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. Now that the quilting on Jackie's Choice is done I'm no to the 12 placemats. There aren't going to be a January finish but they should be done in a couple of weeks. I found some floral yardage in my stash for the black ( you can see that on the back roller). I split it in half and sewed the 2 pieces together. I can quilt 3 across the width. I'm quilting in free motion straight lines and it's going surprisingly fast. I like for the placemats to be quilted to death because it makes them less of a mess after washing. I do iron my placmats and these will require less pressing. Between quilting sessions I'm working on hand stitching the binding for Jackie's Choice. I'm hand stitching this one since it's a memory quilt and it's for a cousin that I don't know well so I want it to be extra nice. In the sewing room Laura has been busy on her Stack and Whack quilt and the top is done! She'll take it back to England to have it quilted and it will be a quilt for her lounge.
This week is all about finishing Jackie's Choice, finishing quilting the placemats and starting to quilt a giant stack of veterans quilts....and visiting my very cute dentist. So, I forgot to post yesterday! But I have an excuse. Tuesday morning right in the middle of printing shipping labels my printer died. I spent much of the day trying every hack I could find on the web to fix it but after several hours of work I had to give in a declare my 10 year old Canon dead. I give it credit, it lasted 3 times longer than any of the 3 previous HP printers. So I went to pick up Mom for our quilt club meeting and decided to go buy a printer on the way back to my house. All I'll say about that unfulfilling expedition is this. Local stores bemoan the fact that we prefer online shopping. Well if they want to fix that they need to think about their products and our needs a little better. A printer is something that always breaks at an inconvenient time and people usually need one right away. So if I were an electronics store I'd have those babies right up front and I'd make sure that some members of the staff actually knew something about them! Our program Tuesday night was about our resolutions for 2020. I don't make resolutions but I occasionally make an attempt to clean up my language. I'm married to a sailor and sailors are nothing compared to restaurant workers. I picked my bad habit up from all of the years of waiting tables. I always fail to clean up my act but I do try. It's a good thing I didn't make that resolution this year because my Mom can tell you that printer shopping would have broken that one into a million pieces. ![]() I finally just called Canon and asked them which printer replaced the MX870 that I had loved. I need a rear tray that holds more than 1 piece of paper so I can feed in fabric sheets. I also need and ADF scanner and the ability to reduce and enlarge from the copier. This is what I came home with and I spent yesterday morning setting it up before heading to the dye studio for the afternoon. The one cool new feature is that I can now print from my phone. Now I'll get on to what I wanted to accomplish yesterday and that was to do some planning for projects over the next few weeks. ![]() First up, veterans quilts! I stopped taking tops in October so the Country School Quilters have been building up a quilt top inventory. There were 8 more than this stack! Other longarmers took 8 and I brought home this stack. I had a few already so I think I have about 14 to quilt over the next couple of months in between other projects. First I have 2 that Mom made and then.... ![]() I'm going to quilt this old UFO. Anyone remember Barbara Brackman's Grandmother's Choice? I made 2 and after they were done I realized that I had made one for each of my Grandmother's. I finished the first one, Lura's Choice, and this one has languished mostly because I don't like what I did with the borders and can't come up with a quilting plan. Last month my uncle died and I've decided to finish this and take it to my cousin at the memorial service in 2 weeks. It's going to get a swirly pantograph so I can get it done in time and I hope she will like it and use it. Then I decided that I'm going to do something with these. I appliqued these blocks a LONG time ago. My friend, Becky, and another guild member, Dot Holloway, taught me how to applique and I practiced on these blocks. Originally I thought I'd make a quilt from these but I'm not at all inspired by them. Well, you know what that means. Placemats! I had put aside all of the fabrics that I used in the applique so I'm cutting then into strips to frame these blocks.
I do have a new project I want to start soon but I'll wait until Ian and Laura go home. We are easily sharing my sewing room now but if I pull out my symmetry fabrics for the next project things could get rough in here! These projects will keep me busy enough and I always have quilting time in the basement. I am allergic to literally dozens of foods with the big ones being wheat, dairy, eggs, soy, onions, garlic and the really big one, chlorophyll. I pretty much can't eat any vegetable that grows above ground or any fruit with a green rind or peel. My food selections are very limited and that's one reason that I don't enjoy cooking. But I've never really enjoyed cooking, I'm more of a baker. I have a few gluten free vegan dessert recipes that work for me but it doesn't get a little boring. Periodically I get a new cookbook or scour the web for some new dessert recipes. It's always an ordeal because invariably they call for 3 flours that I don't generally stock but once ever few years I give it a try. That try was this weekend and, as usual, it was about 90% failure. My goal was lemon meringue pie. The meringue part is easy. Aquafaba has solved that for everyone. I needed a lemon curd that didn't rely on soy or cashews. I tried 2 different recipes that had rave reviews and after a day of cooking I ended up with 2 slime pies. They were so gross and I made them EXACTLY to the recipes. But I did get a better pie crust so that will help a couple of my other recipes. I moved on to looking for gingerbread. The gingerbread cookies tasted like metal (which happens a lot with GF vagan baking) but I landed on a big winner with a Gingerbread Loaf. I didn't add the chocolate chips, that seemed a bit much. But the loaf was delicious. I haven't had gingerbread since I was able to eat the one that my Mom used to make. So after a weekend of wasting a lot of food products (which is necessary from time to time) I do have one more great recipe to add to my small recipe folder. In between frustrating cooking sessions and massive cleaning up sessions I needed a little peace and got started on the third set of Christmas cards. The first step was screen printing the cards. Using the leftover edges of my Groovy quilts I'm making peace trees. I"m getting all of the cards to the edge stitching stage and will do that all at once on the serger. During football yesterday afternoon I fused and cut 3 yards of fabric for postcard backs. This is what's left after I fused the cards that are ready so far. I like keeping a stash of pre-fused backs. It makes the process so much faster for the next set. These are all ready for the finishing edges and maybe a little bling of crystals. I have 12 more cards to make with these little Hardanger embroideries that I made years ago. They were meant to be ornament gifts for my family. Now they will be postcards for my family instead. Last night I started planning the design. I think it's going to be something like this. I had this old cross stitch angel and turned it into a card too. It's better to make something with it than letting it continue to languish in a bin. I think she turned out pretty cute.
I won't be posting much this week. Maybe tomorrow or Wednesday and not again until Saturday or Monday. If you are in the US I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. Yesterday was "dyeing day" and I usually don't get much done on Wednesday other than that. But I had these 2 veterans quilts loaded and one was already quilted so before dinner I finished the second one. The one on the right is folded to show the backing color. For quilts that were conceived just to get another UFO off my list, I'm really happy with these 2 quilts. The binding fabric is in the dye bath so I should be able to get these bound next week. That means at least 2, probably 3 and maybe 4 finishes for November.
Today I'm going to work on some Christmas cards and do some stitching on the Groovy binding. I might even get a row or 2 of Big Groovy together. It was quite a productive weekend around here. I didn't actually finish anything but I made some progress on several things. I loaded the last 2 veterans quilts for the year. These are getting done because they are mine and they will knock one UFO off my list! You can see that I got one done. I'm using a simple leaf pantograph so it's quilting up quickly. I will not finish it today though. I need to get a label on Fireworks so I can take it to Mom tomorrow and she can deliver it to Patrick over Thanksgiving. I spent some time Saturday evening playing around with frame ideas for Fireworks and Groovy quilt labels. I spent my football watching time (Go Hokies! Boo Eagles.) stitching the Groovy binding. It's slow because my hand is still bothering me some. As long as I don't do too much at one sitting I'm OK. I also started putting Groovy II together. It's going to take a little while. I have to lay it out after every row to decided the placement of the colors for the cornerstones. But I'm having lots of fun working on it.
This week I have to get a label on Fireworks, need to make some serious progress on Christmas postcards, do some screen printing on Christmas gifts and, hopefully, grout the dye sink backsplash. |
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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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