Tuesday, July 8, 2025
To Do List for the Week of 07/08/2025
Monday, July 7, 2025
What to Post When You Can't Show What You Are Working On?
Sunday, July 6, 2025
Stitching Stuff: Week 27 of 2025
We had a wonderful 4th of July holiday with my family. Grad Girl made it home. She'll be here all this week, then she heads back home to pack and move. I did pretty well at fitting in some stitching time most days.
- 15 minute days/week = 6/7 days
- 15 minute days/June = 27/30 days
- 15 minute days/2025 = 175/186 days
- Success rate = 94.09%
Friday, July 4, 2025
Thursday, July 3, 2025
2025 Quilting Ambitions: 2nd Quarter Check In
The end of June is not only mid year, it is the end of the 2nd quarter. When I was working, mid year progress reviews were required. I don't have a supervisor anymore, but Quilting Jetgirl has a linky party up for the 2025 Quilting Q2 Check In, which is a good reminder to check how it's going with my 2025 quilty ambitions.
It's so easy to set your goals at the beginning of the year and just forget about them. I'm guilty of that, but maybe not so much this year. I know what they are, but I'm not so sure I've done a good job at focusing on them. So here's my progress on this year's ambitions.
Ambition 1: Make Quilts. My goal is to make as much progress as I can on the projects that are on my quilt plan. Here's where things started in January.
Here's where I'm at as of 6/30/2025.
One finish, one unplanned start and 4 projects that have hit major milestones on the road to getting finished. I really need to concentrate on moving some of the finished quilt tops to finished quilts the last half of the year. I'm hoping to quilt some of these myself and just send out a couple for professional quilting. I have fabrics picked for the backings of several, but haven't done much else on those.
Ambition 2: Learn to quilt. After several years of having this ambition, I finally did something about it. All the dread of learning to use a walking foot in hindsight was just silly. It's not hard, keeping a straight line is still a challenge, but my quilt as you go project finally is a reality.
Four rows of Kate's Choice are quilted. Just two left. Though I'm far from done with this project, it feels good to finally meet one of my long time goals of learning to quilt.
Ambition 3: Fabric organization. Back in April I finally worked on scrap processing and pressing fabrics.
But I've not done much since. At least there has been some progress this year on that front. I hope to do more once our schedule slows down a bit.
Summery for midyear: There has been at least some progress on each of my ambitions for the year, but none of them are as far along as I had hoped. For the last half of the year the plan is to focus more on getting a few projects finished and doing more on the stash organization goal.
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
June 2025 PHD Report
Hard to believe we are half way through 2025. Now that it's July it's time to take another look at my progress with the June PHD report over at Ms. P Designs.
I've not done so well on the finishing up front, but I have been making steady progress on several other projects.
While cleaning up the sewing room, I found a very old counted cross stitch throw started back in college. It's been added to my traveling handwork projects. Not a lot of progress on this, but at least there's been some. I'd forgotten just how much time it takes to do counted cross stitch.
Another oldie saw some progress in July. A few more blocks for Grandmother's/Kate's Choice project were quilted this month. Just 2 rows left to quilt.
Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter) also saw a lot of progress this month. All the orange blocks were sashed as it was the Rainbow Scrap Challenge color for June. Once those were finished, the remaining red blocks were finished and sashing of those started.
In May, quilt assembly started for the Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter). This month the center was assembled and the first border of the yellow 4-patches was added.
Clues 6 and 7 for Old Town (Bonnie Hunter) were completed in June. A good start was made on clue 8. I'm really hoping to be assembling the quilt blocks by the end of July.
The color for the July Guild BOM block was red. I've already started looking for my sashing options. August blocks are already under construction as we've got some stuff going on this month, so being ahead will be important.
Glowing Hearts (MMM quilts) became a finished quilt top. It's in line for quilting, which I should really focus on this last half of the year. This was an unplanned project, but it used up some older stash and was a lot of fun to make.
There has definitely been progress, but other than Glowing hearts none of the other projects have hit a major milestone, so my tracking graphic doesn't look much different than last month's.
Only Glowing Hearts shows any progress on the bar graph. Some months are going to be like that. We'll see what gets done in July, it's going to be a busy month.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
To Do List for the Week of 07/01/2025
Monday, June 30, 2025
Definitely Progress, But Nothing Exciting
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Stitching Stuff: Week 26 of 2025
I didn't mean to be absent from the blog this week. We both attended a technical conference last week and our mornings were early and our evenings late. It was just hard to find the time to write a blog post. I also didn't do so hot on finding time to stitch during the later half of the week, it was just too hectic and we both were pretty much wiped out when we got back to the room. So this weeks stitching stats don't look so hot.
- 15 minute days/week = 4/7 days
- 15 minute days/June = 25/28 days
- 15 minute days/2025 = 169/179
- Success rate = 94.41%
1. Gretchen 2. Frédérique 3. maggie f 4. maggie f 5. Julie in GA | 6. Melissa G 7. Karen 8. DonnaleeQ 9. Melisa- Pinker n' Punkin Quilting 10. Quilting Gail | 11. Bonnie in Va 12. Andrée 13. Carol @Quilt Schmilt |
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Sunday, June 22, 2025
Stitching Stuff: Week 25 of 2025
It's been quite week on the storm front thankfully. Summer has kicked in. Hot and humid are the words of the week. Looks like we are in for a lot of that over the next few weeks. It's a good reason to hold up in the sewing room during those hot afternoons. Which is pretty much what I did this week, it definitely helps with the sewing time.
- 15 minute days/week = 7/7 days
- 15 minute days/June = 21/21 days
- 15 minute days/2025 = 165/172 days
- Success rate = 95.93%
1. Gretchen 2. maggie f 3. Melissa G 4. Deb in Canada 5. Karen | 6. DonnaleeQ 7. Julie in GA 8. Quilting Gail 9. Bonnie in Va 10. Stitching Loving Nana | 11. Andrée at Quilting & Learning 12. Marsha's Spots 13. Frédérique |
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Saturday, June 21, 2025
Week 144 Photo Challenge: Vegetable(s)
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
To Do List for the Week of 06/17/2025
Do you ever look at your calendar and realize that you don't really have that much time to get ready for something? Grad Girl will be moving home next month. She's been applying for jobs and has had one video interview so far. With the current job market, she's probably going to be here for at least a month, likely 2 to 3 before she finds a full time chemist job. I've been using her old closet as storage for some of my quilting supplies, I'm going to have to find someplace else because she's going to need the closet. I have time, but will need to add that to my decluttering to do list.
Maybe it goes on my quilting to do list too? It certainly wasn't on last week's to do list.
To Do List for 06/10/2025
1. 2025 Guild BOM: finish cutting, finish assembly - progress
2. Kate's Choice: Continue quilting blocks - no progress
3. Old Town: Work on blocks at late night sew ✔
4. Embroidery or Cross Stitch: Stitch one night this week ✔
5. Wild and Goosey: Finish red blocks - progress
6. Summer Scrap Quilt: Continue as leaders and enders ✔
It wasn't a bad week, three check marks, two with some progress and only one with no progress. I'm finding it hard to get back to the quilting because I have deadlines with the Guild BOM blocks. My next deadline is in later July, so hopefully I'll have some time to quilt this week. So it will stay on the to do list for this week.
To Do List for 06/17/2025
1. 2025 Guild BOM: Finish July blocks, start cutting for Sept.
It will take an hour or so to finish up the blocks for July. That's doable before tonight's meeting. I'm going to try to get ahead on August. July will be busy.
2. Kate's Choice: Continue quilting blocks
The plan is to change over to the walking foot tomorrow and spend a couple of days quilting. I'll just have to be disciplined and do it.
3. Embroidery or Cross Stitch: Stitch one night this week.
I made a little progress Sunday night. It's slow going, but to be fair that's only an hour of stitching time. But progress is progress even if it's slow.
4. Wild and Goosey (Bonnie Hunter): Finish piecing red blocks, start sashing red blocks
Just one last red block to finish paper piecing and I can start sashing the blocks with black. Orange is this month's RSC color, but I finished all the work on those blocks. So I'm continuing with a different color. I'll be paper piecing a couple more green blocks this month too. I'd really like to see this project be ready for assembly sometime next year. Hopefully, by doing a bit each month, I'll get there.
5. Old Town (Bonnie Hunter): Continue assembly during late night sew.
All the gold/neutral flying geese are made and I've moved on to making these subunits. Hopefully assembly of the blocks will start in early July. I've been working on this at late night sew because it's the only non-guild project I have everything cut for.
6. Simply Sensational Summer Scrap Quilt (Kevin the Quilter): Continue as leaders and enders.
Yesterday's blog showed the progress from last week. The only change is that some of the yellow border blocks are sewn together. It's been fun to see this start to come together. It feels like I've been making all those 4-patches forever!
It's the same list as last week, though I'm hoping to do a bit better on the quilting and the cross stitching this week. We'll have to see how that works out. Linking up with the Quilt Schmilt for To Do Tuesday.
Monday, June 16, 2025
Not Much on the Design Wall
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Stitching Stuff: Week 24 of 2025
It was another good week on the playing with thread and fabric week. Except I did a lot more playing with fabric than with actually sewing it. I need to get a start on next year's BOM. There is no way I'm going to be able to make a block and write a pattern each month. I'm going to start early on that. Still it kept me spending time in the sewing room and playing with my stash.
- 15 minute days/week = 7/7 days
- 15 minute days/June = 14/14 days
- 15 minute days/2025 = 157/165 days
- Success rate = 95.76%
1. Gretchen 2. maggie f 3. Julie in GA 4. Melissa G 5. Andrée | 6. Karen 7. Stitching Loving Nana 8. Frédérique 9. DonnaleeQ 10. Meloney | 11. Quilting Gail 12. Bonnie in Va 13. Carol @Quilt Schmilt |
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Saturday, June 14, 2025
Week 143 Photo Challenge: Old Book(s)
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Photo Play 2025: May Summary
May turned out to be a reasonable month on the photography front. I took the camera out early in the month and then we were on vacation at the end of the month. Nothing from my early in the month photography efforts made the cut to my curated list. At least I have a few photos for the end of the month.
The following photos were taken with either a Canon 70D DLSR with a Tamron 14-400 mm telephoto lens or an I-Phone 12. Some photos have been cropped.
The following three photos were all taken in Norman, OK when we stopped for lunch on our way to Texas. These were all taken with the I-Phone.
The first two "chalk" paintings were taken from one of the buildings. It's hard to ignore the brilliant colors in those. The fish in bottles (do you see them, took me a bit to figure out what all the white "dashes" were), was on the side walk in front of the building. I don't do a lot of graffiti photographs, but these were too good to pass up.
This last trip to College Station we were going to have a lot of time on our own early in week since Grad Girl was preparing for her thesis defense. My Guy dearly loves to walk and hike. So I asked Google to find walking/hiking trails close by. It came back with Lick Creek Park, which was about 20 minutes from where we were staying. It had wonderful walking trails with lots of wildflowers and birds. My bird shots didn't come out so well, but I did get a lot of wildflowers photos.
The following photos taken with the Canon 70D with a Tamron 18-400mm lens.
Blanket flower
Horace's Dustywing
Rock Rose
The following photos taken with an I-Phone 12.
Green Lynx Spider on a Black Eyed Susan
Partridge Pea Flower
American Beauty
Bee on a Blanket Flower
Buttonbush
It's obvious that I enjoy wildflower photography as I certainly have a lot of photos this month. There are some just good luck shots with the insects, those can be hard to catch no matter the camera you have with you. I used the I-Phone a lot on close ups. The Tamron telephoto is a wonderfully versatile lens, but it does struggle with the extreme close ups I love to take. Thankfully the I-Phone does pretty well at close range.
How's June looking on the photography front? I've picked up on the photography study a bit, so the cameras been out a bit more. There is still more than half the month left to see what I can come up with.