Finish #12

 Finish #12 of the year is also a deadline quilt, so it's a double win!

Well, I say it's a win, but the recipient grandson just asked me for a Minecraft quilt, and I just finished his Lego quilt, so we'll see how that goes. His birthday is in a couple weeks, so I guess I'll see then. I'm preparing myself for a less than enthusiastic reaction. I might have enough Minecraft fabric to make him and his brother Minecraft pillowcases, so maybe if I do that I'll be OK. 

I already started FMQ on another quilt, but even if I get that one done in April, I'll be a little behind in my goal of finishing 40 quilts this year. I'm not expecting any out of town company coming up, but grandkids for the weekend may come up soon. We'll see what happens later this year. The biggest interruptions I knew about have already happened, so maybe I'll pick up speed again. 

I finished April's Greek murder mystery blocks.

Come to think of it, I don't think I ever showed you March's blocks.

February and March's blocks were all in blues, January's had some of the same colors as April's block, with the addition of green. The Viking murder mystery was easier to figure out what most of the blocks were going to be in the quilt than this one has been so far. 

I already started another deadline quilt, but I have had a baby quilt that needs to jump the queue. The baby isn't due until September, so I was thinking I could finish the two quilts due in July before I worked on the baby quilt. Well, they are throwing the baby shower in May, which is insanely early in my book, so now I need to work on it first. My goal is to get the baby quilt cut out this weekend. (I did finish the other cutting I needed to do). I've got all the deadline quilts cut out except the baby quilt, so I can just keep using them as leaders/enders for each other until I have all the tops made. 

This afternoon we are going to the county fair with DD#2's family, so I should get some quilty eye candy! There is a quilting category for prizes at the fair. My kids keep telling me to enter, but that's absolutely not something that interests me. I quilt for fun, and my perfection quotient is not that high. I don't want the pressure of needing perfect points or having my binding be just so. That kind of pressure would take all of the fun out of it for me. I do enjoy seeing the quilts that have been entered, so for all of you that enjoy entering quilting contests, thank you! 

I Have Some Cutting to Do!

 I'm really trying to get all the projects I partially cut from 3.5" strips sewn into blocks. I never had a huge variety of 3.5" strips, so I ended up with a lot of duplicate blocks. I planned several projects with HST's made from 3.5" strips, and on those I have all the HST's made, and a few blocks made, but mostly those are stalled there. The thing is, all those HST's are in project boxes, not hanging around my sewing space. The pieces I'm sewing up now were just sitting on a shelf. I decided to sort these longer strips I'll be using for hashtag blocks. They will be big 15" blocks, so with sashing and borders, I only need 20 blocks for a twin and 12 will make a throw. I divided the sets up into three throws and two twins. The piles that are spread out will be the throws, and the piles that are stacked will be twins. I'm matching them up with background colors now. The pattern I'm altering has sashing in the same color as the background in the blocks, but I might not go that way on all of these. I think that mustard yellow may be a bit much in that big of a quantity, so I'll likely use contrasting sashing for that throw. You can see my instructions for April's murder mystery block peeking out in the lower left corner, and I need to cut that out too! 

I'll end up with five hashtag quilts after I cut the backgrounds and sashing/borders. They will be donation quilts, so duplicates are not a problem. They should be pretty quick to make once it's all cut out because the blocks are easy and big. 

I had some leftover strips cut for hashtag blocks but I'm sure I'll be sick of making those after doing five of them, so I cut the rest into the donut-ish blocks I showed last week. I think I have 70 blocks made with the gray background, and 90 or so with a white background, but I cut more white and now I have more to make with those. I'll definitely get multiple quilts from those blocks, but I'll get at least one quilt, if not two, from the bonus HST's I'm getting from making those blocks. 

I didn't finish any quilts this week, but I snapped a pic as was finishing up the quilting on Mr. T's birthday quilt.

I finished quilting this today, so once it's trimmed I can sew the binding on and it will be a finish! 

On the homefront, the ductwork is finished, and the holes in the walls repaired, but DH doesn't have time to repaint for at least a couple weeks. He's overbooked himself over the next couple weeks, so I will just wait for him to have time. I am terrible at painting, so I'm better off waiting than trying it myself. 

I had to switch out my seasonal clothes, and that makes me sad because I hate summer. Our highs have been in the 90's but the lows are still low enough that I've managed to keep the air conditioner off so far. It won't be that way for long, and I'm dreading the high electric bills, but really hoping that ductwork replacement pays off! 

I'm also in a reorganizing mood again. For now I'm trying to tackle the kitchen, pantry, and one of the bedroom closets. This afternoon I was rearranging the kitchen drawers. I emptied one drawer, but what I wanted to put there didn't fit. I do like some of the things I've rearranged, but some I'm still debating. I'm going to try using a knife block again, and I'm not sure how I feel about them being in sight again after they've been in a drawer. That said, I know from experience they are easier to access from the knife block. Just like I kept the knife block (which are crazy expensive now, so I'm glad I kept it) I'll keep the knife drawer organizer for a while until I decide which storage method I prefer. 

I want to move the most common cooking utensils to the drawer closest to the stove, but that drawer was the only one the knife organizer fit into. Now that I'm going back to the knife block I can go back to the the cooking utensils in the drawer by the stove. As I'm going through what's in my drawers and decluttering what I don't use often enough to warrant keeping it, I'm realizing I don't own a spatula I actually like. DH's favorite spatula is huge and takes up way too much space in the drawer, and I'd love to donate it but he'd definitely complain. I haven't been able to find a spatula I've liked for years, why are all the handles so huge??? My current ladle has a huge handle too, and I just don't get it. The handles take up too much space in drawer, they really don't work in a countertop utensil jar, so there are no good storage options for these giant handled utensils. I've been looking for a new spatula ever since DH melted my favorite one, and I cannot find one that same style anywhere. Our pots are stainless and can have stainless utensils, but I prefer non-stick frying pans so I normally buy non-stick safe utensils. If you have a spatula suggestion for me, send me a link, and I'll take a look. I've got too many spatulas, but until I find one I really like, I'm hesitant to declutter them. 

I hope any spring cleaning you are tackling right now is less frustrating!

Sewing Drought

 Our visit with DS the Elder and family was great! Easter went well and we all had a good time. During the time they were here we made it out to the Sonoran Desert Museum, and to DD#1's homestead where we held the baby goats and pet all the animals. We had quality time with family and nothing beats that!

They left last Friday,  so you'd think I'd dive right back into the quilting studio, and I have sewn some, but not as much as you'd think. The thing is, we've needed our ductwork replaced for a while now, but kept putting it off. Now that DH is seriously talking retirement, now is the time to tackle those jobs we've put off. Timing ductwork replacement is tricky because you can't use heating or cooling while it's being done. I'd much rather be cold than hot, so I really wanted it done in March, but March was really busy, and we didn't get estimates until late March. 

The first estimate was crazy high, and the company was unfamiliar with our style of house. We own a tri-level house, which is much more common in the Midwest than the desert Southwest. I had done some internet research on how much duct replacement should cost, so I knew they were way outside of normal pricing. The next estimate we got was very reasonable, and when the repairman walked in, we found out he was from the Midwest and had owned a house just like ours! Just the familiarity he had with this style of house made us feel much better about going with this company. 

So, days before DS the Elder arrived, we scheduled the duct replacement for the week after he left, which is this week. We knew it would take multiple days, and on at least some of those days I wouldn't be able to get to my sewing room at all. I had all of last weekend to sew, but I didn't want to get into anything that mattered, because being interrupted on a major project can be really frustrating for me. Rather than work on a deadline project, or be in the middle of FMQ a quilt, I opted to just work on a random project or two. 

A couple posts ago, I showed you a block that used partial seams. That project has been cut out for a year (or maybe two).

Here are a few of the finished blocks, but I've actually finished all the blocks!  Right now my colorway of Indigo Way is up on the design wall. so I laid out a few blocks on my bed to see how they'd look. This is one of the rare occasions that I only cut out as many blocks as I needed for ONE quilt, and I cut out the borders at the same time, so once the center is assembled I'll be adding borders immediately.

I also worked on some other blocks that, again, have been cut out for a long time.

This project is quite typical of me. I was cutting up 3.5" scrap strips, and I cut as many blocks as I could from the colorful scraps. No counting, no sorting, no plan. I took a length of white fabric and cut as many 3.5" squares from it as I could. I knew that wouldn't be enough, and some of my colored scraps were quite light in color. I had a piece of darker gray fabric lying around, so I cut as many squares from it as I could. Again, no counting, no sorting, just cutting what I could from the lengths of fabric I had. I knew that wouldn't be enough squares for the blocks either, but no worries, I can cut more fabric later. I started with the blocks with white squares, and sewed up blocks until I ran out. Now I'll be working on the blocks with gray squares, which I'll be matching up mostly lighter scraps. When I run out of gray squares, then I'll count and see where I'm at. I'm planning on using these for donation quilts, and 9" blocks add up pretty quickly. I'm sure I'll end up with multiple quilts, but how many I don't know. I might mix up the background colors, and go for a positive/negative thing, or keep the same colored backgrounds together. Will I end up going for a third background color when I run out of squares? All of that is yet to be determined. I have another gray fabric that is close to what I am using, and of course I have more white, but not the same white. Until I finish the blocks I can make with what I already have cut, I won't be making any decisions on that. 

My pile of bonus HST's is piling up as I finish these blocks too. I didn't draw lines on these squares to get my bonus HST's the exact size I want them, so I'll be trimming these before I press them open. That's an easy job to do in my living room while I can't get to the sewing room. I get four bonus HST's from each bigger block, so I should have enough for a bonus quilt when I'm done. Doing sew and flip corners is never wasteful for me, because I always use the "waste" in another quilt, or sometimes for borders in the same quilt. 

Wondering how the replacement is going?

That was some rusty ductwork! This house had been cooled with an evaporative cooling system for years, also called a swamp cooler. Systems like that force air through wet filters and use the evaporative process to create cooler air. They work well during the dry months, but just make things humid and miserable during monsoon season.  They also rust out your ductwork. We took the evaporative cooler off the house years ago, and only use an air conditioner for cooling. Replacing the ductwork with definitely help it be more energy efficient like it should be, and since we no longer use evaporative cooling at all, we shouldn't have rusty ductwork again. I am very happy we are getting this work done before summer hits again, but we cut it close. The forecast says it will be 90F today. 

This afternoon the drywall guy will be coming by to start repairing the holes they needed to cut in the walls and ceilings to replace the ductwork. I'll be glad to have this project behind us. Now to decide which house project to tackle next!