border from her scraps. It's been a quilt top for a while now, but I basted it my last basting spree, just in case I finished quilting those quilts before I was ready for another basting spree. I'm glad I chose to do that, because even only FMQ one hour a day, I am making serious progress on the backlog of quilts. 

Here's the quilt thrown over the loveseat right after I finished sewing the binding on. 

Here it is on the guest bed! The colors in this quilt just remind me so much of Granny. It has lots of her favorite colors, the ones she used to wear all the time, blues, purples, burgundy, and pinks. it also has none of the colors I never saw her wear, there isn't a single yellow or brown scrap in any of her fabrics. There also aren't any true oranges, though there are peaches and coral. 

Besides finishing this quilt, I got the borders on the transportation quilt.

It's not a great pic, bu you can see the Hot Rod fabric. I haven't gotten the borders on the bargello yet, but I have cut them. 

I also restarted a project. DD#2 wanted a weighted blanket, and I finished it earlier this year. She decided it was TOO heavy, so I took it back. It was easier to start over than to unsew all the channels in the weighted blanket. 

I've got the new version on the design wall, so I can start assembling the new top. I had to substitute a couple fabrics because I was out of what I had originally used. 

I cut apart the old weighted blanket, reclaimed all the plastic pellets (those things are expensive!), and I also reclaimed the fabric. Before I started cutting the quilt apart, I was hoping I'd be able to get 5" squares out of the fabric, since they started with 6.5" squares. Since I sew the channels with a serpentine stitch, I cut off a bit more than I had planned, and although some pieces were big enough to get a 5" square out of, most were a bit shy. I decided to cut them all into 4.5" squares instead. Since I now have squares of the backing fabric too, I actually have more squares than I started with!

Now the "too heavy" weighted blanket will end up being a quilt, and she'll get a new "not as heavy" weighted blanket. I'll also have enough extra pellets to make an extra weighted blanket, since I'm making it almost half the weight of the first. 

I have several weighted blankets promised to people, and it is long past when I said I'd have them done. I'm hoping to finish them all before Christmas, and I'll make weighted blankets until I'm out of pellets. After that, I am out of the weighted blanket making business, because it's too hard on my arm to move those heavy blankets around when I'm sewing them. They aren't hard to make, just too much stress on my arm. 

I really feel like I'm making great progress, and even only sewing three or four hours per day is enough to make a real difference. I only quilt one hour per day, but depending on what's going on and how my arm feels, I might sew another 2-3 hours total, taking lots of breaks. Cutting and quilting are what's hardest on my arm, so I am very strict about how long I do those. Today I didn't sew a stitch, and that's OK too. I needed a break, and I had family over for lunch. Family comes first. 

Just Needs Borders

I have been busily sewing all week, using my grandson's quilt as leaders/enders for another wedding quilt. I just finished both quilt centers today, so it's time to cut borders!

^Here's my grandson's quilt. I have Hot Rod fabric for his borders because DH calls him Hot Rod. I can never keep transportation fabrics in the stash for long, because I keep being asked for transportation quilts. 

^Here's the bargello quilt center. This one is getting two borders, one thin inner border a shade darker than any of the reds, and then a wide floral border. I'm not a big fan of florals, so when I choose one, it's got to be a good one! This was my first bargello, and I would be willing to make another, but not when I am feeling so much pressure to get it made quickly. If I make another it will be when I have no deadline quilts, which I don't see happening anytime soon!

Speaking of deadline quilts, I have another added to my list! I just found out I've got another grandbaby on the way, so I have two grandbaby quilts to make! One grandbaby is due very early January, the other is due in May, but I'm sure will be born in April. If the one due in January comes in December, I'll have two grandbabies born in 2018, if January there will be two born in 2019, but the latest two will still be within 12 months of the last one. The oldest grandkids will all be ooh-ing and ah-ing with cuteness overload with all the new babies!

I did a bit of stash enhancement this week.

Mostly fat quarters, but the three in front are half yards. The alphabet panel in the bag I'm really excited about. It's a cotton panel with fusible already on it, so I'm planning to cut out some letters and have fun on all the baby bibs I need to make. I'm not thinking much if any of the panel will make it to stash. I'm using fabric up pretty quickly lately, so I don't feel bad about hitting up some crazy sales. These fabrics ended up being $4 per yard, and I'm not going to feel bad about that!