Road trip equals knitting not sewing

My quilting is on hold for a couple of weeks while we travel cross-country and 9 states, each way!  We live in central Pennsylvania, our younger son is graduating on Saturday in New Mexico, and I flew out to Chicago for work yesterday (Monday).  My husband leaves from home, driving, tonight to pick me up tomorrow afternoon and then we hightail it in a southwesterly direction until sunset and beyond.  The idea is to take some vacation time after the graduation before schlepping all the way back to PA again.

I don't do much hand sewing, but I do knit and have one pair of socks that just need afterthought heels putting in and another pair of socks where the second needs to be knitted to the closing of the toe and then they too (two?) also will need the heels doing.  If I get all that done while we travel I have more sock yarn in my suitcase to be able to start in on something else.

Here is the pair that only need heels:

Apparently they have been in this state since 12th Jan this year (2021) so finishing them is my One Monthly Goal for May.

I shall add a picture of the other socks when I am not stuck in a laboratory :)

Christa's Colors - some progress

Life has been busy this month, particularly with work and associated travel, so not a lot of progress was made on the quilting front, but I have met my OMG of getting the yellow and purple bits of Christa's Colors quilted and moved on to some of the green.  I'm still having thread breakage issues while doing FMQ which has dulled my enjoyment of the process.  However here are some pictures showing what I did manage to achieve:

 And the start of filling the green wedges:

I am also now fully vaccinated against Covid-19 which is a relief with my business travel commitments, some of them due to be international this summer by the looks of things.

One of my sourdough loaves was really pretty this month too:

Some quilts are like fine wine.....

 .....they need to have time to mature.

I am currently working on Christa's Colors, a quilt that I started at a retreat 5 years ago in April 2016 designed by the highly talented Cynthia Spencer of Stitch Your Art Out here in Centre County PA. 

Cynthia's original quilt

Cynthia's original quilt was lovely but I wanted a bigger end product so firstly I decided to add more blocks but this took me almost a year to get around to!  With another retreat on the calendar I made the effort to have this ready to assemble there.

Not quite enough blocks

 

Enough blocks and the rows decided upon

 

After getting the rows sewn together I knew it still wasn't quite as large as I wanted so it needed borders, (almost) black borders - I had sufficient of 2 suitable fabrics in my stash so needed to audition them both and choose a final layout:

Squiggly grey on black or black Spraytime by Makower?

Without sashing?

Or with just a thinnish strip to separate the rows?

 

I settled on the squiggly grey on black for the setting and to have thin sashings between the rows.  Off I went to retreat and came home with this:

A flimsy!

I really liked the top I ended up with but had no idea how I was going to quilt it, and it needed thoughtful quilting to help those bright colours sing even louder, but I had an ideal backing and black batting so I even got it pin basted in May 2017 and then it became one of my PIGS (Projects In Grocery Sacks) and matured for another nearly 3 years.  At that point it started whispering to me, first who it wanted to be owned by and then how it wanted to be quilted, yes quilts talk to their makers, no we are not crazy, this is a real thing! So late in 2019 or early in 2020 off it went to my Tuesday quilt group where there were tables big enough for me to lay it out and mark it up for quilting, then covid hit and my quilting mojo decided to go into isolation without me :(

Pin basted

 

Fast forward yet another year and it is finally under the needle of my sewing machine being quilted, and I would really like to get it done in the next couple of months.  

There will be different textures for each colour

I think getting in all quilted in one month may be too ambitious, so my One Monthly Goal for April 2020 is to get all the yellow and purple quilting done with the red and turquoise (or whatever is left) slated for May.

In other news Smokey thinks the weather is nice enough to catch some rays on our Adirondack chairs in the back garden.

What a fast month!

Wow! March seems to have flown by this year, and how is it already over 3 weeks since I posted my One Monthly Goal?  That goal seemed so achievable back then, but life got very busy very quickly - my elder son moved into his first flat (apartment) on his own and he and I went out hunting down affordable pre-owned furniture, I spent a week away working and then was super busy in the lab when I got back. In the meantime the weather has gone from cold to warm and back again, and tonight we expect snow in time for April Fool's Day. There was a brief flash of spring and I found these crocuses in full bloom, not where I had originally planted them but relocated courtesy of the squirrels and/or chipmunks! Flower bulbs rarely remain where I intend in my garden.

Crocuses the day before a heavy rainstorm...

Oh yes, and before I went away I had almost run out of the thread I was using to quilt my OMG quilts.  While away I visited 2 quilt shops neither of whom stocked the thread I wanted but I did buy other thread (in a similar colour way but a different manufacturer) and fabric including what would become the binding and that was on sale :)  When I got home I could not make the new thread work with my machine at all, ordered a free standing spool holder which got lost and a replacement had to be sent out.  However I did find the thread I wanted on-line and that arrived super quickly so I was able to have another go at the quilting and then found that I had not lowered my feed dogs when I had been having all that trouble with the different thread.  My preferred thread behaved just perfectly and tonight, with just a couple of hours of March left, I got the binding on both barn quilts - OMG for March 2021 achieved!!

Two quilts for "Toys for Tots"

There will be more detailed pictures once the quilts have been washed and dried to remove the temporary markings.

Baking also happened this month. Pi day was marked by an out of season batch of mince pies, normally I only make these between 1st December and Twelfth Night, so these were much appreciated as a special treat.

Pi day pies

 

For Christmas my elder son gave me a copy of New World Sourdough by Bryan Ford, so last weekend I made his Bananas Foster loaf and very good it was too!  I shall share photos of more of my attempts at recipes from this book over the coming months.

Sliced bananas on top

Banana-y, buttery, sugary swirl with rum on the inside

Spring Clearing (not cleaning)

After what seems like an endless winter with snow present in our garden from 10th December 2020 (yes that is 12 weeks ago!) the sun is shining brightly, the wind is still cold but the snow is melting, and Spring may be on its way "real soon now".  It will still be a while before the haze of green starts to appear in the woods around us, but I am already hearing birdsong when I awaken in the mornings and the curtains are staying open a little later each evening before I feel the need to shut the darkness out.

Quilter's Depth Gauge, 17th Dec 2020

 

At some point last year my quilting mojo just up and left - I think it had had enough of covid, social distancing, isolation etc.  Wherever it went I hope it had a good time, but I sure did miss it.  I still did some sewing as masks continued to be needed, I made summer pyjama shorts for my menfolk, some shorts and a couple of dresses for myself, but no quilts.  However I am pleased to say my mojo crept back into my life sometime in November 2020 and still seems to be here, which brings me to the real subject of this blog posting - Spring Clearing!

Autumn Leaves Wallhanging - completed Nov 2020

 

Like many (most?) quilters and crafty people I tend to have more than one project on the go at any one time and sometimes those projects that get left behind nag us in the background, sapping our energy for the current project, pushing our guilt buttons because they still aren't being worked on or even finished.  I had too many of those so have been making efforts towards whittling them down a bit so I can get on with more recent(and new) projects with a clearer conscience.

So far as part of my Spring Clearing I have photographed and listed several quilts in my Etsy shop, relisted my hand dyed sock yarns and finished up some nearly done baby quilts and listed those too.  For my younger son I got on with and finished his denim and polar fleece quilt that had been in the works for too long and thanks to USPS it arrived in New Mexico from PA a couple of days before his birthday.  

Today I am working on pin basting two charity quilts for our local quilt guild, I had started these back in June last year when I last updated this blog, yesterday I made the second top and dug out a couple of pieces of polar fleece to back them, getting these quilted and bound is my One Monthly Goal for this month. 

Backing is fleece with pink stars

Pale fawn fleece backing with pastel elephants

I also have a couple of quilts that are destined to be gifts to work on, but can't show photos just yet.  The sooner I get them done, the sooner I can share them with you all.  Another work in progress is my Grassy Creek mystery quilt designed by Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville, I have made all the parts except the outer borders but assembly will have to wait until my living room floor is no longer occupied by my tender plants. In the meantime I did assemble a whole load (240) tiny bonus HST units trimmed off while making one of the clues into a cushion cover featuring some of the other fabrics used in the quilt.

Cushion cover from Grassy Creek trimmings

Constituent parts of Grassy Creek quilt - some assembly required...

I am hoping that the mojo is here to stay for a while and I will get more projects moved from the WIP list to the done list freeing up time and energy for some long standing UFOs (UnFinished Objects) as well as some new ideas.  Meanwhile Smokey is dreaming of better weather to come: