2022- The Year of Shirts?

 The last couple of years I've ignored my collection of men's shirts for quilting. To be fair, I had a lot of deadline quilts in those years. The thing is, I love quilting with men's shirts! Doing Rhododendron Trail mystery quilt with men's shirts just reminded me of how much I enjoy that. 

I found sewing up those butterfly blocks very boring, so I used them as leaders/enders while working on blocks for other quilts. I had to make a bunch of extra QST's for extra blocks and cornerstones, and if I had been rotary cutting them I would have given up. Since I was using my Studio cutter with a Go die, at least I got a lot cut at once, and I had no dog ears to trim, so it wasn't nearly as tedious as it could have been. 

I've got enough blocks made to make a square quilt, which wasn't really my preference, but once I add sashing and a border (both of which I'm using yardage for) it will be large enough to fit a queen sized bed, and I often use square quilts for those.  I'm going to use a goldish tan for the sashing, which will lighten up the quilt considerably, then I'll use more QST's for cornerstones. I've got two pieces of fabric in stash that would work for borders, and I'll make my final decision once the center is done. 

Since I was digging through my shirt stash, I dug out every shirt section that had a pocket and I'm cutting all of those up. The whites and creams, plus the blues, I set aside to do the mystery quilt in Quiltmaker magazine. I've never attempted to do a quilt over such a long period of time before, BOM's aren't usually my thing, and this being every other month is even more unlike me, but I have so many blue shirts, I felt like this was a good option for that. I haven't started cutting for that yet, but with the clues so far apart, I'm sure I can catch up. 

The other colors of shirts I'm cutting up for some specific quilts. All basic sizes, so if I have too many of a size for the quilt I'm making I can easily use it in another quilt. I'm cutting the largest pieces first, then cutting smaller sizes as the piece gets smaller. Since all of these pieces I'm cutting right now have pockets, the biggest piece I have been able to cut is a 6.5" square, and I've only got a few of those, and they aren't in this bin. 

On the shirts that are predominantly one color, I'm only cutting up the sections with pockets, and anything small like cuffs or yokes. Sleeves, front sections without pockets, and backs are all staying intact for now. Multicolored shirts that are hard to use by color are all getting cut up, so that I'll have a bunch of quilts cut out ready to use as leader/ender projects, and all the shirt pieces that are left are the biggest, most versatile pieces. Cutting shirts into usable sizes is going to be a huge project that will likely last most of this year. I do have a couple things that are essential for cutting smaller things like this. 

Besides my rotary cutter, my rotating Olfa mat and the Stripology Squared Mini ruler are both winners in my book. I'm not much on brands, I have several brands of mats I like, two of which are rotating. I do like the Olfa mat better than the rotating Fiskars one I have, but the Fiskars mat is smaller and better for keeping next to my sewing sewing machine when I'm doing frequent trimming. I really like slotted rulers, and I have three sizes of June Tailor slotted rulers, and three sizes of Stripology slotted rulers. This mini ruler from Stripology is hands down my favorite of the Stripology rulers. A lot of the slotted rulers are huge, which is great when you are cutting a lot of strips from yardage, but if you want a slotted ruler for scraps, this one is smaller and more easily moved around which you'll be doing a lot of if you are working with small scraps. I have a lot of brands of rotary cutters I like, but when using a slotted ruler, you want to use one with a manual safety guard. The ones that automatically close don't work well with slotted rulers in my experience. If I'm cutting a bunch of strips with a larger ruler, I prefer a 60mm blade, but for this smaller ruler, the 45mm is better. 

I've still been doing some decluttering.

I've got the gluten free flours tamed and organized. I have some other flours I am not going to keep on hand anymore, so those are in a bin and I'm going to try to use those up soon. I also have nut flours but I keep those in the freezer. I made myself an expiration date for the bin, and whatever I haven't used by then is being tossed. All the packages are opened, so donating them isn't an option. 

I went through FABRIC!!!

All of these fabrics went to my sister. Only the fabrics on top are quilting fabrics, everything else is either garment or home dec fabrics. I also passed on a bunch of notions, like all of my zippers. Everytime I think about garment making I put it off and put it off, and it's just time to accept the fact that's not something I want to do anymore. I can still make scrub tops, t shirt dresses, and pajama pants, all of which I don't mind making. I kept things like interfacing and elastic I'd need to make those. I had already given my sister all of my buttons, though I have some, because I save all the buttons off the men's shirts I use for quilting. 

My plans last weekend fell through, so I had some extra sewing time. I am going to have company for part of this weekend. I need to go set up the pack and play for the littlest one to sleep in, then it's back to seeing what else I can get done before my company arrives tonight. 

Mystery Quilt Dropout

 I've been doing Bonnie Hunter's Rhododendron Trail mystery quilt, and I'm sure the reveal is coming up quickly, but I've decided to go off in my own direction from here. I'm sure the reveal will be spectacular as usual, but I've just got my mind set on other plans for these blocks and units. 

After playing with the blocks a bit, I've decided I really want to straight set them, so even if Bonnie does an on point setting, I'm not going that direction with them (literally, not that direction!) I am debating sashing and cornerstones, and I haven't come to any firm conclusions on that. I'll have to make a few more block B's, and I'll have two leftover block A's, but that's fine. 

So what am I going to do with all the flying geese units from clue 2?

I'm going to make these blocks, which is likely why I'm going off on my own now. I've been wanting to make a quilt with this block for a while now, and since I've got all these flying geese made, I may as well go for it. Of course, half the blocks will spin to the left, and half to the right, but that's OK too. I'm thinking I'll frame these blocks with the burgundy, then alternate those with a different block, probably a 16 or 25 patch, depending on how wide I make the framing strips.  These will just go in a different quilt, so I'm taking the mystery quilt and making two separate quilts from the parts. 

Besides working on the mystery quilt, I spent some time working on problem areas in the sewing room. I don't know about you, but I like a LOT of stuff with arms reach when I'm sewing, which leads to this...

What a mess! I've been watching quilt studio tours on YouTube, and I saw an idea that got me to thinking. If I had a raised shelf here, I could store things underneath it, and still have the top available. 

I store my studio dies in a set of used kitchen cabinets I bought from Habitat for Humanity. My strip dies are so tall, I had to take the shelf out, so I had an extra shelf sitting around.I had a shallow bin to store all my bobbins and bits underneath the shelf, so now the bin acts as a drawer. 

The bin doesn't go all the way back, so I stuck some smaller bins behind that. Notice what's holding up my shelf? Thread cones! I didn't have to build anything, I can take it all apart anytime I want, but the shelf is heavy enough that it's not likely to move (my coffee is safe), and the thread cones are plenty sturdy enough to hold up the shelf! I've had it like this a couple days already, and I'm really liking the change. 

Do you have any great sewing room organizing tips for me?

January Declutter

 Last June I did a big declutter with my girls, They decided to do a declutter again this month. There's no way I can keep up with the number of things they are decluttering, so I decided to go a different direction. My freezers are FULL, both the one that's part of my refrigerator, and my upright freestanding freezer. I make a lot of freezer meals, so it's not like it's all weird forgotten food, though there are a couple corners of the freezers that are, like the bin of frozen vegetables, not sure what's at the bottom of that! I can't really reorganize until I get the inventory down. My walk-in-pantry needs a good clearing out as well, when food was so scarce in 2020, DH went shopping and brought home some interesting canned goods. Anything I normally bought is long gone, but a few of the odder things are still there, and it's time to use those up.

 I've also been a mission to use up some of the gluten free flours I don't use very often, and not to buy any more of those. I'm trying to make myself a list of 6-8 flours I need to keep on hand, but right now I likely have 30 different GF flours, starches, gums, etc... Baking yummy stuff gluten free is totally doable, but it tends to take a lot of different ingredients. I can make a really nice loaf of traditional bread with five ingredients. To make DH's favorite GF bread, I use at least 20. 

Also, since it's the beginning of a new year, my sister and I were both thinking about how to tweak our craft rooms. She decided to do a complete flip of hers, where I just had a few changes I wanted to make. I decided a couple months ago that I wanted to move the ironing station into the fabric room. Things were so busy around the holidays, and I was rushing to get deadline stuff done, so I didn't have the time to do that until now. Monday I moved the ironing station, and it fits even better than I expected in it's new spot. I can even easily plug and unplug the iron! 

Now I had an empty spot in the sewing room. I had debated on moving my vintage machine to that spot, but it's fine where it is, so there wasn't a reason to. I started looking around at my messy sewing room, and really started thinking about WHY it's messy. I realized that a lot of what was sitting around was the bins I use for current projects. I have been thinking about asking DH to make me a set of shelves specifically to fit my favorite type of project bins. For stalled or long term projects I used closed project bins, but for stuff I'm currently working on (and I'm always working on multiple projects) I like open bins. I like being able to toss all the parts to a project into an open bin, and then I can clean up quickly in case I need to switch to another job, like mending or something. The thing is, I didn't have a place to put open bins, so they were always all over. 

Now, someday I'd like to have DH make me some shelves exactly to my specifications, and I'll buy a few more of my favorite bins, and then I'll be able to use my open bins like drawers in their custom shelves. Someday, but that day isn't now. DH has been really busy, and wood prices are sky high again, so it's just not fair to ask him to do that right now. 

I looked online to see if I could find something ready made that would fit my purposes, and nothing I found was quite right. If I wasn't going to get just what I wanted, I didn't want to spend any money, so was there another solution? Since I've been an empty nester, I've been careful to not fill up all the empty closets and dressers with stuff. The only things stored in my guest room closet are guest related things, air mattresses, a cot, a pack and play for babies, extra pillows, etc... BUT there was something in there there that wasn't being stored, it was just part of the closet. 

When we first bought this house, one of the first things we did was buy closet organizers for every closet, and rearrange how things were stored in them. As rooms changed purposes, we moved the units from the closet organizers around the house to what made sense at the time. I never get rid of any closet organizer pieces, I just rearrange them. For example, in DH's office, which used to be a bedroom, we completely uninstalled the center tower, took out the closet bars, and moved a big set of shelves into the closet which far better utilizes the space for what he needs in his office. In the grandkid room, I moved several shoe shelf units into the closet so I could store toys for them in easy to grab bins. We have a five bedroom house, so we've also got a lot of closets. We've rearranged the closets multiple times over the years, just switching up which closet organizer pieces were where. Well, the guest room had all the extra pieces we weren't currently using, and those I could repurpose!

It might not be pretty, but I did reconfigure the extra closet organizer pieces into something that would hold my project bins. I'm sure I'll be tweaking how they are arranged on here, but I just wanted to see if it would work at all, and it will!

If you are wondering what that stack of purple on top is, here's a sneak peak...

It's the attic windows blocks for my youngest granddaughters I Spy quilt! I finished all 80 blocks this week, and now I've got to cut the sashing.

I've also been working on the mystery quilt. I'm not caught up, but I'm making progress. I've got clues 1, 2, 3, and 5 finished now. I'm finding sewing up the gazillion QST's from clue 2 boring, so I'm using them as my leaders/enders on everything else I sew. I'm still not sure if I have enough cut, because I'm not counting until I finish sewing what is cut. Today I finished strip piecing the connector units for clue six, so tonight I'll press and sub-cut while watching TV with DH. I'm betting clue seven that comes out tomorrow will use all those QST units from clue 4, and if I'm right, I'll have to get moving on those! 

If all of that were not enough, I'm also back to sub-cutting men's shirts for several projects. My spot in the living room doesn't have a machine set up right now, I've got a small ironing board on my sewing table, and a cutting mat on a TV table next to that. I have several projects in mind for shirts, and I know once I have those cut, I can divide the scraps into Scrap User sizes, strings, crumbs and trash. My sister gets all the crumbs, but I'll use the scrap user sizes and strings. I have been wanting to get back to string piecing for a while now, it's such a stress reliever! If my deadline quilt list doesn't fill up, I should be able to donate time to that this year. I love only having two quilts on my deadline list! 

Silly Putty Days and Year End Reckoning

 I'm calling these Silly Putty Days because I'm having to be flexible on a whole new level. Last weekend, when I thought I'd be having a quiet low key Christmas, I ended up throwing a big Christmas Eve event, a busy Christmas Day, and four out of town guests. 

This weekend when I thought I'd be throwing a big event today, it's postponed due to illness (not mine) and instead of having a houseful I'm only going to have two grandkids, so I decided to celebrate their birthday today instead. As soon as I finish blogging I'll go make a birthday cake. I had to completely rearrange the freezer to get the food for the big event that's now postponed in there, so I wasn't wasting food. 

I did have a couple of days with the grandkids earlier this week, which was great, but I'm on round two of antibiotics for a tooth infection which is kind of taking the wind out of my sails a bit. I have a dental appointment on the 10th to deal with all that, but they can't do much while an infection is raging and the first round of antibiotics didn't knock it out. I'm feeling a bit better now, and the swelling in my face is much better, so that's good. 

So overall, I've had a bunch of company, but not always who I thought was coming. I've thrown events I hadn't planned, and postponed stuff I had. Where I had planned on celebrating Family Christmas today, I ended up taking down all the Christmas decorations today instead.

You can imagine I've fallen way behind on the mystery quilt. I've done most of the cutting for clues four and five, but only sewn a couple units of each. Using my Studio cutter for the cutting makes short work of that. I decided to make one block of clue six just to see how it looks, since my colors are drastically different. 

The colors are pretty off in this pic, I'll try to get a better one later. Since I'm using men's shirts as my colors, I will have multiple shades of solids mixed in with the plaids and stripes. The burgundy background is constant throughout, I bought yardage of that. 

Oh, I did get some Christmas Goodies for my quilting!

DH got me two jelly rolls and some fat quarters. He knows me well.

As for my year end reckoning, I finished 21 quilts in 2021. Nine finishes were UFO's. Three were WIPS that were started in 2020, but I had never set them aside so I more consider them WIPS than UFO's. The other nine were new starts, but I'm OK with that, because any new starts that were finishes didn't become a UFO! I have the sizes of all my finished quilts written down, but I don't have the headspace right now to figure out the yardage used. It is no doubt over 100 yards, especially considering I used about 30 yards of flannel making burp rags, and at least eight yards making bowl cozies that weren't even quilting projects. I finished two King sized quilts, one queen, one full, and several twins. Yeah, over 100 yards easily. 

My empty spools for 2021 don't look very impressive, but it still represents 6.5 miles of thread. I have several almost empty cones, so next year should look like more. 

I haven't looked back on my goals for 2021. I still haven't gotten a quilt on my bed, but I did meet all my deadlines this year. I know I had hoped to bust more scraps, which I have done. I think I wanted to sew up a couple quilt kits, which I haven't done. It's a mixed bag of met goals and good intentions unfulfilled! Isn't that a typical year?

I know I had planned on being low buy for 2021, and I completely failed at that!  I had some huge fabric purchases! The quilt specific fabrics I bought are already used or cut out, Everything else I purchased was basics, solids, tonals, or blenders. I've already cut into a lot of those too. 2022 needs to be a low buy year because we have a big trip planned in the fall, and I need to save as much money as I can towards that. I already know I need about a twelve inch square of yellow minky for some applique on a baby quilt I'm making. I think I'll look on etsy since I need such a small amount, although my MIL got me a Hobby Lobby gift card, so maybe I'll check there first. I tried Joann's, but they only had a harvest gold type of yellow. I need a lighter softer yellow. I was hoping for a remnant, since I just need four crescent moon appliques out of it, but I haven't found one. I will likely have to buy batting some time this year, but I'm going to wait until I absolutely have to have some. I have a full roll of cotton batting, but I'm almost out of poly batting. Thankfully poly is the cheaper one to buy, so I'm not too stressed about that. 

I know of two deadline quilts for this year, a twin and a baby quilt, for different families but both due in March. The twin sized quilt I've already started sewing. Besides any deadline quilts that come up, I really just want to keep doing what I did this year, finish UFO's, start quilts that use stash and scraps, and have fun!