This weekend was sewing weekend with my quilt club and that means I got to work on one of the 18 veterans quilt kits that I've cut. The number of cutting mistakes in this kit outnumbers my previous record for sure! The bad thing is that I cut 2 of this quilt so both were wrong! zi did eventually get this one sorted out so this top is ready to quilt.

The mistakes started with the blocks. I only cut half of the cornerstones that I needed for the blocks. I don't have any of this fabric left so I had to start piecing the few scraps and some of the extra sashing.
Then I cut too much away from the inner border and had to add the dark blue corner stones that you can see in the first photo. 
I figured that out after I came home Saturday and decided that I wanted to get the quilt wrapped up.

I got that first border sewn on and put the quilt on the design wall to measure for this outer border. That's when I discovered that I had designed a much larger quilt! For our charity the quilts are 48 x 60 and this on was going to be 54 x 68. How in the world did that happen? 
​I have no idea. But I know now that I'm not going to do anything with the batik scraps until all of my quilt kits are sewn together!

After I got that top done I pulled out the second quilt and adjusted the sashings and inner border so that I can add the star border on this version.
I sure hope I haven's screwed up all the other kits to this degree!

I also finally have a crochet update. I haven't crocheted in at least a month because I developed a lot of pain in my hands from overdoing it. I've been wearing various braces, applying a lot of ice and stretching my hands. My right hand is pretty much cleared up. The left hand is good except for the pinkie finger but I have long term nerve damage in the wrist of that hand so this isn't anything new. I'm down to KT tape all day instead of braces and I've altered some of the ways I crochet to make sure there's no stress on the pinkie and ring fingers of my left hand. I'm not allowing myself to crochet up to 2 short sessions every day and I was finally able to finish the body of this blanket. This is made from 2 Caron Baby Cake. I have a coordinating pink cake that I will use for a border. I might have this one don this week.

I love the mindlessness of doing crochet in the evenings so I had to find something else to do while I couldn't crochet. That turned out to be puzzles. I know that the right way to do them is to start with the border but I tend to start with a color block and eventually work my way around the puzzle. I also like to start with the hardest area, like solid skies. In this one I'll start with the white and gray waterfall. I'd rather being crocheting.

The last thing I have to share is this postcard that I received from Beth H. this week. What a lovely surprise!

My number 1 goal for this week is to get the longarm up and running again.

Today's inspiration comes from one of my local friends, Becky Brown. Becky is in our quilt club and she and another member taught me to applique. She is also a pattern tester for Barbara Brackman so you make recognize these blocks if you follow Barbara's historical QALs. Becky used fabrics from Cranberry and Forest Shades Packs for her background and lots of Gradients and Stash Packs for the applique elements.

You can click on the photos below to see close up how she uses fussy cuts fabrics for special effects in her elements.

For sharing, Becky received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery.  The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. ​

What time of day is most productive for you? I'm not particularly productive in the mornings. I do exercise every day but I don't even eat breakfast until 10. Then I will do computer stuff and I don't get motivated to make/sew/due until about 2. But after 2, I'm on fire until about 10 pm. 
I've become my father who was an incredible night owl.
Yesterday afternoon I made some good progress on my weekend goals.

I got the little t-shirts tied/stamped and ready to dye this weekend. These are for a birthday gift for next weekend. One will be a spiral, the one with the little tied nub is a fish and I'm doing color magnet with another fish theme. Hopefully he will like them. 

Then I got started cutting out more veterans quilt kits. This is a panel that my friend bought for me. It's almost as wide as the quilts we make so it's getting 3" stripes above and below. This one will sew together in a couple of hours.

I had enough batik left over to cut out 2 HST quilts with 6: HST blocks. Both are in blue and cream batiks.

Here's what's left of all of that 30+ yards of batiks that I bought several months ago. These leftovers might become placemats.

When I get back from sewing today I'll get started cutting into those 2 piles in back. That's all that's left of my patriotic fabric. I'm so glad because as of now I have EIGHTEEN kits cut out. That should keep my busy for the next year. 
​I will not be buying more patriotic fabric for a while.

I didn't get anything creative done yesterday except the regular Wednesday dyeing session. I was sill a little tired from the long day Tuesday so at the end of the day I just say and worked on a puzzle and listened to a book. It was kind of a perfect day!

My big goal for the weekend is to cut the rest of this pile into veterans quilt kits. I like pre-cutting kits for my quilt club sewing days and for vacation sewing. I have 2 quilts planned from this pile and the rest might be cut into tumbler or square or HST scraps. But I'm committed to not returning these fabrics to stash!

The other thing I'm doing this weekend is tie dyeing these toddler t-shirts for a birthday gift. I know I'm doing a fish and a spiral but I need to quickly come up with another idea.

It is sewing weekend with my quilt club so Friday and Saturday I'll be working on 2 kits in this pattern. One has the light blue background and one has ivory.

I've ordered the backing and batting for the king size quilt. The backing needs to be dyed but I'm a little closer to getting that quilt done. Because the backing needs to be dyed it means that I will be ice dyeing again soon!

Yesterday was the Democratic primary for 3 positions in Virginia and I spent the day working at the polling station. I did this the first time for the last presidential election and I really enjoy doing it. Unfortunately the turnout was abysmal (as expected for a single party primary) so we were all quite bored. We had 82 voters in a precinct with over 1400 registered voters. There were 5 of us working and we all got lots of reading in and I finished off this hat that will be donated as a chemo hat. It's a 15 hour day so I was almost straight to bed by the time I got home.

Back to the hat. The yarn is Flecks from Michaels. I had been hearing a lot about and I caught it on sale and picked up this skein. I like buying single skeins and trying them out with hats. Then I can figure out if it's something I want more of. This yarn is really soft so it would be great for shawls, hats and scarves. I've seen it made up into a pretty swing-style tank top too. I think it made a pretty chemo hat and I have enough for at least 2 more. It's pretty splitty so I don't know if I'd buy more of it but I'm glad I bought some to try out.

I think this brings my total number of hats to 6 for the year and I finally feel like I'm starting to understand hat making, so that's good. I'm also glad that I have a place to donate them. 

My hand is starting to get better so I'm doing a little bit of crochet every day. I'll have to avoid doing hours of crochet every day again. I did love sitting down after dinner and doing crochet until bed time. Now I'm working puzzles and piecing. I'm going to try a turmeric-based anti-inflammatory to see if that helps. The problem is all inflammation but I can't take ibuprophen or other drugs. I hear good things about tumeric/cumin but I'll need to try it for myself. I have discovered that, as with most things,  the good brands are not inexpensive.

The fun part of my weekend was delivering the Minnie Mouse doll dress to Ella. She loved it and then I spent the rest of the visit tethered to her little brother playing with a bottle of bubbles. Who knew that a $1 bottle of soap would be so popular? You never know.

The rest of the weekend was much quieter. I had the time to get the big green quilt together! Now, I know that most of you are not to sure about this one. Frankly, I'm not either. But my college roommate LOVES anything green. She's seen this and says that she loves it. But just in case I'm going to dye a really pretty back for it so that it will be two-sided.

Here it is spread out flat on the back porch. It's 108" square to fit their king size bed. It's growing on me. For a quilt that wasn't planned at all, it's not too bad! It started as a desire to empty fabrics from my green hand dyed drawer and to use some of the waste fabrics. It accomplished both of those things. The pattern is Club Noir from my favorite quilting book, Colorful Quilts for Fabric Lovers by Amy Walsh and Janine Burke.

This will head to the to-be-quilted pile now.

On the longarm front there's been no progress. Innova tried to call me Friday but I was out running an errand. I expect I'll hear from them today.

Tomorrow I'll be working the Virginia Primary election. It will be really slow so I'll have to take a book to read or some crochet or hand sewing to do. It's a Democratic primary and Virginia Democratic elections are pretty much controlled by national organizations so everyone already knows who the candidate will be. I don't personally know any Democrats that are bothering to vote. It's going to be a long 12 hours in my largely-Republican precinct. The people I'm working with are all nice so it will be fun to reconnect with them.

Funny story, the last "new" person that I met before the pandemic hit in full was Lauren Furey. We met at the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival at the end of February last year.

Lauren is an award winning textile artist and for the last ten years or so have created primarily one of a kind clergy stoles. She ahs her own dedicated section in the Customer Gallery now where you can see a collection of her stoles. For Goddess she used a Denim Shades Pack. Notice that this one came with a coordinating mask. Brilliant!

For sharing, Lauren received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery.  The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. 

So I mentioned Wednesday that my goal Thursday was to get the Innova timed. 
It all started when I wanted to get these 2 veterans quilts done quickly before vacation. For this one I was happily quilting along with the wavy cross-hatch when the machine started acting up. I think I ran up on a thick seam and it messed up the hopping foot height. That's not uncommon and it's not a big deal. I fixed it and moved on and finished this one.

Then I started on this one just doing some wavy horizontal lines. On both of these quilts I was using thread that wouldn't really show so I could get away with really simple quilting. This quilt legitimately deserved some fancy quilting but I have to remember that I'm quantity over quality when it comes to veterans quilts.  This quilt should have taken 40 minutes, max, to quilt.

As of these evening I expect that it's taken me 4 hours! My machine is unhappy. It is quilting great from left to right but right to left is awful.

Yesterday Marcy came over and we went through the timing steps and I think we did everything right but I still have some sort of problem. It's possible that there's a burr somewhere that I can't see or something. I've taken a lot of photos and sent an email to Innova for some help. I'm not frustrated with the machine or anything. I've had it since 2014 with so few problems. I'm sure this is either a damaged part or something stupid I've done in my attempts to adjust it. I expect it will be resolved soon.

Here's what the back of these quilts look like. It's nothing special except the specialness of being done! I'm all caught up on veterans quilts until the meeting Tuesday night.

​This weekend is all about getting the green quilt top together.

I still don't know why I'm making these doll clothes but I can tell you for sure that I'm not done because there are other ideas floating around in my head. This diversion is simply bizarre for me.
​This is my newest outfit. 
Ella, the recipient of these, went to Disneyworld recently. I found this fabric when I was in Lancaster (along with the "handbag"). The next week Pixie Fairie had a 1950's shirtwaist dress pattern for free. It was meant to be! I've ordered a belt for it to complete the ourfit.

Do you remember when I made this evening dress a few months ago? We're saving it to give to her on her birthday in July. That worked out great because a friend gave me some fake fur scraps. A fur trimmed cape seemed in order.

The claps really isn't in proper proportion but I found it in the button cabinet and seemed like a fine way to finish it off.

​Anne gave me a bag of sparkly knit fabrics so I expect some sparkle t-shirts are in my future. I've put the doll stuff away for the moment. It's time tog et back to quilting.

I will spend part of today trying to re-time my longarm so that I can get back to quilting. I messed it up before vacation. I've been meaning to purchase the timing tool for a while but now I have the need. It was time to invest. If I can't get it right I'll get my brother over here to help. He can fix anything.

I don't know about you, but I don't travel without some sort of sewing or craft project. I took some crochet for the car and my sewing machine for the house. I barely touched the machine because the weather looked like this EVERY day. I parked myself on the beach with books pretty much all week.

But Anne and my SIL, Carol, got busy with the Cricut machine. Anne recently bought one and Carol offered to help her start it up. The first thing they did was make this iron on vinyl for me so that now I have dedicated crochet travel bag!

Anne also brought along a dozen water bottles to decorate. Carol designed this cool puzzle label because we worked 3 puzzles during the week. There are 4 puzzle pieces: a fish, a beach sign, lounge chair and lighthouse (for the Hatteras lighthouse). I did help "weed" then. I learned that term last week. Aren't these cool?

When I handed out the dyed tote bags, Anne chose an apron and added these designs to the pockets. Carol had the idea to put the apple stem inside the pocket. I can't wait to come up with some other ideas that Anne can make for me. 

I'm having a lot of problems with my hands so I haven't been crocheting at all. But I have to do something in the car to do. I've told you before that I'm a horrible passenger. I took along this car crochet project and I stitched really slowly and carefully. It has 2 skeins in it so far. I'll use all of this third skein and then add a fuchsia border.

Here's a closeup of the pattern. This is my "go to" car project because it's so easy. It's all double crochet and chains.

While on vacation I always feel it's my patriotic duty to support local shops and I was a good patriot this week at several shops. Mostly, I bought t-shirts and hats. But surprisingly in the little village of Hatteras there's a very nice yarn/gift shop that has the added bonus of a sweet welcome dog. They have beautiful yarns. Most are wool that I can't use but I found this beautiful chain spun yarn that's a cotton blend. Carol found me a really simple duster/cardigan pattern for it. I really need for my hand to get better so I can crochet again!

Back at home I've got all the green quilt blocks sorted and paired together. These will be sewn together in pairs to make 12.5" blocks. I've started sewing these together. I expect this top can go together pretty quickly.

I'm also working on more doll clothes and I should be able to share those tomorrow. I've totally lost my mind over the doll clothes!