Author: Cathy

I finished the Suburbia Moonshadow quilt I ordered from Craftsy. Well, I say finished, but I don’t even want to wash it because the creative dreamer in me would love to add some quilting in those wonderful spaces. I’ve got the dinosaur panel off the table and in the process of hand binding. The wonderful, dino obsessed kid isn’t sure she likes it, something about the quilting, but I told her I am happy to put it in the gift box – our “gift box” is a drawer I keep things in that I’ve picked up with the thought of gifting. Right now it has a coloring book, a coin purse, special color pens for Autumn, a handy pocket size lint remover, also for Autumn…. anyway, you get the idea. So, if the dino piece we were going to use as a play mat doesn’t meet her standards that is okay.

We are having a rare day of sunshine – which means is is EXTRA cold – but even the sun can’t capture the rich color of the moonshadow fabric. Dino panel on the side- that guy almost looks like he’s smiling – and my next one ready for basting is on the bottom left. But the Plan is to do some more free motion practice, (aka make more pads for the dog beds) before I tackle the quilting on the piece I hope to gift.

The kid had two days of school this week between the holiday and school closings due to icy roads, so I haven’t been on top of the projects as much. Today, I am taking a little time to straighten the table and prepare for the next thing as she plays around me.

There was the usual bit of material to cut off after the quilting process with the dino. I don’t feel the need to keep every little scrap these days, but what can be used again is put away. There was one strip that was small and had incomplete dino bodies, so that is cut into little squares I’ll use at the machine. I sew through it before I start sewing and at the end of a block/chain/strip. I love this little trick! When I start with the scrap, then chain the working piece on, it prevents the beginning of my block from getting mangled and lets me end the set without any pull on the good stuff. I’ve been using pieces over and over and am glad to have expanded my collection.

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Next, pieces of batting….. I’d love to have enough 2 1/2″ strips to someday make a jelly roll rug, but not excited enough to take too much time with it. While I may save some pieces, I cut up smaller ones. I keep one taped next to the machine acting as a perfect thread catcher. I also put one next to my small table ironing area, along with some thread snips. Seems there are always loose threads, fraying edges, and general clean up when I press seams, and it’s nice to feel a bit neater as I work, especially since it’s simple and cheap.

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One more thing… I have a regular trash can handy, but see that bag hanging in front of it? That is where bits and pieces go. Anything that can be run through a washing machine, relatively safely, goes in there. Things like the piece that is cut off to get edges straight for rotary cutting, the batting with captured threads, the pieces I use to start sewing (explained above), stuff like that. I filled up one with fleece pieces as I made a costume. These are special savings. I don’t mind wasted pieces as much and even include a few extras now and then. When I have a couple of bags full, I empty them in an old pillow case, sew it up, and it is an easy-to-wash cushion for the dogs. I’ve got one that is just loose stuff, but it has a lot of the fleece in it. The other, I ran a few basting stitches through to keep the insides from getting too balled up. I do think the dogs are a bit spoiled with their fancy beds, but this way of practicing quilting and recycling aren’t just practical, they are joyful!

So much for today. The kid and I are going to run some errands and maybe I’ll get some more sewing in later! As nice as it is having her around most days, I am hoping for more school days next week, for both of us.

Take care of yourself! Love always,

Cathy

OMG!! I was starting to get into this writing thing and WordPress changed the way it works. I have not been in the mood to learn something new, being more in a tight, surviving mode than feeling free to explore in life. I tried to put in a picture to show how I had overcome what I thought to be a problem in quilting only to be stymied with how to write around it. I cannot explain how frustrating this was, and is, to me. Maybe, just maybe, I’ve made progress!!

This was the picture I wanted to share. I needed, or thought I needed, a way to allow my spool of thread a way to unspool sideways. I had to set a quilt aside because thread was breaking as I was free motion quilting, repeatedly. On another project that required more frequent thread changes, I noticed the thread was twisting when I had it unspooling from the top, and changing the orientation to horizontal has seemed to correct that.

This set-up is actually working for me, as odd and home rigged as it looks. (I simply don’t have a pin that holds the spool on the machine in a stable way.) BUT, I realized the breaking thread was caused by my beautifully pinned basting. I thought tight was best and was proud of how tight and straight I had it!

I finished quilting another piece last night and not once did the thread break. I wanted to gift that first quilt to my aunt. It is not my first quilt now. The new one is gorgeous, but not the happy flowery piece the first one was.

I have a quilt top from many years ago that I have hauled around unfinished. I prepared a back, basted and quilted a top that was living in the house before we were. (The story about it and the other already pieced tops was in another post.) But the Friendship Star quilt was my first start to finish. I haven’t revisited it since the revelation of the tight basting being the problem. I have the feeling, I may be doing a LOT of ripping out to redeem it – or I cut it up to make smaller quilts to be used on the dog beds.

Realized I had so many things I could have posted around Halloween! I thought I had, in fact, shared with you about how the snowmen that sat on the porch last winter, decided to be ghosts for the month.

 

(My daughter  and granddaughter, are so weird! Each asked me today how I was going to make the snowmen turkey outfits! And they came up with the idea separately! Ghosts made sense, turkeys do not, in my opinion.)

Or, I could have written about how my mom created a yarn spider web on our porch almost 50 years ago and it has since become a tradition with my kids. There is a huge improvement this year because I crocheted the webs. I love that I can hook them up, take them down and wash them before they are packed away.

Those were fun things to do for our porch.

 

But what I really to share today is a quilt, an unfinished quilt. Halloween may be done for another year, but my quilt will take a bit longer.

There is a class on Craftsy called Woodland Critters by Wendi Gratz of ShinyHappyWorld.com. When I saw it, I knew it would be perfect for my animal loving granddaughter. I watched the class some time ago and kept it in the back of my mind. With my renewed zeal for creative pursuit, it seems like the perfect time (and hopefully, I can keep it secret til Christmas). I let her take a look at the patterns on Wendi’s site, and she wants the Cats quilt – first, anyway.

As I’ve worked on other projects, I’ve been gathering supplies. Wendi offers some free patterns on her site and I thought it might be a good idea to try her technique before I completely dove in. “Spooky Cat” seemed perfect, you know, Halloween season and the kid’s choice of the cat quilt. And so I began….

 

Isn’t she cute!? Although you can’t tell from here, there is sparkling gold thread around her neck, in the eyes and for the whiskers.

But how could I really try the technique with just one? I needed to make sure the joining would work (have I mentioned how sewing challenged I am?), so I created another, and the pumpkin was born. But what’s the use of just 2 blocks?

And then, if I was going to try the recommended soft backing, well, that would be nicer if it was more than a skinny wall hanging, right?

It may have been finished by Halloween, if I had worked from a pattern, but no! me? make it easy? is there a pattern? I kept going within asking what else would be good in this project.

Although the kid is disappointed I don’t have a Frankenstein, which would require another row of creations, I have made the decision that I am completing the test of “will I like this technique?” and calling this one good. Tonight I have almost finished quilting it with the cuddly fleece as the back and am excited to see how the binding goes.  So here’s what I’ve done. I know the pictures aren’t great but the best I can do for now. Maybe the sun will shine before it’s packed away and I can lay it out somewhere.

I’d say the house on the hill is one of my favorites, but I find I’m kind of fond of all of them!

 

 

It’s not large, but maybe good for early fall snuggling, you know, that space before you have to bundled chin to toe. So, thank you, Wendi! I think I’ve watched all of your videos a couple of times now. You make it look easy and fun – and with your great instruction, it is.

Love you! Hope you are up to some kind of good!

Merry Christmas! Or what phrase is honoring your holiday this time of year. I have not written on this site for sooo long. As with the best of new intentions, we’ll see…… but here’s a giggle for your heart.

She saw this in a book and fell in love. So while waiting in the school pick up line I worked a few rows at a time. As you can see, her joy shines. It stayed on her head most of the morning, only being removed when she needed something to securely prop her new tablet on the table.

 Based on pattern from Vanessa Mooncie’s book, Crocheted Animal Hats.

Recently my young granddaughter had to make a trip to the Emergency Room. She was having severe stomach problems and the closest Urgent Care wouldn’t touch it. So my daughter spent several hours at the hospital while they started simple and bumped up each test searching for the cause of the distress.. This was no “my tummy hurts” episode.

My daughter posted to social media that she was grateful to be where she knew her daughter would be cared for with wonderful equipment right down the hall. It was very busy that day, and she said they didn’t get a bed but a chair and sometimes shared that, but that was, to her, a minor inconvenience sitting in a clean air conditioned room. It didn’t take me long to realize she had not fully recovered from my being rushed to the hospital a year ago.

I had finished a round of antibiotics a few days earlier for a minor infection. I walked to the school and back in the rain, heavier than we usually had but that was okay. When I got home, I realized I was actually chilled. I got out of my wet clothes and wrapped in a quilt that I had taken to the island, but not used before. When my daughter came home a couple of hours later, I knew I was in a bit of trouble. I didn’t have the strength to get “properly dressed” and after a couple of attempts, I didn’t particularly care. Things start to blur then. At the clinic, the nurse took vital signs and the Pulse Ox, measuring heart rate and oxygenation, were within normal limits, for a few minutes. The doctor obviously didn’t believe the nurses had taken it or checked the reading.

So I ended up on oxygen, in an ambulance, a fancy van really, with an EMT attendant that was not allowed to administer anything I might need medically due to a new director that didn’t trust her people, driving on roads that a month and a half earlier lost several bridges in a storm and unstable “Bailey bridges” in place. Hard to see the road even. And, we had to stop to pick up the district nurse about halfway into our trip of an hour. I am grateful that the clinic had bags packed with what was needed at the hospital, like sheets, toothbrush, toilet paper, a couple of gowns and a small, light blanket.

My bed was in a 19 bed open ward that currently had 22 beds. They kindly, maybe, put me by the door everyone used to go outside. It was always open so there was no problem with hearing a door slam anyway – I did say open right? The view was beautiful, the Caribbean Sea and all the magical colors through the day. The care was significantly lacking. My oxygen ran out about 2 in the morning. I realized it was now harder to breathe with the mask than without, so I set it aside and self monitored without equipment. They did manage to get the X-ray tech to come in and do a chest shot on the dilapidated machine. (that maybe cloudy area could have been some pneumonia or the cloudy areas that often shows up on that machine. There was another one on island, in our area even, but it was broken at the time) The next night, my IV quit about 4:00 am. I messed with it (I am a nurse) and it wasn’t going to open. I was there for IV Antibiotic and O2 therapy. So, at this point – well, I didn’t need to be there (except that new director wouldn’t let the clinic administer IV antibiotics any more either, thus the hospital). I finally saw a nurse in the night to tell her the IV was blown, She said she would let my nurse know and came back about 7:30,after I had told someone else at 6, mashed it with her fingers, seriously, mashed a spot already inflamed, and saw a drip in the IV letting her claim it was working. It was determined about an hour later that it truly wasn’t. I had already decided that as much as I don’t like vein work, I am good at it and I would put my new IV in rather than allow them. But I opted out completely. When my daughter got there we left AMA (against medical advise) after I let the doctor know that I wasn’t getting the treatment anyway. Oh and being by the door to the balcony? Easy excuse for the locals to check out the white woman in their midst.

So when my granddaughter went to the hospital, there was relief in knowing it could have been going very different. Being grateful. Oh, and the kid is okay. They thought appendicitis for a bit , but it was ruled out by tests and she is recovering nicely.

So many memories! So many triggers in our lives. So tough to learn to live NOW and not respond or react from old. Yes, more on those ideas another day!.