My Kind of Day

Today was a really nice day, in a way that reminds me of my childhood, but I rarely get where I currently live.

SNOW!

And more snow!

And even a slide avalanche!

I loved the snowy day, and although I know most of the USA is sick of snow, it's a novelty here. 

It was a good day in another way too. I got another weighted blanket crossed off my list. It's not a UFO, but done is done!

This is for one of my grandsons, and he wanted a Minecraft weighted blanket. I ordered the fleece that's on the back first, not realizing how huge the images were. To get a small enough design for a six inch square I had to buy the cotton print on the front. I had wanted to make it all from fleece, but now I had this cotton. I decided to mix the cotton with fleece, so the lime green squares on the front are fleece. It was trickier than I thought to sew those together. Fleece is fairly stretchy, quilting cotton is not. Let's just say not all my corners line up right and leave it at that ;-)

The seemingly "zillions" of Flying Geese are finished. 

That's eight stacks of Flying Geese almost 5 inches high! What I love best about Flying Geese, is double sewing the corners and getting bonus HST's to play with.

A "zillion" flying geese lead to two "zillion" bonus HSTs. Sure they are small, but with this many, I can make a decent sized quilt with them. 

I'm back to FMQ every day, and the quilt I've been working on has a very pretty, very busy print for the border. I was having a hard time seeing where I had quilted and where I hadn't on this busy print. I decided to add another lamp. The lighting in my sewing room stinks, so I am constantly adding lighting. 

This is my longarm with the lighting it came with on. I knew when I bought this longarm I would need additional lighting. My sewing room is in the basement, it's not bright down there.  Yes. the lousy overhead lighting is on too. 

I immediately bought LED lighting for the throat of the machine, and this photo is taken with the LED lights, the light it came with, and the room's overhead light on. This is how I usually quilt, but I was really struggling to see the pink thread on that busy border.

Here I've added an OTT light that was elsewhere in the house. You know what, If someone told me they were using three additional lights to sew, I might think it's overkill, but looking at this, I don't really think it is. 

It may just be because I'm in my 50's, but I really need task lighting these days. I normally don't like things too bright, I've been known to wear sunglasses in the house on super sunny days, but to do detail work, I need my work space well lit. 

BTW, the quilt in that photo is now quilted and trimmed, so I have two quilts waiting for binding. Both quilts are getting the same pink binding, so I decided to wait until I had them both finished before binding either. I did bind the first pink quilt, just to get me off the queen's list in the UFO Challenge. This is the last of my "Why Does Everyone Hate Pink?" quilts. 

Three of the ten quilts I basted are now quilted. Not bad! I don't FMQ every day, but most. I never quilt more than 75 minutes per day, but it's usually an hour. I'll go a bit longer than that hour to get to a good starting place for the next day, but never more than 15 minutes over. My arm complains if I push it too much. 

I wound bobbins for the next quilt in the queue. I decided to tackle one of the big ones next. I rethreaded the machine with purple thread, and it's ready to go for the next quilt. 

No quilting this weekend, I've got family stuff going on, and that's ok. In fact, I'm going to go make dessert for tomorrow's family lunch.