Easy Week

 I'd say this week didn't go according to plan, but the fact of the matter is, I didn't really make many plans for the week. I got the J&J vaccine on Monday, and I wasn't sure how I'd be feeling, so I didn't plan much. As it turned out, besides some swollen lymph nodes, I felt perfectly fine, not even a sore arm. DH has struggled with nausea and headaches all week though. 

The little bit of plans I did make were derailed by the post office. The seller of my white poly pellets sent them Priority Mail, and as such they should have been delivered last week. I had hoped to finish Miss S's weighted blanket this week. Well, I didn't get the pellets until last night! The only progress I've made on the weighted blanket front is to get the third one's top almost assembled. The rows are in pairs, just five more seams and all the tops will be done. 

My design wall is empty, and even though I have several projects ready to go up on it, I didn't feel like laying out a quilt, so nothing there.

I did get half of the last basted quilt quilted, so there's that. I'm using a peach colored thread, and it's amazing on many fabrics the peach almost disappears.

When I was looking around my sewing room, I spied the brown 2" cut strips, the only color of 2" strips I hadn't tackled in my scrap busting projects. I've debated several plans for those strips, and changed my mind several times. Then, I remembered I had a container of fall colored strips and cream strips I had set aside for a particular project. It was supposed to be a gift, but circumstances changed and I now no longer have to make that quilt. That quilt was even listed on my UFO list. I knew those were 2" strips too, so I dug them out too. I started with the non-brown fall colored strips, and sewed each of those to a cream strip. When I ran out of the golds, oranges, reds, and greens, I went into the browns. I continued sewing a colored strip to a cream strip until I ran out of cream colored strips. Most of the creams are tone on tones, with a couple solids mixed in. I then made strip tubes out of the strips, since I've been watching a bunch of strip tube tutorials on YouTube. I don't have any of the Strip Tube rulers, but I do have a ruler with the same markings. I have the Quilt in a Day Triangle Square Up ruler. I had quite a few reds, but not much in the golds or oranges, so after I make the blocks with what I've got, I may decide to cut more strips in those colors just for variety's sake. 

This is most of the strip tubes I'll be making. I still have a few stripsets left to sew into tubes. I've got my ruler ready to subcut the strips, and I've moved all of that into the living room, because I do all my subcutting while watching TV (more listening than actual watching) Once I subcut all the strip tubes and sew those units into blocks, I'll decide if I need to make more strip tubes, or if I have enough. I have no expectation of what size quilt I'm making, projects like this are completely improvisational for me. I've had times I've had to cut more, and other times I've sewn up so many units I ended up with four quilts from the same fabrics. It doesn't matter to me. I really like using multiple tone on tone fabrics for a background, because if I do run short, I can cut whatever tone on tones I have currently and just mix them in with no drama, since there are already so many different background fabrics. 

I still had a bunch of brown strips left, so I sewed them into sets of four strips. It took some sorting to divide the strips by length. I didn't have many WOF strips left. 

I'm subcutting them to 3.5", and I'll add a strip of another color to each side to make a square block. I'm thinking I'll use a dark red, but I won't know for sure until I audition a couple options. I want this quilt to be pretty dark. There are always a lot of novelty fabrics in my scraps, so when I say these are brown strips, I'm really only talking the main background color. Depending on the scale of the novelty print, certain patches might not have any brown at all. 

Neither of these quilts were what I had planned for the brown strips, and that's OK by me. Sometimes I have specific quilts I make with scraps, other times it's just play, and whatever I feel like at the moment. 

I got a sweet surprise this week. 

I shared some poly thread with one of DH's coworkers. I had hit the jackpot at a thrift store a while back, and I just wasn't using the thread as quickly as I thought I would. The thread I had was meant for machine embroidery, but it works just fine as a quilting thread too. DH's coworker has an embroidery machine, so I sent a bunch of the thread I had to her. She's already using it in her embroidery machine, and gave me these fat quarters as a thank you. I can guarantee I'll use up the fat quarters faster than I would have the thread I gave her. I wasn't expecting anything in return, but it was a nice surprise. 

I haven't given much thought to next week's goals. Since Sunday is Mother's Day, DH is grilling steak and we are having my sister and my MIL over for dinner. Hopefully next week I'll get back to the weighted blankets, and maybe finishing the last of the long basted quilts. 

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there!