Finishing stuff

Thanks to everyone who thinks my blog posts are more upbeat – I think life is more upbeat right now in general. Extreme burnout wasn’t pretty and it was a long period of sustained burn out, so I apologize—I really didn’t realize how bad it sounded!  I suppose I should also note the burnout was multi-faceted. Sure, there was that job thing for many, many stressful hours a week and then there was (is) some serious stuff going on with a loved one. And as I learned in the last year, there’s nothing like compounding extreme job stress with intense grief to make a person tired.

Anyway, now that the burnout is fading, I’m finding myself full of energy and inspiration to do projects. It’s like getting back to me. Only the inspiration is at a crazy high level from such a long period of complete exhaustion and being uninspired. I am trying to harness the crazy and keep it manageable. And I’m trying to finish some of the stuff I’ve started before getting into too much new stuff. So far:

- I started and finished a baby quilt for a friend’s baby, only a couple months late. And then it sat on my buffet for a couple weeks and I finally delivered it. Hurray!

- I finished a jean quilt that I started a very long time ago. I found the quilt top in my stash when I cleaned it out and then I proceeded to actually finish it. Woo hoo!

- We (the dogs really) finished Operation Chicken 2012. (Maybe a complete failure, but hey, it’s a finished project).

- I finally painted the hall. (I consider painting the trim a completely separate project- and it is not on this finished list yet.)

- I made new potholders.

- I made pillow covers for the guest room daybed.

- I finished one seam on my apron I’ve been using for about 2 years but kept forgetting to finish.

There’s a whole host of things I haven’t finished… and even more projects I’m starting… but for a moment there, it feels nice to actually finish a few things. 

Moments of Tranquility

A few days ago I loaded the dogs in the CRV and we headed for one of our favorite spots, the country roads just out of town. Mmmm so beautiful.

The less tranquil part of the walk is always these two, who love it as much as me, but don’t seem to appreciate the stillness, the wildflowers, or the moments I want to stop and take pictures. There’s nothing like honing your photography skills by trying to take close ups, in fading light, without a flash, while the dog pulls to go chase a squirrel or tramples the subject of your photo. Gotta love those pups. Well I do anyway. And somehow their enthusiasm just adds to the adventure.

Thrifting Regrets…

One of my friends is a person I consider a thrifting genius. She can and does find amazing and cheap things at thrift stores with alarming frequency, which always inspires me. It does not always work quite so well for me, however. 

A few months back, I found a fabulous, practically new denim curtain for amazingly cheap and it was in fabulous shape. I bought it for a couple bucks and it was the backing for two baby jean quilts I made. Fab. Look at me, thrifting, quilting, booyah.

And then there was my recent experience…

I found this quilt top in my stash. I had sewn the top all together about two years ago, folded it up, and forgot about it. Since I’m on this finishing things kick and since I went through my sewing stash, I relocated this mostly done jean quilt and decided to finish it.  Enter another thrift store denim curtain find. Gold. As always, I threw it in the wash when I got home and had it clean, folded, and ready.

 

So I get the quilt top out, hack some batting out of an old blanket that has just been sitting in the linen closet, and cut the back out of this curtain. I hadn’t noticed when I purchased it the extent of the sun bleaching on the fabric. Hmmm. I nearly ditched it, but being cheap and having it on hand, and the fact that it is a jean blanket- meant to be used and abused indoors and out, I decided the sun bleaching would be acceptable, I put it all together, clipped the threads, and surveyed the quilt. Far from perfect, but not bad.

And then, as I folded it up, I caught a whiff of something strange. A smell. An unknown smell, no less. Is it my quilt??? I stick my face into the newly finished quilt I’d been so happy with moments before and panicked! Did I sew a thrift store find into this quilt without smelling it first??? Am I really so cheap I’ve thrown all caution to the wind? Gasp! I should know better than that!! In fact, how did I miss the smell? I’ve been handling the fabric to sew it?!? (I’m still trying to figure out the answer to this one- maybe it was while I had a cold a few weeks back). For anyone who has darkroom experience, it reminded me of the smell of developer, not entirely unpleasant, just kind of strange and chemically.

Maybe it was the blanket. It was an older blanket, well used… I quickly go smell the remaining blanket scraps… nope. The remaining blanket pieces smell good as new.  It is that darn thrift store $4 denim curtain!! Ahhhh. Did I just ruin a perfectly good quilt top because I didn’t think to smell the darn thing?

So I tried several solutions:

• Soak the quilt overnight with water and detergent. Dry it. Sniff it. Still there. Panic a bit about the wasted quilt top. Refuse to be mastered by a bad thrift store smell.
• Soak the quilt overnight in borax and water. Wash it. Dry it. Sniff it. Still there. Panic a bit more about the wasted quilt top. Refuse to be mastered by a bad thrift store smell when I haven’t exhausted all options. Google how to remove bad smells from laundry.
• Soak the quilt overnight in water and vinegar (3x as much vinegar as anyone on the internet recommended). Wash it. Dry it Sniff it. Still there… faintly, but still there. Consider my options. More vinegar soaking? Give it up and cut the back and front of the quilt apart? Start all over again?
• So I hung it on the line in the sun for 3 days…

… and the smell is finally gone. Thank God!

Suffice it to say, I will never again use a thrift store find without first making sure the smell is gone… BEFORE the sewing into a project. 

And now to get the smell out of the remains of that curtain that I sewed into a reusable shopping bag…

 

What about you? Do you have any Thrifting Regrets?

Fall Insanity

Most of my friends are getting kids back to school or starting back up with the homeschooling, and me? I’m just hitting a breakneck busy time. Last year I remember realizing I had been out of town 6 out of the 8 weekends in September and October. Exhausting!

This year looks like it’s going to be close, although some of the traveling will be less intense than some of last year’s traveling. Thank God. So far in September and October, I’ve got:

• Family wedding labor day weekend in Detroit
• Wedding in Charlotte, NC the weekend of Sept 15-16
• Bridal shower / bachelorette party the weekend of Sept 22-23
• Ladies weekend in western Michigan with a bunch of my girlfriends Sept 28-30
• My sister and her family in town for a visit in early October (?)
• Roommate’s wedding in Toledo the weekend of Oct 20
• And trying to find room for a trip to New Orleans to visit my brothers and finally meeting my nephew who is almost 8 months old! (Epic aunt fail)

And somewhere in there I need to sew straps for 7 bridesmaid dresses, hem a couple bridesmaid dresses, work in my garden, clean out the abandoned chicken coop, get the shed and garage cleaned out and ready for winter, mow the grass, and find time to sleep.

Happy fall!

More on that quilt

I told you earlier I was working on a new quilt. It has become a bit of an obsession in fact. I’m calling it my “Hey I’m getting margin back in my life quilt” because it represents a lot more than just scraps of fabric. 

So let’s pick up where we left off…
10. Change your mind about the quilt size and decide to make a lot more squares. Go back and repeat steps 3 through 9 again until you have the right number of squares. My quilt has grown from a twin to a queen so I had a lot more squares to make.
11. Iron all the completed squares flat.
12. Trim your completed squares with the rotary cutter so they are square and exactly 8” (in my case anyway). 
13. Once all of your chevron squares are completed, and ironed, and trimmed to be square, you get to lay them out.  This took me awhile. How to sort the squares?? There were so many different colors, patterns, themes to figure out what order to put them in. Not to mention now I’m making a queen sized quilt- so I’ve outgrown the dining room table. I eventually decided on the living room floor since that is the biggest space. There are a few obstacles to using the floor:

After the fact, I wished I had done a video of the evening of me laying out the squares, and the dogs taking turns sniffing, laying on, and messing up the squares – really quite funny and not terribly productive. But it is like a magnet, if I lay something on the floor, pretty much anything, the dogs are going to lay on it. So we bonded over quilt squares as I arranged and rearranged and then straightened and re-straightened…

14. Once you have the quilt squares all laid out, you can start sewing the chevron squares into rows.  Mine is eleven squares by eleven squares. And of course, the dogs wanted to get in on that as well.
 
Stay tuned on finishing the quilt top and then the actual quilting, backing, binding, etc. 

A new quilt in the works

Here’s how it goes…
1. Clean out your sewing area and realize how many small scraps of fabric you have from dozens of previous projects (including a bunch of extra squares from the quilt you made for your bed 7 or 8 years ago).
2. Get inspired by some blog where they were showcasing the Chevron quilt. Download the instructions. Decide it’s the perfect use for all of those scraps of beautiful fabric. Completely disregard the part about using solids since most of your scraps have some kind of pattern. meh. Decide that of course you have the time and energy to make a quilt right now.
3. Start cutting out squares. At home, on vacation, squares, squares, squares. And not the size they called for in the instructions, because 4 7/8” squares seems harder than 5” squares somehow. Finally finish cutting out a ton of squares, in the 200 range. Each square needs a matching one. This is great fun on vacation, in the sun, while visiting with friends and watching munchkins. This is also great fun at home avoiding cleaning the bathroom. The cutting takes a long time, but I found it to be enjoyable, especially using the rotary cutter.

4. Slice squares in half on the diagonal to make triangles. Fast. Fairly simple. This gives you four triangles (at least) of each pattern. Some of the fabric I had a lot more than 4, some just 4. Meh. It’s a scrappy quilt, we’re going with the randomness of it all. 
5. Start matching sets of patterns – 4 triangles of 2 patterns to make the squares. Even better, have your crafty friend matching patterns up for you while you begin the sewing.
6. Sew those triangles together along the diagonal to make squares. Four matching squares of each set of patterns. Get most of the way through the matching and about half way through the sewing. Take a break (and by break, it might be a coffee break, or it might be a ‘drive home from up north’ break, whatever works for you).
7. Get out the ironing board. Turn on a movie. Start ironing those squares flat and then clip the uneven corners. Do this for a long time (well, get through your stack of squares). 
8. Once that batch is ironed, back to the machine, sew the four squares together to make a chevron pattern blocks.
 
Note: Be careful not to do this. You’ll have to rip them out to correct it. Or scavenge your scraps to see if you have any scraps left to make more half squares to avoid ripping out. Or decide you didn’t really want that square anyway. It is a scrappy quilt after all.
9. Repeat steps 6-8 until you have enough of the chevron squares. So far I have 50 completed chevron squares (40 to go) and enough of the smaller squares ready to be sewn into the remaining chevron squares (I think). I thought this could take me years to even get to this point, but it goes pretty fast once you’re sitting there sewing. And I like this because there are a few different steps so you can mix it up if you have the attention span of a flea like me.
 
Even the clippings look fun!