April Showers!

Snow Showers that is!  
Driving home from work (and how weird that is for me to say) Monday evening this was the view out my truck window.

About an hour later, the further west I went, the more the snow was accumulating on the grass.

Needless to say, this was enough to slow down my commute but not as much as what I discovered Tuesday morning.

After scraping the thin layer of ice from my windshield, I realized that I had a completely flat rear tire!  DRAT!!!

Thankfully, I was able to use DH's car while he dealt with the flat.  Of course, as his car never moved out of the driveway during Monday's snow, I had 3 inches of snow and a good half inch of ice to chisel off.

No, April snow is not uncommon.  It's just something we all have seen too much of this Winter and we're really, really, really ready for Spring to stay sprung!

Big Change!!!

Yes, indeed!  We have experienced a major change here last week that will undoubtedly affect my blog. But no worries - it was a good change.

I am back in the workforce full time! My temporary retirement of 21 months officially ended last Tuesday.  Being out of the house during the day all week will require me to find quilting time whenever I can squeeze it in.  The DH will take over the majority of the house chores and will certainly not begrudge me any studio time.  But there may not be daily blog posts.

Which brings me to sharing what I was able to get done on my Sauder Village Challenge entry last week.

The free motion quilting on the Kona white between the color sections and the dotted fabric is tiny pebbles/scribbles.  On the white part on the outside of the color sections will be larger pebbles.  

Stay tuned for more updates on the April quilting projects as I figure out this next chapter in my life, it will be interesting!

New Under the Needle

Whenever I go to the Michigan House, I bring my Singer workhorse machine with me, knowing that I will manage to squeeze in some sewing time at some point.  The family has come to understand that the dining room table will not be able to be used for dining purposes once I get rolling.  Not that they like it very much... but that's what they make tray tables for.

This last trip was no different.  After cleaning up Lill, I scrubbed my hands, removed the tablecloth and broke out the design paper.  I use the end rolls of newspaper for drawing out my design patterns.  It's 24" wide, sturdy enough for handling but you can see through it enough to trace a copy of a pattern before you cut it apart if needed. 

Yes - I used a dinner plate for a template

I didn't take a picture of the design before I cut it apart so this will have to do.  I was making color placement decisions as I was drawing the design.  See the pile of solid fabrics - I removed the orange & red so that they became the bright pop of color from the striped fabric.

This will be my entry for the 2014 Sauder Village Quilt Show Challenge.  The theme is Line Dance and the link will take you to the challenge guidelines page.   The challenge fabric is Michael Miller's Big Stripe.

I got to work a little later in the evening than planned &  stayed up to 1 a.m. working on piecing the background. 

All of the striped strips, as well as the dot fabric, will be hand appliqued in place.

I finished the top on Monday and started the machine quilting on Tuesday.  And I've discovered something as bad as quilting with black thread on black fabric and that's white thread on white fabric!  Thank goodness for my Ott light and by brooder lamp.

Almost Ready for Prime Time Binding!

'Grey is Not a Color' but it is almost a finished quilt.  I powered through the machine quilting as fast as I could last week and on Thursday, I focused on joining the quilted quarters.  I thought some pictures would show you my process.

One quarter is trimmed to the seam allowance through all three layers.  The quarter that it will be stitched to, has its batting and backing pinned back out of the way.

The trimmed quarter

 It is then pinned, right sides together and stitched on the quarter inch seam allowance.  

The excess batting is carefully cut away.  Then the extra seam allowance of the backing is trimmed.

The backing is folded under and pinned in place.  I hand stitch this in place, much like a binding.  

Not as straight as I'd like it but I can adjust it as I hand sew the seams.

Once that sewing is done, any quilting that needs to be added over the joined quarters  would be done.  This extra quilting also flattens the joining seams on the back and makes them less noticeable.

Only thing missing now is the binding.  Not sure what I am going to use - probably will piece the binding from some of the leftover color blocks fabric. I don't think I have enough of the sashing fabric to use as the binding.

Really need to have this done by Wednesday, April 9th - TOMORROW - for my Sweet Man!

The Transformation of a Great Lady

I was at the Michigan House this past weekend where one of my projects was to clean and oil the 1933 Singer 15-91 ( in the No. 47 cabinet with knee controller) that lives there.

A few before pictures:

Waiting for a good cleaning - dull, obscured decals

Grungy motor and side plate

There's a scrollwork face plate under there somewhere!

Rusty wheel knob

Inside full of lint & dust. 

A few during the cleaning:

Just sprayed with Tuff Stuff

Tuff Stuff doing its thing

The grunge lifting from the machine

Tuff Stuff dripping off machine, turning brown as the grunge lifts off surface

ICK!!!  These rags went straight into the garbage!

I didn't take any pictures of the oiling and inside cleaning process.  Suffice to say, my tweezers and Q-Tips got quite a work out.  

And, at long last, the after pictures. 

Presenting ... LIL!!!

Look at her decals now!

Now that's a faceplate!

Shiny and oiled

The side plate is so shiny its reflecting the flash

Un-Rusty wheel knob

LOVE the detail.

It really didn't take all that long & it was so worth it to see this beautiful Great Lady glowing.  

Yes, she runs and even though I gave her parts a good oiling, I need to figure out how to get her into the service man for a good internal going over.  I also need to track down some more Singer oil and motor lube!

Hanging by a Thread

As I predicted, I ran out of the Sulky 30 wt. cotton Blendables thread in the soft blacks color I am using to machine quilt DH's 'Grey is Not a Color' quilt.  

Some quick calculations revealed that I have over 450 yards of thread going into just the quilting of this project.  Seeing as this spool is only 500 yards and previously partially used, it's no wonder I ran out. 

If I had been thinking ahead when I first started in on the piecing of this UFO, I could have grabbed a spool back when I did the Shop Hop in mid-March.  Since I had a day of errands planned, I just seriously altered my route (it's 30 miles one way) to get to the quilt shop that carries this thread. Fortunately, they had 1 spool of it on hand - I called ahead!  I  also called every other shop that lies between here and there to see if any of them carried it, with no luck. Oh well, a quilter's got to do what a quilter's got to do!

When I posted that I was up to the quilting on the fourth quarter, that didn't include the outside edge row that was missing the backing.  

Yesterday was the day to fix all of that.  I peeled back the top and batting, trimmed off the selvage edge, and stitched on the extra backing strip.  

It worked well! Then I re-pinned the layers and continued with the quilting.

As of this morning, I only have the last quarter to go! If I get lucky with stitching time, I will be able to join the quarters today.   The back of the joining seams will be hand stitched in place but I am considering doing the binding all by machine. 

This quilt is needing to get finished!  I am working up against two deadlines that I can't quite talk about yet.  As soon as a few things are settled, I'll share them here. It's good news - I promise!

Road trip tomorrow before the crack of dawn and I may be offline for a few days but I'll take some pictures.

Measure Twice, Cut Once!

That's the old carpenter's adage.  My version of this would be "Measure at least once".  Which brings us to:

The Tale of the Too Short Backing
I was so excited to be working on Sweet Man's 'Grey is not a Color' quilt again that I forgot the basic rule of backing. You know the one that says it must be bigger than the front.   Most of the excitement stemmed from the fact I won the backing fabric in a blog giveaway!

 Yes, 10 yards of Riley Blake granite!!  The minute I saw the giveaway, I knew this was the fabric for me specifically for this quilt.  And of course, I was right.  The powers of the Universe must have agreed because it did indeed become mine. Which meant I needed to find the project bag and get this quilt done!

I love the color, a purple-y grey.  I measured four lengths for the four quarters of the quilt, chucked them in the washer/dryer and promptly packed them to go up to the Michigan house for my last visit's sandwiching session. 

Did you catch my error yet?  No, you say?  While it's true I measured the length, I NEVER checked the width!  I just assumed at least a minimum of 42" of usable width of fabric.  That's were I made my mistake.  Never Assume Anything!!  

So what's the big deal?  You just need to add a piece to the back of each quarter?  Yes, yes I could.  But the remaining hunk of backing fabric was: a) not washed; b) not in the same state I was in and c) nowhere near my sewing machine and unable to be attached before sandwiching.

Missing something? 

What's a quilter to do?  Sandwiching anyway, deal with it later!  I made sure the shortages fell on the outside edge of the quilt and that I had plenty of backing towards the middle seams since this is a quilt as you go project.

Orange tag = which quarter this is and the outside edge

The quilting is coming along. I am onto the fourth quarter this morning - running low on thread.  It amazes me how when using a variegated thread, the light part of the thread always seems to end up in the dark fabric blocks  and the dark part of the thread ends up in the light blocks.  In between, the medium values blend beautifully! 

The thread just sinks into the backing fabric.

I'll quilt as long as the thread holds out this morning and add the missing back parts. Then there will be errands to run and thread to hunt!  
Happy April Fool's Day!