Wheel of Mechanics!

Things have gotten so out of hand with the gas line fiasco, I'm starting to find it funny. We got our turf reinstalled, and while they were doing that, they ran a spike through our air conditioner coolant line. NOT what you want at any time, but it was 100 degrees outside so definitely not a welcome circumstance. The turf company was great about it though. While one of them came to tell us what happened, the other guy had his boss on the phone, and they had an air conditioner repairman here in less than an hour! We paid the turf people, they paid the air conditioner guy. 

We went and ordered a new stove, boy have the prices gone up since our last one! The stove I have currently has a bunch of bells and whistles I never used, so I downgraded, and it still cost about the same. 

The gas company is done with our house, but they'll be in my neighborhood for ten MONTHS! Considering they broke three water mains in two days, so our neighborhood keeps losing water, it's going to be a loooooooooong ten months! I'm hoping when they get to other side of the neighborhood, they won't be parking the trucks at my house anymore, and hopefully it will be quieter here too. 

It's just been crazy around here with all the mechanics and tradesmen around here! Pipeline men, gas company men, water dept. men, one HVAC guy for the furnace, a different one for the air conditioner, turf installers, our pest guy comes Monday, and the new stove gets installed a week from today! It sure doesn't feel like social distancing when you have this many strangers around just doing their jobs. 

I actually got to see some of my grandkids for the first time in four months. One of them is just starting to walk, and I feel so blessed to have seen some of his first toddling steps. 

I did manage to get some sewing done, but I'm doing some proCRAFTinating. I'm working on other projects instead of what I need to be working on! I hadn't touched the baby quilts until today when I got one ready for basting and dug out my basting pins. I'll baste it in the morning when I call my mom. 

I finished getting this quilt top together and now it's hung in the quilt closet. While I was in the closet, I pulled one top out because it needs to be finished this year, and it won't take long to piece a backing for it and get it basted. It's a good one to baste while messing with the baby quilts. 

While I was in the closet, I counted the quilt tops hanging in there. I have 12 quilt tops hanging that don't need to be finished this year, one of which needs a pieced border I haven't cut yet. The rest are completed tops. I bought a lot of 25 skirt hangers, and that's what I hang my quilt tops on. I decided I'd like to have all the hangers filled by the end of the year. It's not really THAT lofty of a goal, because I easily have at least 13 UFO's at block stage. I still have multiple quilts that need to be finished this year, so those will never hang in the quilt closet. 

I can still work on finishing UFO's too, because I have about a dozen already basted in a laundry basket. With all the new starts I need to work on, I'm really doubting I'll get all those quilted. 

Most of my pro"craft" inating has been working on my 2" cut strip busting projects. I'm mostly down to black, neutrals, and brown. I made all those black/white log cabin blocks a while back, and I still had pieces left. 

The pieces I cut at 9.5" I sewed up into blocks that will finish at 9". Obviously, I haven't pressed any of them yet. Now I'm working on neutral 9" blocks, and when I see how many I have, I'll come up with a plan for them. I already have some of these rail blocks in other colors that I haven't gotten them into quilt tops yet, so I could combine them, or throw in some random blocks if I don't have a good number to set. I'll make a plan when I see what I've got which is how I normally do scrap projects.

The odd sizes of strips I had I sewed into black/white/black or white/black/white strips. These are so scrappy with so many novelty fabrics, that once they are subcut into 2" pieces the actual square may not be that color, but I think overall it will be fine. I'm mixing in all the grays I had into these too. 

I think it will all work out in the end. I decided to make this quilt, Growing Up Odd, All the squares will be black, white, or gray (well, or whatever the predominant color in in the 1.5" square that shows, and I will use red sashing. I'm going to use up the rest of my colors in one of these quilts with white sashing too, but I am going to try to use one color per block for the other one. I have an overflowing box of 2" squares, so I can easily add them in to make the other sized blocks. If you have a lot of scraps like I do, the blog I just linked to has a bunch of excellent scrap patterns. 

I had to take down the sewing machine in the living room for the grandkids to come and not get hurt, so now my TV time is pressing and sub-cutting which works fine. I'll have to take a new photo of my sewing room now that I've got a third sewing machine in there, and I switched to a smaller table, because I wanted to ditch the Tin Lizzie table which was bigger than I needed for just piecing. The smaller table is a much better scale for the room, considering I already had two big sewing cabinets in there. 

I hope you are all staying healthy and getting some sewing in should you wish to. I know some people are busier than ever with their kids home all the time. I homeschooled my five kids for years, so I always had to sew around them, but if you're not used to it, it's tough to get used to. I didn't have a sewing room then either, so I did a lot of handwork, because it was just easier to manage around the kids. 

Distracted

 I'm feeling a bit discombobulated these days, and most of it is either unrelated to Covid 19 or only loosely related. My day to day life has changed very little with the restrictions. I've even seen more people than most during quarantine because DD#3's family was living here when quarantine started, and then my sister moved to town during quarantine. 

DH's job is secure, and since ER nurses can't work from home, he's still off to work regularly. His shift did get involuntarily changed, so his hours are different, and his pay is less on day shift which we aren't thrilled about, but whatever. We know we are still better off than most during this weird time. 

The gas company changing all the lines and meters in our neighborhood is making me pretty crazy. They needed to work under our artificial turf, and it's costing us $500 to fix what they did to that. Once we were hooked to the new meter and line, they came inside the house to check all the gas appliances. Come to find out, the furnace we replaced three years ago was installed incorrectly, so they wouldn't turn our gas on, and when we called the company that installed it, they are insisting we pay $100 for them to fix their mistake. They did fix it, and our gas is on now, but we haven't paid the $100 yet, as we think we shouldn't have to pay to repair what they did incorrectly. 

The gas company also messed with our gas stove, and now three of the knobs won't stay on the stove, if you touch them they just fall off. We were planning on replacing the stove this year, but we weren't planning on replacing it right now with all the extra bills we hadn't anticipated. A new stove just jumped up the list. The oven hasn't been working correctly, and I think it's not easily fixable, so we had already planned on replacing it. 

I'm also just really tired of all the construction noise, and the fact that they park all of the big trucks by my house over the weekend, so every time I look out the window I just see all the trucks. In the grand scheme of things, I know I'm just whining, so forgive me for that. None of this is the end of the world, it's just inconvenient, and on top of everything else going on it seems like a lot. 

I have gotten some sewing done, but nothing like last week. 

The last of the fern fabric went into these blocks, which are my favorite use of the fern fabric. The block design is called Ribbon Block, and the version I found free online only used two fabrics. I was trying to use up the fern/pink bonus HST's I had from making Flying Geese units, and I only had 92 of those, so I opted to use the yellow fabric for the stars. 

I put some up on the design wall so I could get a feel for the secondary pattern I knew it would create. I ended up with 48 blocks using every bit of that fern fabric, so the actual quilt will be set 6x8. I already have the rows sewn, I just need to get them pressed so I can sew the rows together. I have just enough yellow left to make the border.

The rest of the sewing I've been doing is dealing with leftover units from my scrap busting spree. I'll still be doing that for a bit. 

Arizona is partially reopened, so my sister and I went to JoAnn fabric so I could get some giraffe flannel for burp rags for my nephews baby. They only had a remnant in stock, so we'll see what I can make with what I got. I told the lady at the cutting counter I think I have more fabric at my house than they did at the store. It was an exaggeration, but it really did look like the last couple days of a Going Out of Business sale in there. I needed a couple different solids, and they were wiped out, so I ended up ordering some from fabric.com and they said it wouldn't arrive until late JUNE! Even with the wait, I ended up having to buy extra wide solids to get the colors I needed. Most of the 44" solids were unavailable. I'm not buying any fabric to stash these days, it's only what I need for a specific project. 

I haven't worked on the baby quilts at all, I really need to piece the second backing and get those basted. I did get the acrylic surround for my new sewing machine, so I can quilt the baby quilts on my Janome M7 and see how that goes. 

FOUR quilt tops!

I've been busy, two babies coming in July and both quilts need to be mailed, so the clock is ticking!

This is baby quilt tops number 1. The blocks were slated for a different quilt, but I opted to use just over half the blocks for this baby quilt, because the colors worked with what the parents wanted. Nine blocks didn't make a large enough quilt, 16 blocks was more like it, but the sashing put it to 50" which is about as large as I'd make a square baby quilt. A border would look fine, but I'm stopping here. I've already got a backing pieced for this one.

I decided I didn't want a weird number of blocks lying around, so I made two extra blocks and made another baby quilt out of them. No hurry to finish this one, so it's on a hanger in the quilt closet. 

This is the other baby quilt that needs to be finished by July. According to what I've heard, baby's room is being done in pink and green, with lots of roses, and the Mom wanted to incorporate ferns. The green triangles have ferns on them, and there are pink roses in the border. I was working from stash, so the greens aren't quite right together, but babies don't care! I'm sure if I had gone shopping I could have found a better border fabric, but in person shopping isn't really in the cards right now, so this will do. I purposely used a modern pattern for the quilt center, because I was afraid it was looking too grandmotherly for a baby. The fern fabric has some random pink leaves that are the same as the pink background. 

The fern fabric in the above quilt came from a thrift store, and I do really like it, but somehow it didn't feel right to put the leftover piece back in stash. It was like I had the fabric for this purpose, and I didn't need to keep it anymore. 

Well, the easiest thing to do would be to donate the remaining fabric, but since when do I do anything the easy way? I decided I was going to use it up instead. I didn't have a large enough piece to make a decent backing, and I couldn't find any coordinating fabric I wanted to use to combine it with for the backing. I decided I'd make some big Flying Geese units.

Sometimes I like using light fabrics in unexpected places, so I opted for the same pink for the Flying Geese corners, but a white calico between the columns and as the border.

Since it blends in with my design wall, here's a close up of that fabric, and you can see the fern fabric better as well. This quilt top is also hanging in the quilt closet, because there is no hurry to finish it. 

Since I made the Flying Geese units with flip and sew corners, I also ended up with bonus HST's, and I came up with a plan to use every single one of them! I keep using that same pink, and I don't think I'll have any of it left to shelve either, which is fine. I've already used all the fern fabric, I don't even think I had a strip left for the scrap user system. If I did, I've already put it away because there is none on the cutting table. 

So, what started out as me wanting to get two quilt tops done, turned into me making four quilt tops, and I've already cut all the additional pieces for the last quilt top that will use the fern fabric. 

It's weird for me to make so many quilt tops using so few fabrics, but a few of my recent projects have been SO scrappy, the calm of using just a couple prints was a bit of visual relief for me. I really love scrappy quilts, but since I donate a lot of quilts, I try to make a variety of styles, so there's something for everyone.

Fourth Finish of 2020

I promised myself a while back I wouldn't start any more mystery quilts until I had finished all the ones I had started. I just finished the last mystery quilt on my UFO list. I still have a really long UFO list, this is just the last of the mystery quilt UFO's.

This is Bonnie Hunter's Allietare mystery quilt. I made it in two colorways at the time, and as it happened, both quilts ended up going to grandchildren. 

This was the other version of Allietare I made. It's made mostly of men's shirts. The bright version looks quite a bit different since I used the background fabric for the setting triangles and borders. I also changed the pattern in the men's shirt version and used hour glass blocks in place of the large squares.

I've realized that on mystery quilts, I love the challenge of trying to "keep up" but as soon as the reveal is out my interest wanes. I might try making half the units next time I decide to try one.  I do really love most of Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt patterns. 

I am currently working on a couple baby quilts, as well as several UFO's at different stages. I'm hoping my next blog will show a couple baby quilt tops, I've got the blocks done for two, and I've cut the sashing for the one that needs it. I hope to start assembling those two quilt tops tomorrow. 

Mr. LJ has a new favorite thing. He came across a crocheted water bottle holder my mom made, and now he carries it everywhere with him. In this pic his sippy cup is in it, but he'll carry it around empty as well. 

I hope all of you are doing well, and keeping calm in these weird times. Time for me to go draw some lines on squares for sewing up tomorrow!