two weeks - oops!

It's been two weeks since I last wrote, but my hubby has been on vacation, which means schedules are all sorts of random and I can't keep track of what day it is.  It also has messed with my sewing schedule, but I can't complain about having him home at night and awake during the day.

Despite the random interruptions, I have gotten a fair amount done!

I last left you in the middle of the Positivity Quilt Along project.  I sewed a lot of seams...

...and then I sewed a lot more...

...I even had to buy more brown thread, and then I was ready to test my layout.  I had hoped the different prints on the browns would be different enough to not look like mush, but until I got far enough away, I couldn't be sure.

After making sure the darkest brown (which actually, the browns are all about the same color, just some have more printing to make them look lighter!) were spaced out reasonably, I climbed up onto a chair to snap a photo to check on things.  Ah yes, this will do.  (Finn agrees.)

Toby would like to highlight my assertion that the browns are all very close in color.  Or maybe he is just doing a glamour shot?  (I love his swirl markings!)

After labelling rows and picking them up, it was back up to the sewing room to get these sewn into a top.  With no real seams to match within the blocks, this went quickly.

Gabby thought this whole mess exhausting and took a nap on my notebook.  She is such a ham.

As I was adding this to the Rack of Shame, I decided I needed to longarm something.  Anything.  It is getting out of control.  Maybe not the quilt on the assigned stick, but something.  Since my longarm was misbehaving last time I used it, I didn't want to try anything too involved, but I can't just ignore it.  So first I loaded some fabric I don't much care for and a scrap of batting and gave it a try.  It seemed to be working nicely, so maybe it was just a thread/weather/fabric combo giving me trouble with the last quilt?

I decided to quilt one of my finishes from earlier this year, rather than the assigned quilt.  I needed something I could do an overall pattern on, allowing me to rebuild my confidence with the machine.

Remember Midsummer Solstice from back in February?  The quilt that I literally sewed like a maniac on for the entire month?  It's 96x96, so a monster, but I knew custom quilting would add little, if anything, to it, so overall swirls, my go-to and comfort zone, would work just fine.

I had purchased a back for it a few months ago.

Something like 8 yards, but never prewashed or pieced the darn thing.  So it went into the wash and then up for piecing.  It's an Art Gallery fabric, which has a nice feel, but also I knew it probably had a fair amount of sizing in it, and if I was going to attempt to make my longarm behave, every little obstacle I could remove was important.  It set me up starting way later than I would have liked, but I was determined.

(And the photo here was taken after I put it on the longarm, looking up from the bottom, so what look like shiny spots are actually the lights from the longarm light bar shining down on it!)

The machine had a few issues with thread shredding early on, but nothing I could figure out that was causing it.  Until I randomly felt the edge of the plexiglass that covers the machinery on the front of the head.  It was just a little off from flush and sharp!

It is hard to see here, but where I've circled, I put a piece of clear tape over the spot where the thread, if it gets all wild and loosey-goosey, could be catching and at such a high rate of speed, could easily catch and rip itself free and start the shredding.  And based on where the shredding was seen, this seems to be about the right spot for it to have started.

I had only two more instances of thread shredding after that - and I went through quite a few bobbins.  (I think 8 in total, but this was found maybe halfway through?)  I think with all the use, this has probably shifted just a hint, but I'm hoping this is, like the very particular positioning of the thread guide, another simple fix that will make the machine run better in the long run.

Once it was done, it was time to bind the monster!

Binding took quite a few hours, but thankfully we had a cooler spell, so sitting under it wasn't too awful.  Normally, I would do this downstairs, where the air conditioning keeps me cold (I'm currently wearing a sweatshirt!), and I can watch some Netflix.  With the hubby home and awake during the day, I opted to work upstairs in the sewing room where I wasn't forced to watch shows I really don't care for.

I had literally put the last stitch in the binding maybe 30 seconds before little miss claimed the quilt.  She hardly bothered me in the approximately 5 hours this took (not all at once!) to get bound.  It was like she knew!

Being as large as it is, I thought it might be a nice change for my bed, so I went looking for some new sheets.  In kinda girly colors.  Something to coordinate better.  Let me tell you what a bust that was!  Almost all the sheets I found were super pastel colors.  Like barely green.  Or barely pink.  Those that weren't were either dark blue or grey.  I have grey.  I want like actual pink.  Or actual turquoise.  Maybe not as bright as the quilt, but not something that looks like I washed my colors and lights together!

I'm also picky.  I don't want polyester.  They don't breathe.  I don't want jersey.  They don't stay on the bed.  And I'm not going to pay $214 like Bed, Bath and Beyond wants for their plain, boring, white sheets.  The search continues, but yesterday sheets needed to be washed anyways, so I decided to put the new quilt on with the grey chambray sheets.

I didn't realize how actually large this is, but on my queen size bed it fits nicely.  The grey sheets do nothing to help it, but it is what it is for now.  (In the winter my pink bunny flannel sheets will look no worse!)

This is what I was doing last night when a tornado siren was blaring away.  There were a few that touched down south and west of us and we were under serious warnings, but there was a spell between two warnings that I decided rather than sit and stare at the television (not working because wind and rain killed the satellite signal) and worry, I would go remake my bed.  (I did have shoes on and my purse and such all gathered up, in the event we needed to head to the basement quickly, but yes, I was being a rebel and watching the weather rather than hiding from it!)

Anyways, it's an official finish!

Pattern: Midsummer Solstice by Carl Hentsch

Found in the May/June 2013 issue of Love of Quilting Magazine

Size: 96x96"

Pieced and quilted by me - Started February 2021, finished June 2021!

Number of pieces: 3,008

With that done, it was time to figure out what to do next.

A squirrel came to me in perfect timing.  The local cat rescue group, those who brought me the elusive Freddie who not only doesn't usually visit me to get his photo taken, but being black never looks great in them, put out a request for hammocks for the kitties.  They use these in crates and cages to provide a little more space and a little comfort to the homeless kitties they rescue.  I read through their instructions a few times and set out to make a couple to turn in, making sure my design would work for them, before I went into any sort of mass-production efforts.  (They didn't provide a pattern, just a few photos and descriptions, so I was winging it!)

This large blue floral is left over from a quilt back and has been haunting my stash for far too long.  It was first on the list to go.  The lighter print was used to stretch the darker for that quilt back, but I had forgotten it was in there!

This is one of the first four I made.  I met one of the volunteers the following day and she was thrilled!  Apparently some of the hammocks that have been turned in were less than stellar.  And I know well how kitties can use and abuse these, so I know to choose darker, busier fabrics that will show stains less and put a fair amount of stitching in to make sure they hold together as well as possible.  Also, I realize the life of these is short.  That's okay.

With that approval, it was back home to dig through the stash for more fabrics I would be happy to see leave in pursuit of a better cause.

Gabby got into it too, though I think her pin inspection turned into a test run!

Maybe she was just putting a little extra love in?  Or some comforting smells to let other feral cats know being a housecat is not a bad deal at all!

By the end of a two-day sewing session (the first day was just a short one and the second day was interrupted by tornadoes), I had 12 more hammocks in varying sizes.  The rescue group specified sizes that work in the crates and cages they have, but which size I chose to make depended on what size my fabric piece was.

I invested in a 1" bias tape maker to assist me in making the tabs.  That definitely sped up the process and saved my fingers!  But I can say the thing that helped me the most was all the masks I've made in the past year and a half.  I learned a lot of tricks with my machine in making those that helped a lot in my efforts to make these.

There is probably more fabric in the stash, in large enough pieces, to make another batch, but in chatting with the volunteer who got the first set, it sounds like folks have donated a lot of fabric, so I'm hoping when I drop these off I can claim some of that.  It's not that I don't want to use my fabric, but more that I understand the trouble of having boxes and boxes of donated fabric and no one willing to sew with it.  So I'll give it a go.

These were fun to make, though, and I'm happy to do something to help the kitties.  We're at maximum capacity of kitties right now, so adoption and fostering is out.  I donate food and supplies frequently, but this was a fun use of my skills and stash.

And with that, my report is complete.

I'm not sure what I'll do next, but this "sea and sand palette" quilt block drive might be a good way to further whittle my brown (tan) and turquoise/blue scraps?  (I do have some sticks left, but I'm going to ignore them for now.  I'm kinda wearing out on four assignments a month...)

Happy quilting,

Katie