Weekly To Do List for 4/7/2020

The working from home thing is starting to become a bit more normal.  Though I'm spending more time in video conferences than meetings during a typical week in the office.  It's a lot harder to end the day since I'm already home.  So I'm still struggling to do much more than my 15 minutes of stitching time each evening. By the time we finish up, go for an evening walk and eat dinner, there's just not much energy for stitching.  Though I can't really blame that for the lack of progress on last week's to do list.  The need to make a few face masks for the family and friends took over the bulk of my stitching time this weekend.  Just how badly did that affect the to do list? 

Weekly To Do List 03/31/2020
Twinkle Stars: Finish Binding ✔
Mosaic Mystery:  Add 4th border - no progress
Frolic:  Make 2 lt blue blocks, continue quilt assembly - progress
Unity: Pick out fabrics, make center block - abandoned

Twinkle Stars was finished last week. That alone made my week.  I made some good progress on Frolic.  Progress on Mosaic Mystery fell victim to my face mask sewing.  I did demo some fabrics for Unity, but in the end decided it just didn't fit in with my goal to work on finishes this year. I'll save the pdf files as they come out. Maybe I'll decide to make that later this year once I get a few quilts off the UFO list.  

So what's the plan for this week? 

Weekly To Do List for 04/06/2020

Winter Quilt Along:  trim excess batting, make binding

That should be doable as this is only a 4 day work week since we have Good Friday off. 

Frolic:  Finish 2 lt. blue blocks, assemble rows

This is the progress on the two blocks from last week's list.  The first is almost finished. There is still quite a bit of assembly needed for the second block. 

Mosaic Mystery:  Add the final border. Hopefully I'll have better luck this week on getting this to do item checked off. 

So that's my list for this week. You can check out all the other lists over at To Do Tuesday hosted by Home Sewn by Us.  

A Bit of this and That

The weekends are the most normal part of the week.  Laundry and housework still have to get done.  And spending significant time in the sewing room is a big part of my normal.  It was a pretty ordinary weekend.  Though my sewing project for Saturday was out of the ordinary.   

Since the CDC is now recommending we all wear face masks if we go grocery shopping, I pulled out bin of large scraps,  found a few feet of elastic in my old clothes making stash and made a few.  These are for my family and the Scientist in Training's roommate's family.  None of them are perfect, but they won't come apart.   

I used Frolic as my leader and ender project while I was working on the masks.

Frolic, 2019 Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt

Two rows are assembled and there has been good progress on getting row three finished off. I'm really happy with how this one is coming together.  

That's pretty much all that went on in my sewing room this weekend.  Linking up with Monday Making and the Monday Design Wall posts.  

Week 14 of 2020: Stitching Stuff

The Scientist in Training and I were up a bit late just hanging out.  She's better at the staying up late thing then I am.  It apparently affects me more than it used to, the 15 Minutes to Stitch linky party is a bit late this morning as I over slept.  

Working from home is finally becoming routine and it's been easier to work in my stitching time.  Last week was really good on that front. 

15 minute days/week = 7/7 days
15 minute days/March = 29/31 days
15 minute days/April = 4/4 days
15 minute days/2020 = 86/95 days
Success rate = 90.53%

So I'm back to stitching more than 90% of the time.  My goal for the year is to manage at least an 85% success rate, so I'm doing really well with that goal. You can share how successful you were at finding time to stitch so far this year at the bottom of the post. 

It's a new month, so here's the stash report so far for 2020. 

Fabric used in March = 2.4 yards
Fabric used in 2020 = 15.42 yards
Nothing in for 2020

March was a bit slower on the fabric out front, but at least there's not been any fabric purchases to date and I'm in still in the black 3 months into the year. Linking up with Quiltpaintcreate for the regular stash report.  

There was a bit of slow stitching this week. Not as much as there has been, but enough to make visable progress. 

I should finish off that top wing sometime this week.  Linking up with Slow Stitching Sunday.  

So now that I've caught up with all the other Sunday linky parties, here's the 15 minutes to stitch linky party.   

Progress on the 2020 PHD and Other Quilty Ambitions

The first quarter of 2020 is over.  It's definitely not been the year I was expecting in terms of work and general life.  The stuff going on the sewing room has been progressing almost normally. So I'm going to concentrate on what progress there's been there.  

My 2020 Quilting Ambitions were pretty simple.  

The big push this year is to finish a few quilts.  I signed up with Quilting Gail's 2020 PHD Program to help keep me motivated on that front.  And I can finally show some progress on that front. 

A finish finally!  The last stitch in the binding for Twinkle Stars happened about 10:15ish on 3/31.  

Twinkle Stars from a Tutorial by Angela Feldbush of Soscrappy

I'm really happy with how it turned out.  Twinkle Stars was my 2015 Rainbow Scrap Challenge project. So just a bit over 5 years from start to finish.  Part of the reason it took so long to finish was that I struggled with deciding on the setting and borders. That's my usual hurdle to finishing up one of my scrappy projects.  This quilt will go live with one of the Scientist in Training's writing group buddies. The SIT loves it, so much that she said it's hard to give it up to someone else. It's always nice when the family likes what you've made.  

That's the only finish so far this year. But there has been good progress on a few other projects. 

The Winter Quilt Along project was partially assembled at the beginning of the year. 

Quiltygirl Winter Quilt Along from Alycia Quilts

It's back from being quilted and needs to be trimmed up and bound.  That's going to be the One Monthly Goal for April.

I've continued to work on the 2019 Bonnie Hunter Mystery, Frolic. Last year's mystery quilt went on for a few weeks past the first of the year.  I still need to finish up a few of the blocks, but there's enough done to start the assembly process. 

Frolic, 2019 Bonnie Hunter Mystery Quilt

I'm happy with how this one is coming together.  The blocks have quite a few pieces, so finishing the last five will probably take all month.  Then there are the pieced borders to finish. I'm hoping this one is a completed flimsy by the end of May.  

Mosaic Mystery is another mystery quilt still in progress from 2019.  But all it needs is one more border. 

Mosaic Mystery Quilt from Cheryl at Meadow Mist Designs

The borders always take longer then I think they will. Even so, I'm hoping to have the last one on and a backing made for this project by the end of the month.  

I've added one more project to my current rotation and that's the embroidered medallion quilt.  

This is usually my take along travel project, but it now sits by my recliner. It's my "sit with the family and hang out project". Which I've done a lot of the last couple of weeks. I'm stitching on the butterfly in the upper right and have made a fair amount of progress on it. 

No plans to get this project finished this year, I'm just hoping to move it along a little more this year.

So how is 2020 going?  Three months into the year and only one finish wasn't the plan.  But a second quilt just needs binding and a third should be ready for quilting by the end of this month. And I've not started any new projects, yet.  I'm really tempted by Bonnie Hunter's Unity project. I've been auditing fabrics for it, but haven't decided if I'm going to start that one or not.  Not the best first quarter, but definitely not the worst!  

March One Monthly Goal: Down to the Wire!

Nothing like a late night finish on the last day of the month. But the March One Monthly Goal is finished thirty minutes before the linky party closes.  

The goal for March was to finish Twinkle Stars.  At the beginning of the month Twinkle Stars had arrived back from the quilter, but it needed the label and binding made first.  The binding was made a week before I managed to pin the Scientist in Training down on the message that went on the label. 

The binding was made to match up with the narrow rainbow border in the flimsy. 

Twinkle Stars A Tutorial by Angela Feldbush of Soscrappy

I turned the last corner and made good time on finishing off the last 30 inches  at about 10:15 central time.  Now Twinkle Stars is all finished. 

Twinkle Stars is a pretty large quilt and I didn't have the time to lay it out and get a good picture. The best I could do was to show all four corners are finished.  I promise a picture of the finished quilt later this week once I have a chance to get it hung up for it's glamour shots.

Linking up with the end of the month linky party over at Elm Street Quilts.