I spent a lot of time this weekend continuing my reorganization efforts. I discovered that I have lifetime supplies of paper (notebooks, notepads, etc) and gift wrapping materials. I should throw out about half of each but, for now I have them consolidated and organized. I did toss out a big black bag of actual garbage. Over the next couple of years I really need to go through my photos and cut that volume in half too. But, two closets, a desk and several drawers are organized and that was a huge step. I now know what we have and I know where it all is. In between organizing, I organized an ice dyeing day. 90 degree weather is perfect for ice dyeing. I got all of the fabrics ready Saturday and did the dyeing Sunday. This was the state of things yesterday evening. I'll have the results in a few days and will share some of the new techniquest that I tried out. Somehow I got blue dye everywhere! These are my dyeing shorts anyway so this addition is OK. I'll be scrubbing blue stains off my hands and nails for days. I sewed some potholders too and I have 15 done so far.
This week, I'll be sewing potholders and getting ready for Wednesday. That's when my young friend, Ella, arrives for "craft camp". It should be fun. We also have our friends here staying in the guest house. They have been working themselves to death finishing their move out and clean out before the sale closes tomorrow. Hopefully, after today we will have some time to visit and catch up.
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I didn't get a lot of sewing done yesterday. We spent the morning moving out a 30 year old sofa bed, end tables and coffee table. They were old but still in perfect condition. We found a charity that was thrilled to receive it. I'm always glad when things can avoid the dump a little longer. We have one more piece of furniture to move downstairs and it's going to be the hardest to move. We may attempt it today. Later in the afternoon our friends arrived to move into the guest house. I also got to deliver 42 veterans quilts to our VA contact. I love delivery days! I did get a couple of hours in the sewing room and finished cutting out the fabric parts of the potholder kits. All I have left to cut are the pocket batting pieces and then I'll set down for some serious sewing.
Honestly, the only thing I did yesterday was pack orders. Thank you to all of you for that! The night before I did have time to load and baste the next 2 veterans quilts. I hope I can start quilting these today but we do have an appointment this afternoon and I have a few more orders to pack. But good news! The electrician came yesterday and fixed the breaker for our AC and now the house is nice and cool again! We also have more bluebirds!
Well, we mostly had a family vacation but not without a LOT of drama. This was our vacation craft project and provides a hint as to what happened. I'll let you think about it and will give you the story at the end. But as to this project, I am committed to the absolute fact that I need a Cricut machine. After doing my brother's screen printed shirts and this project, I have so many ideas of how I could use it. I don't have any beach photos as I only got out to the beach one day and I had one afternoon to do some crochet. This is how far I am on the baby blanket. I'm almost done with the first skein. Since I got home I've mostly done unpacking and laundry but I got the next set of veterans quilts loaded. We came home to a broken downstairs air conditioner so it was nice to be in the cooler basement for a couple of hours. The upstairs works so we aren't in any distress and can wait on the repair shop to open this week. No need to pay emergency prices. I'm doing a swirly pattern on this quilt.
Now, onto the vacation. We stay in Hatteras Village, NC. It's at the very tip end of the Outer Banks by the ferry to Ocracoke. It's far away from everything, including emergency services. This story, surprisingly, does not have an alcohol consumption element. Chris rarely, but occasionally, faints and he seems to do it more during the night. Well, the first night we were there it happened and he couldn't have fallen in a worse place. We aren't sure how he fell but we know his nose hit the end of the bed and he was knocked out. We were off to the ER at 5 am on Sunday. The ER is over an hour away and it was raining buckets. He had a broken nose, sore neck and damaged right kidney. We were back at the ouse around 3 pm but he was in too much pain and it was back to the ER at midnight. By 6am, he was being transported to the Norfolk General Trauma Center. Final talley: broken nose, pinched nerve in his neck, bruised rib, bruised lung and lacerated kidney. He has several follow up appointments with specialists and, I expect that there will be a nose surgery in his future. He's doing a lot better but is still moving a little stiffly and I won't let him drive yet. But every day he is getting better and better. I didn't let him go to the beach but he got to relax by the pool a couple of days. I made it to the beach for one hour with my friend. I was so grateful for my brother and two friends for helping me out. Two of them drove me to Norfolk. One of our friends lives in Norfolk and spent 8 years in and out of that hospital with her Mom. She dropped everything to come over and sit with him Monday evening and Tuesday morning while I wasn't there. She kept him entertained and she knows all the things that the hospital was supposed to be doing for him but wasn't! She was a Godsend. I had not had much sleep so I couldn't drive myself. Our friend, Win, took us to the second ER visit and to Norfolk. My brother took me on the day he got out. When we were kids it seemed that my Dad got sick on every vacation. He would spend most of vacation in bed with some sort of cold or something and Mom had no choice but to let us run feral on the beach. One year he had a major dental emergency. My brothers accused Chris of trying to take over the family tradition. Everyone,including Chris, kept their senses of humor. He even approved the design of our memento craft project! Surprisingly, everyone is looking forward to next year! I'm going to pick a less remote place. There's a weekly casual craft group at the local library now and I planned to go yesterday and wanted to take a new crochet project. This baby blanket seemed like a good idea. I got it started Wednesday night and worked on it for 2 hours. At the end of that session my eyes were burning and my sinuses were inflamed. 30 minutes after I stopped everything cleared up. Apparently I'm allergic to this yarn so I stopped this project and will donate this yarn. I still needed a project to work on at the library and I remembered this shawl. I remembered that it was easy and I had the same yarn in a different colorway and could follow the exact same instructions. It goes really fast and I got this much done in 2 hours at the library. In the sewing room I'm steadily working away on the surgery drain bags. It's possible that I get these done this weekend....but not likely. I'm sure I'll find some sort of other distraction!
I don't have a lot to share today because yesterday was a busy dyeing day. I'm very grateful to my customers for keeping me so busy lately! Yesterday was a particularly long day but all the fabric is happily batching and waiting to be washed out this evening. I"m lucky to have my husband's abandoned sauna for batching so I get very consistent temperatures every week. I'm slowly making progress on the quilt. I've finished 3 rows of 8 of the cross-hatching and border blocks. My left wrist has mostly healed itself but I'll continue to quilt with the ruler in my right hand for a while.
After the Direct TV repair person comes today I'll be right back on this and, hopefully, get another row done. I don't have a lot to report today. The only maker thing that I got done yesterday was to get the veterans quilt quilted. Because it's bigger than our regular veterans quilts I couldn't do it on one of our wide backs with another veterans quilt so I pieced this back out of some black yardage that didn't dye to an acceptable shade of black for the shop. It worked just peachy for this. Quilting never shows up on these Paula Nadelstern fabrics so it got the quick fans pantograph and was done in about an hour. In the evenings I sit and crochet for a while so my new blanket is growing. I think it will have a total of 10 blocks and then it will get borders too. I didn't do the bobble rows correctly. I was supposed to do HDC between each bobble but I did DC instead. I was in the white section before I realized it. I wasn't about to rip it out so I'm just continuing with the mistake. Consistency is more important than accuracy sometimes!
There will be no quilting this weekend. I'm spending most of the weekend with my SIL so this blanket will get some attention. We are leaving Monday for a few days of hiking so there's probably no posting next week either. So if you don't hear from me don't be surprised! I'm not quite sure what happened to yesterday. I do know that when I start my day off doing something out of routine that the whole day seems off. Yesterday the trigger was a morning trip to WalMart. I like to go there first thing in the morning because it's the best chance of finding my favorite chocolate (Sam's Choice Swiss Dark 72%) in stock. I had not been there in a few weeks but they had the chocolate and almost everything else I wanted. Toilet paper (which I didn't need) was fully stocked but the yarn aisle (I also didn't need but always check) was decimated. It was a successful trip but the rest of the day was kind of haywire. I had to pick my car up from an unsuccessful 4 days in the shop ("A/C is fine" - no, it's not, but it won't break again until the warranty expires). I delivered 21 veterans quilt to our VA contact and had a nice long chat with a friend on the phone. I also made some lotion bars which are so easy and they are great for dry feet. There are loads of recipes on the web if you want to make your own. Google will be happy to help you find a good one with simple ingredients. I eventually sat down for a few hours of sewing and I got the rest of these blocks together for the next veteran's quilt. I'm really glad I didn't make these into a wall hanging. I wouldn't have liked it. I'm happier with it like this but after getting these on the wall I didn't like 2 of the blocks. Here it is with the 2 substitute blocks. I might get this together tomorrow and I'd like to get Mom's quilt loaded so I can get it quilted by Saturday.
It's hotter than Hades here so staying inside seems like a good idea. Now that the basement is clean I can start doing some quilting without worrying about ruining a quilt with grout. I think the first thing I'm going to quilt is the 2 Blockade quilts made from symmetry scraps. The one in the left is the first one that I made and the one on the right is the one I got together yesterday. My friend, Wanda, suggested cool colors for one of them so that's what I did and I like it a lot. I expect they will get a light blue backing because I have one dyed and ready to go. Next I'll do these 2 quilts that Mom made. There's a batik backing for the one on the left and I think I'll dye a gold backing for the one on the right. Both of these are pretty big quilts. My Mom sure knows how to tame a scrap quilt. I ordered more tea towels for my fundraiser and the package got lost in the mail. It only took a couple of days for the post office to find it and get it to me yesterday. I think they delivered it to a nearby house that's currently vacant, I should have known to check there. Our neighborhood is 10 acre lots so you can't see neighbor's houses from the road but I should have known to check across the street. All's well that ends well and I spent most of today screen printing with Color Magnet and dyeing 16 towels. I also decided to do some white ones with straight up screen printing with fabric paint. I know that some of the towels are sewn with polyester thread so they would dye leaving the thread white. That's not a really big deal but since I have fabric printing paint I've decided to leave some white. I'll be printing and dyeing towels for the next week and then get them posted on some local Facebook pages to sell them next week.
That's pretty much what I'm going to be working on the rest of the week. After my standard dyeing today I'll be quilting and dyeing towels. Yesterday was dyeing day so I didn't get a whole lot accomplished but I did get all my stuff organized to make the coasters and worked on one for a few minutes. I setting up to do these at the Brother sewing machine and will make them until I run out of fabric or cord. There's really no reason to keep a big stash of cording laying around and I have a pretty good size stash! But I did do a little bit of organizing. This is my travel sewing kit. I think I bought it at Wal-Mart in the tool department for about $6 and it's really perfect for holding a complete set of sewing notions. But lately it's gotten a little difficult to close so clearly I've added in a few too many things over the past few years of using it. Time to reassess. For one thing there are way too many markers and seam rippers. A few of these markers have never been used so they can go in the trash. I wouldn't use them at home either. I sure don't need 2 tape measures, a pin cushion and 2 boxes of pins. Surprisingly that little spool of Wonder Under fusible does come on handy from time to time. I had 3 times as many hand sewing needles and twice as many machine needles. I don't know how I accumulated so many but downsizing was in order. I do like to have extras in case anyone else needs one but this is at least a 3 year supply. With a chalk wheel I really don't need any of the other markers but the glue stick and tape really do come in handy. The tape was necessary the day that I broke the spool holder off my machine. It held it until I could get home and apply the duct tape for a "permanent fix". All organized and ready for another few years.
Now it's time to stop getting distracted and work on the penguins some more. I'm also progressing on the new crochet blanket in the evenings and I"m starting to plan the quilting for the postage stamp quilt. |
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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July 2024
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