Well, that was a great weekend!

Sewing with my quilt club each month is always a great start to the weekend.

I am using my quilt club sewing days to work on veterans quilts for the next several months. I started this one last month and finished it this weekend. It's ready for quilting but I don't know if it will get quilted before we leave for vacation in August. I have a couple more quilts ahead of this.

Back at home my first priority was to finish cutting up ALL of my patriotic fabrics. I decided on 4.5" squares, 2.5" strips and 2.5" squares. Anything smaller than that went in the trash. I also had a stack of fabrics leftover from hand dyed quilt backs for veterans quilts and I cut all of the blue ones in the same sizes. I put them all in a box and this will likely be the last veterans quilt kit that I cut/sew for many months! I think I have 15 - 17 kits cut and ready to sew.

This effort cleared one pile off the cutting table.

Then I went back to cleaning the cutting table and found 5 blocks leftover from the big green quilt. The quickest thing to do with them was to make another project bag! Thirty minutes later the new bag was already put in use holding one of my travel projects: shibori stitching. 

The table is now about half cleaned up so I'm making good progress. 

On the quilting front I loaded a quilt for Mom last night and got the first row quilted.

This is just a weird side story. When I first got into longarming I did the normal thing that people do, I bought TONS of threads. Instead of buying one or 2 cones of a thread that I thought I would like and trying it out, I started collecting just about every line that Superior carried at that time. As expected, over time I've grown to favor some and not others but I'm determined to use even the ones that I don't prefer. They are all good threads but they don't all fit my aesthetic now. I'm no longer a big fan of King Tut but I'm using it on veterans quilts as much as possible. I also bought a lot of Masterpiece thinking that I would use it in the longarm but I don't really like it on the longarm. It wasn't designed for that in the first place. It's not called Masterpiece for nothing! I stopped using it for the longarm and brought it all upstairs to use for piecing and I'm going through it at a pretty good pace. But let's face it, some colors just aren't going to be used for piecing and here are 2 prime examples. But I do hate waste and wanted to still find a use for the bright colors that don't work so well for piecing. I picked the magenta one and started using it to baste quilts and now it's almost all gone! I didn't think I'd ever get through that cone of thread but the veterans quilts are keeping the machine busy. Soon I'll be basting in orange thread. That's the kind of thing that makes me happy.

I'm determined to only buy 1 new cone for every 2 that I empty so that I can reduce the massive inventory that I have. Aside from blue and cream for veterans quilts I shouldn't need to buy any thread for several years and I haven't really bought any new thread for several years.

This week I'm determined to get the project/gift bag tutorial done and posted and possible even the ice dyeing tutorial. I'll get Mom's quilt quilted and get the big green quilt loaded. I also want to finish clearing the cutting table and doing some other organizing in my sewing room. Things are generally kind of messy in there and that interferes with my creativity.