Progress Report for Jan 19, 2013

This is my second progress report for 2013, and the last one was Jan. 8th, so I can’t call it Week 2. Not so much done this time. About 2 days after the last progress report, my husband took a bad fall out in the workshop and injured his ankle. I’ve been playing nurse and doing his chores on top of mine ever since, which has cut severely into my sewing time.

Here are a few of the projects I have managed to work on:

Scrappy blocks, which I wrote about here. I have quilted in the ditch around the center portion on each one. Next up is to change machines and stitch around the outer edge. That’s partly to stabilize the sandwich and partly to see if the other machine still breaks the thread when straight-stitching with poly thread. Cotton thread in free-motion mode did not work well, but I wanted to do a little more testing before giving up on the machine.

Several AAQI quilts. One is all quilted, and I’m thinking of adding a little applique on top. The other two still await basting. I sewed up some green HST units hanging around on my sewing table, and when I ironed them they looked like trees. So I made trees and simple pieced landscapes.  And I’ve got one more little top I haven’t taken a pic of yet, it needs something more but inspiration has not struck.

I wanted to empty and refill the dark green bobbin before I tackled the quilting on the first AAQI piece above, looked around for some scraps to sew up or something, and grabbed three leftover little blocks and some green strips. Sewed the green strips on, still had bobbin thread. Well, let’s see, I could add a yellow frame, I can use dark green thread for that if I’m sewing onto the green. Finished that and still had bobbin thread. Okay, fine, more green, but maybe a light one this time.

Last seam, the bobbin finally gave out an inch from the end. I set the blocks aside and quilted the AAQI piece, but then my machine was sitting there with green thread, and the blocks were calling out to me to finish them. They wanted some pink, just a little bit. I succumbed to the siren song and added the pink.  Then more dark green (I still had that green thread on the machine, an old spool I wanted to use up). Now they looked done, and looked even better together:
I still couldn’t let it go. Four pieces of background and I could have this thing together so fast … I gotta do it. And I couldn’t resist the eye-popping pink polkadot. I don’t really like pink, and I’ve never cared for polkadots, but it sure sets off the blocks in this little piece. Now I need to dig out something for the backing.

And I’m doing another Improvi-Robin from Venus de Hilo. Here’s what I’m sending – found it when digging for some black fabric for Xmas gifts. Leftover shoo-fly blocks from a quilt I made a long time back, I’m guessing 1997, from an online swap. I’m not sure why I picked that swap, I had to go out and buy the fabrics as I had no solids in my stash. Uncharacteristically, I finished the top within a year of getting the blocks back, but then it sat. And sat. And sat. I finally had a longarm quilter quilt the thing about 5 years ago, and it’s done. These leftovers aren’t done, and I had no plan for them.  Then a brainstorm – Improvi-Robin! This will be a great challenge for the other Robiners to get creative. When I went to make the label I grabbed one I’d found on the floor recently when I was cleaning up, which I’d written in 1997 for some swap or other and hadn’t used. I added on to it, providing space for the other players to add their name.

Now I’m feeling the need to get back to doing some actual quilting, in between bouts of organizing my sewing room. I should take some before pics for that project too.