Results of June Decluttering

 Today is the last day of June, and the end of the declutter challenge I did with two of my girls. I did it! I decluttered at least the number of items of the date each day! Several days I was way over that. DH didn't think I'd make it through the month, because I do declutter on a regular basis, but this challenge made me rethink some things I had been keeping. I also found a few things I thought I had already purged. 

For example, I thought I had given away all the extra curtains I had. When DH was in the Army, I always hung onto extra curtains, because we moved so frequently, I never knew what size the windows would be in the next place. When I went through a linen closet that didn't have a lot in, I actually found two sets of curtains and a couple of satin table runners we used for a party years ago. 

Mr Z, my oldest grandson, just asked me to make him a black cape. The last time I made him a cape he was little, and now he's taller than I am! I thought I only had black quilting cotton in the house...until I came across the old curtains.

These black curtains can easily be turned into a cape, and those red table runners will make a great lining for it! Suffice it to say, I didn't donate these, but brought them down to the sewing room instead. Still, they won't stay in the house long.

This was the other set of curtains I found. I made these from some cotton I found and when we were in a different bedroom, these were on the windows. It is rare I find a floral print I like, I'm just not into florals, but I did like this fabric. I think I'm going to cut off all the seams and rod pockets, and piece together all the fabric left, and I should have a decent amount for a quilt backing. Since that's my plan I brought these down to the sewing room as well. They aren't curtains in my head anymore, just fabric. 

None of those counted for the declutter challenge, since I kept them, but here's my pile for donation.

No chance of me digging anything back out either, since we already brought it to the thrift shop. I also disposed of a couple bags of trash, and I gave a few items away as well. 

Some areas I decluttered more than once. I went through our en suite bathroom vanity early in the month, and got rid of several things, but yesterday I went back to it, completely emptied it, washed all of the dividers and bins in it, then reorganized it. I couldn't believe how much stuff I was willing to toss once I saw it all out. 

The one thing I'm getting rid of that I haven't gotten out of the house yet is some fiction books a friend sent me. I only read fiction at night in bed, and my Kindle Paperwhite is much easier to manage than a paper book and a book light. I found the books she lent me on kindle, downloaded them, and I'm going to mailing the books back to her. I already told her next time just give me the title of a really good book, I just don't read paper fiction anymore. The built in light on my kindle doesn't bother DH near as much as me using booklights did, and I prefer just tapping the screen to go to the next page rather than juggling a paper book. Non-fiction like cookbooks and quilting books I want in paper format, fiction I'll take on my e-reader. I still love the smell of a used book store, and I like looking at real books. I am just at a point in my life where I don't want to store hundreds of fiction books, when my e-reader can hold 1,000 books in the space of one. My first kindle I wasn't a fan of, but when they came out with the paperwhite, I was sold. 

I purged about 50% of my jewelry, and probably 75% of my hair accessories. I think my side of the closet is reduced by about 25%. 

I haven't done much in the way of sewing in the last week, since decluttering took a lot of my time and I haven't been feeling terrific, but I did finish the blocks for the king sized wedding quilt, and I sliver trimmed them all since some were a little off. I hate sliver trimming and I'm normally pretty accurate, but something was off a little, probably just me!

I also got a few blocks of my fun project sewn.

It's all reds and creams and should be a pretty quilt when finished. 

Good Week

 This has been a good week. Nothing tremendous happened, but no disasters either. I got a little sewing done, but not a ton. I got to see grandkids twice this week, and that was great. One day I was babysitting five of the grandkids, and it was the easiest babysitting gig ever! All the kids were fantastic! 

Yesterday I got to hang out with my sister, we went shopping and out to lunch just like in the pre-Covid days. We even had the adventure of driving to multiple stores looking for the starch I needed, and the wool roving she needed. I bought eight cans of starch once we found it, so I should be good for a while. She found the roving at Michael's. Joann's doesn't sell it, at least the one near us doesn't, we tried there first. 

Father's Day was ridiculously hot, so hot I didn't want to heat up the house cooking, and DH didn't want to grill. One of the local chains has really good pizza, and we found out that some of locations have giant pizzas. The location near us doesn't offer that, so we didn't know. They have some of the best GF pizza around, so DH got his own (much smaller) pizza. We decided to see what the grandkids thought of family sized pizzas.

Their reactions were funny. The three year old insisted she couldn't eat that much. The eleven year old took that as a challenge and ate three giant pieces. The six year old said she likes medium pizzas better. The eight year old just took pictures with the old camera I had given him. 

We made homemade peanut butter ice cream for dessert. The paddle to our ice cream freezer broke shortly after we turned it on, and I had to send DH out hunting down another one. He couldn't find another 6 qt freezer like we had, so now we have two 4 qt freezers. I had made enough ice cream base for 6 qts, so one 4 qt freezer wasn't going to do it. That's OK, we used to have two ice cream freezers anyway, so we could make two flavors at once for get togethers, and now we'll be able to make two flavors next time. I have really good recipes for vanilla, coffee, and peanut butter ice cream. I hate chocolate ice cream, and some of my kids don't like fruit ice creams, so we don't make either of those. I'm looking for a good butter pecan or pistachio ice cream recipe, so if you've got one, please share.

So what sewing did I do in the past week?

All of the stripsets I made a while back are cut down and re-sewn into blocks now. If you cut the stripsets with one ruler you get the block on the left, use a different ruler and you get the block on the right. My main project was the blocks on the right, but I can usually get one or two cuts for the other block from each stripset. I had a set amount of strips I wanted to use up, and I didn't count anything along the way. Now that I have blocks, I can figure out what I want to do with them. I ended up with 49 of the smaller blocks, and 98 of the larger ones. I'm thinking I may end up cutting more fabric and making more blocks, but I don't have to decide now, as there's no deadline for these. They are being set aside for now. I'm debating several layout options for the smaller blocks.

I got several more blocks done for the king sized wedding quilt, and that will be my main focus today. I also started sewing up some more non-deadline blocks. I'm keeping all my deadline projects in the sewing room, and playing with some non-deadline stuff in the living room. Most of my efforts are aimed at the deadline stuff, but a bit of sewing for play helps keep me happy, so I allow the time for that. 

The decluttering continues. It's getting harder now that the numbers of the date are higher.  For today's declutter I got rid of more than 24 things for the 24th. I went through all my hair stuff, barrettes, combs, hair ties etc... and got rid of what I never use, including the tin I stored it all in. Now I'm down to one small bin in a drawer of my nightstand of just my favorites. When June is over, we'll donate the pile I've accumulated over the last month of donate-able stuff, other declutter items were either given away, or went into trash or recycling. In July I'll just enjoy my less cluttered house!

Quilting Sourdough Starter

 Have you ever made sourdough starter for bread, and kept it going for a while? If you want to use the starter past the first time, you have to keep the starter you have left, and add more ingredients to feed the starter. If you have any leftover dough, you can toss that into the starter as well. 

I asked that because I approach quilting a lot like making sourdough starter. I often make too many units, because I don't often bother to count them. I'll estimate them, and go for too many rather than too few every time. 

A few years ago, I made a radiating nine patch quilt for a wedding gift. I needed 60 nine patches each of several different colorways. I strip pieced the nine patches, but the required number of strip units made more nine patches than I actually needed. 

After the original wedding quilt was made, I looked over the remaining nine patches, and added some more ingredients for another quilt. I finished that second quilt today, and it will be a wedding gift too. 

This was the original quilt I made a few years ago. I still like it. The jewel toned fabrics look really rich. It looks really blue in that photo, but it is mostly purple and green.

This is the quilt I finished today. I used the leftover nine patches like sourdough starter. I added the turquoise fabric and the solid purple in the borders as new ingredients. You know how I said you can toss in any extra dough into the starter? Well, the fussy cut border was the rest of the border print I fussy cut for the first quilt's border. There were thick strips of design and thinner ones. The thick ones I used for the first quilt, the thin ones for this quilt. I ended up getting two wedding quilts for little more than the cost of one. The first one was a queen/king, the second is a throw, about 58"x76".

I have a love/hate relationship with minky. I love the way it feels, and I love how quilting looks on it, but I hate the drag it causes when quilting, and my arm really hates that. When I give a throw sized quilt as a wedding gift, I like to back it with minky because it seems luxurious, and in my mind, more suited as a wedding gift. I would never back anything larger than a throw with minky because it's so hard on my arm. I opted to use a walking foot for a lot of this quilt, and that was a good decision for my arm. I only did FMQ on the two purple borders. 

The quilting on the purple minky on the back looks pretty good!

Here's a close up of the corner from the back.

And here is a close up of the borders from the front. My quilting's far from perfect, but I'm OK with that. It's better than it used to be, and hopefully not as good as it will be someday. I'm always a sucker for variegated threads, but honestly, I've been shying away from matching threads too closely. I just find it too hard to see what I'm doing when the thread exactly matches the fabric. My mistakes and bobbles show more, but that's OK, lets them know I did it and not a computer. 

So now that I've finished one wedding quilt, I still have two to make. I'm making good headway on one of them.

This is the top right quadrant of the king sized quilt. Since I rarely make a quilt with so few fabrics, I had forgotten how much faster they are. When you go scrappy there are a lot more decisions to make about which fabric goes where. In this quilt every fabric has an assigned place, and all 100 blocks are identical. I only need to add the last two rounds to the other 75 blocks, so all of the blocks should be finished soon. 

I'm stuck on how to quilt this one. The blocks are pretty big for ruler work and a radiating design, which was my first thought. The logs are fairly thin to do a different design in each log. I'm thinking I'll quilt with grey thread, but which shade of grey I haven't decided yet. The backing fabric is a black with grey designs on it. I really want to get this wedding quilt top done and basted, and then I can work on piecing the third wedding quilt on one machine while I'm quilting this one on the Janome. I don't have any quilts basted and ready to quilt in the interim. I do have a couple quilt tops out and I've even cut the batting for one, but I haven't pieced the backings yet. 

Since this weekend is Father's Day we've got some plans. I'll be doing some misc. sewing in small bits of time, but I won't really be getting back to the sewing room until next week. 

Quilting Weather

 I know for a lot of places quilting weather involves rain or snow, but here it's all about the heat.

Here is our weather forecast. That 83 degrees, that was at 8:30 AM. If you prefer weather forecasts in Celsius, here you go.

Anyway you look at it, it's going to be HOT! I've never been a summer girl, and now I live someplace that has TWO summers! We have dry summer, followed by wet summer. Anyone who insists Arizona only has a dry heat hasn't been here in August. It's still not as humid as some places, but if we are having a good monsoon year, we can get rain for a short time every day. It's the super high temps of June that bring the moisture up from Mexico, and cause our monsoon season. June is typically our hottest and driest month. 

When it's 110 degrees outside, I don't want to leave the house. Air conditioning is my friend. The air conditioner has a hard time keeping up with these kind of temperatures, so I do my best to not make it any hotter in the house. I try not to use the oven this time of year, the slow cooker doesn't heat up the kitchen. If I need to make bread, it's in a bread machine. As far as quilting goes, the major issue is the iron. I try to use the iron as little as possible, and for as short a period of time as possible. I'm more likely to do several short ironing sessions than one long one. 

Last year we had an unusually cool June, and our monsoon was the second worst on record. Since we get half of our yearly rainfall during monsoon, that's a really bad thing. I'm actually routing for the high temps this year, because we really need the rain. I'm just planning on staying home and quilting during those high temps. 

I started quilting one of the three wedding quilts I need to finish ASAP. This one is for a wedding in July. It is a large throw and I backed it with a purple minky. Minky creates a lot of drag, so I'm opting to crosshatch the center with a walking foot, which is much easier on my arm. When I'm crosshatching squares 6" or smaller (these are 3"), I tend to just aim for the opposite corner and not mark anything. When I get to the edge of where I want that quilting, instead of breaking thread, I just pivot the quilt and keep sewing. Depending on whether your rows are odd numbers of blocks or even numbers, sometimes I can crosshatch the whole section and never break thread (unless the bobbin runs out) Sometimes you might have to start over in a different corner to get it all done. If the quilt is square, the two center diagonal lines must be started and stopped, but after that you can start at the corner of the second block and use the pivoting method. If that doesn't make sense, and if that interests you, let me know and I'll do up a tutorial on it. 

I'm still debating how to quilt the borders. I think with the fussy cut border print, I'm just going to stitch in the ditch, then echo that on those green lines. I'll do some FMQ on the purple borders. 

Since I had to take down the sewing machine in the living room due to company, when I set it back up I switched machines.

It's best to sew on your machines from time to time, to keep things from freezing up on you. This living room set up is a good place to use the machines I don't sew with as often. I've gotten rid of a few of my vintage machines, and I'm open to passing on a couple more, so sewing with them can give me a better idea of which ones I'm willing to part with. I really like the colored machines though, they just make me smile. 

Sometimes deadlines don't bother me, and I'm really motivated to get them done on time. Right now I'm feeling a little overwhelmed, and my method of dealing with that might surprise you. This machine in the living room? I'm only allowing myself to work on non-deadline stuff on it. Even if I only sew for 15 minutes a day on it, it has to be something that has no deadline. Sometimes a little playtime goes a long way in reducing stress.

I am getting deadline stuff done too. I'm doing one hour of quilting per day on the wedding quilt above. I quilt on my Janome M7. I'm piecing another wedding quilt on my vintage Singer 201, which is my piecing machine of choice. I've been piecing at least an hour per day. My Bernina is open for other projects, I have one quilt in rows, and I'll likely sew the rows together on the Bernina just because the cabinet it's in is better suited to that than the table the Singer 201 is in. I need to make DH some new scrub tops, and I'll sew those on the Bernina, and I have another weighted blanket ready to fill, and that will be done on the Bernina too. 

I cut out the first scrub top yesterday, and as I looked at all the various flatware I was using as pattern weights, I decided that some of these poly pellets I'm trying to use up could go to work in some real pattern weights! I've been looking up DIY pattern weight tutorials, and I'm debating which type I'd like to make. I think I like the pyramid-ish ones best. 

Lest you think all I do is sew, June is a decluttering month for me and two of my girls. We are getting rid of one thing on the first, two on the second, three on the third, etc... Since today is the tenth, I need to come up with ten things to weed out. I think today I'm going to go through my jewelry, and I'll likely have enough to count for tomorrow too. I declutter pretty regularly, but I'm still finding stuff that can go. We have a chat group going and we have to show photos of what we decluttered that day. It's a good way to keep us accountable without any drama of a large group. By the end of the month we'll each have gotten 465 things out of our houses. I'm donating or recycling what I can, but some things are bound for the trash, and I'm OK with that. My main method of cutting down on clutter is being mindful of how much I buy. If it's not coming in the house, it won't be having to leave it either. It's easier to manage that now that we don't have a houseful of kids. I've always been big on buying secondhand too, and I think that's good for the planet as well. 

Short-Sheeted Week

It feels like this week was short-sheeted on both ends. I went with DH on his business trip, though I had debated staying home. It ended up working out that I could see two of my nieces if I went, so I decided to go. 

We got to eat lunch at the beach on our way to the event, and I'm all about watching the waves, so that was great! I am such a water girl, stuck in a desert. DH is a desert rat through and through, and he loves the desert. I love him, so in the desert is where we live. He tries to take me to forests, lakes and beaches on a regular basis, so I get bits of what I crave from nature. 

We were gone all of Memorial Day weekend, Friday-Monday. Tuesday was doing laundry and putting everything from the trip away. Today is Thursday, and tonight we have company coming for dinner, then we have different company coming late tonight to spend the weekend. Now you can likely understand why my week seems short-sheeted. I was gone early in the week, and now I've got guests coming. It's all fun stuff, but still disruptive to my usual schedule. Not all interruptions are bad. 

I did finish sub-cutting all the fabric I brought with me to the hotel. Now that project can get added to the leader/ender queue. This is one of those, "I didn't count how many blocks I cut, so I might have to cut more later", depending on how many blocks I have and how I set them. It's a scrap busting project, so I'm pretty lax on those. If I really love how it's coming out, I might decide to cut a bunch more to make a big quilt , but for the most part, scrap quilts end up whatever size they end up. It will be a red and cream colored quilt, and I'm not sure when I'll begin sewing it.

Since I didn't have much in the way of sewing time this week, I just worked on sewing sides onto these scrappy strips. It's fast and pretty mindless sewing. Unfortunately, I sewed the centers on three different machines, so they aren't all coming out just the size they are supposed to. I think I'll be doing some trimming down once I have all the blocks done. I'm not a fan of sliver trimming, but with these simple blocks I don't have any points to worry about and if I don't center it exactly it's not likely to be noticeable in the finished quilt. I've got no deadline for this quilt either, so trimming blocks while watching TV at night works just fine for this one. I usually piece on one machine, but I had so many projects going that needed more than just a straight stitch, that I snuck in some piecing on machines I don't normally use for piecing. I won't have to trim much, just enough to make them all the same size for easier assembly. I'd totally fudge it if I had points to worry about. 

My custom painted 301 is currently set up in the living room, because I needed a change of scenery when sewing. You can see I don't have many blocks left to sew sides onto, and I'm hoping to finish today, but it will have to be in short segments of time in between all the things I have to do to get ready for dinner tonight and the weekend. I'll have to put the machine away today too, since we'll have little ones here this weekend, and I'm not going to leave the temptation out for them to get into trouble, or worse, hurt. 

Next week I think things will be back to normal for a while, so I'll have to reassess where I'm at with things and decide where my priority should be.