WIP Wednesday #2 for me

It's a CRAZY month at our house.  Schoolwork is backing up and sewing time is rare, indeed. With 4 different Spring Break weeks, everything is insane. Still, I've managed some progress this week.

Needed a good station for free-motion quilting to move forward on several projects, so Scott put my new table together for me. (That deserves its own blog post when I have time!) I couldn't bear to tape a lunch bag to the new table the way I do at my piecing station, so I sewed up a Thread Catcher/Pincushion doohickey. What should have taken a couple of hours took 4 days! (No sewing time, not bad instructions.) Thank you very much to Elizabeth Hartman of Sew, Mama, Sew! for the terrific tutorial: Weighted Pincushion Organizer. Now I need to sew up a machine cover some day!



As far as quilts go, I finished the LeMoyne Blues Tabletopper and moved on to Marissa's Moment.

Managed to get a lot of the leaves made and will have about 2/3 of them sewn on by tonight.

Heather's home this week!!  She's been meticulously removing the tear-away foundation from her Geometrics quilt. This is a paper-pieced pattern that she started two summers ago before we knew what we were doing, so it was monstrous to work on at first. Once I learned easier technique for working in this style, she whizzed through the second half of her top over Christmas break. Now we're finding that it's a REAL PAIN to remove tear-away. Don't use tear-away interfacing-style stuff for your foundation piecing!!  It's too stiff to leave on - will make for nasty draping, and is AWFUL to remove. Paper. Use paper!  Even normal printer paper is much, MUCH better than this stuff.  She's a real trooper, though, plugging away at it a bit each day.


This week's stats:
New projects - Thread Catcher and Pin Cushion (justified because needed at new station, and used ONLY materials already in-home)
Completed projects this week - 2 (LeMoyne Blues Tabletopper; Thread Catcher)
Actively in progress - 5 (Marissa's Moment, Dad's Wagon Wheels, Devon's What a Hoot, Lori's Butterflies, Heather's Geometrics)
UFO Firing Range - 33 (not counting untouched kits!)

Finishes for 2011 - 4

Completed tops awaiting quilting:

Three charity wheelchair quilts

Katie Loves Christopher

Wagon Wheels West #1- AT Katydids LongArm Studio

Trip Around the World with Mr. Hernandez (Mr. Hernandez's)
Trip Around the World with Mr. Hernandez (Heather's)

Be Attitudes

We Love Kelly

Sailing with the Flying Needles
Wagon Wheels West #2

Poor Forgotten Orphan from 15 years ago

Figuring This Out. . .

So. . . I've been stitching along as I can around schoolwork and Mom stuff - Just haven't been posting because I'm new at this blogging thing. So much inspiration to be found in the Web world! Will post my year's progress in a bit.

For now, I scoured my memory for the years on my Lifetime Finishes list, and got my Truly Insane list of active UFO's composed, roughly in order of priority.

There are many reasons that list is so long, among them:

• 1o. Unhappy with the way the project' design was turning out or Decided I hate the colors and boxed it up until some unknown time.
• 9. Found some Poor Forgotten Orphans from years ago in an obscure closet!
• 8. Mother-Daughter projects that can only progress when they are here.
• 7. Uncertain how I want the quilting done.
• 6.Waiting for my quilt's turn at Patty's long-arm studio.
• 5. Broken heart from the death of someone very close.
• 4. Adopted projects for deceased cousin.
• 3. Unorganized work area with inadequate station needs
• 2. Lack of skill for the next step, giving in to INTIMIDATION. (no more! OO-Rah!)

and the number 1 reason:

• Quilt ADD. Yep, I freely admit it. I cannot stand to stick with one project at a time, nor (until now) have I had good discipline in saying "No" to accepting a new project that calls to me.

It just takes so stinkin' long to finish the big, heirloom-quality quilts I gravitate toward, that I get sick of looking at the same colors and techniques. So I work in a circular fashion - tending to stick with a given project to the next good stopping point and then putting it back in its bin/box and moving to another. The fun part of that, though, is that now there are a LOT of projects in the final stages, so I'm at a point where I'll have finish after finish of these treasures!