April One Monthly Goal: Pressed, Folded and Shipped

As the fourth month of the year comes to a close (way to fast if you ask me) it's time to post about the fate of April's One Monthly Goal. 

The plan for this month was to get the backing made for En Provence, de-thread and press the flimsy, then package for shipping to Trudy for quilting.  The backing came together easily enough. 

The back used up all of the Geisha print, all of the pink floral and most of the magenta fabrics.  It feels good to get all of those out of the stash.  

It took me a full weekend to remove all the loose threads from the back and then press both the flimsy and the back.  Bonnie's quilts have so many seams, it's quite a challenge to be sure there are no threads that can show through the neutral squares. But after many hours of prep time, both were pressed, folded and packaged for shipment. 

Trudy is usually pretty quick with the quilting, we've already discussed thread colors and quilting motif.  So sometime in early May, En Provence should be back here ready for binding.  It will feel nice to finally get a quilt off the UFO list.

The One Monthly Goal for March was to get all the Vintage Dress blocks sashed.  Still working on meeting that goal. 

Vintage Dresses by Charise Randell

The second row is all sashed and the first row is getting there.  Hopefully Vintage Dresses will make it to the finished flimsy stage by the end of May.  

While En Provence was the number one priority for April, there were a few other priorities on my quilty to do list.  Here's how I fared with those.

1.  En Provence - Make back, prep, ship  
2.  Geek Chic - Bind   
3.  Magnolia Mystery - prep for quilting
4. Vintage Dresses - finish sashing
5. Squared Away - finish green blocks 
                               finish yellow blocks
6. Inverted Star - finish green stars
                            finish yellow stars 
7.  On Ringo Lake - leaders and enders project.  

So there was good progress this month.  I'm hoping to get Magnolia Mystery prepped for quilting next weekend.  It's not a UFO yet as it's not a year old, but I want to get it off the list before Meadow Mist Designs starts her 2018 quilt along. 

That's it for the week and for the month of April.  Now it's time to decide whats on the quilty to do list for May.  Linking up with:

April's One Monthly Goal
Monday Design Wall 

Week 17: Stitching and De-Stashing

It's been such a pretty weekend, spring seems to have finally sprung.  I was more than ready for that.  My sewing room didn't see a lot of me yesterday and probably won't see much of me today as there are plans to get out and soak up some of that warm sunshine. Getting in at least my 15 minutes of stitching before the end of the day may be a challenge.  

It was a good week in terms of fitting in some stitching time here and there. 

Days with stitching time this week:  7 out of 7 days
Days with stitching time this month:  28 out of 28 days
Days with stitching time this year:  110 out of 118 days
Success rate:  93.22%

With the prettier weather it's going to be a challenge to keep up; like many of you, our yard really needs some work.  Plus I've been gearing up to get back on the bicycle.  The weight loss program has stalled and I need to add in some new physical activity to jump start it again.  So my stitching time most days will likely only be 15 minutes.  Still that's better than no stitching time at all.  How do you balance the increase in activities that comes with spring and summer?  

Mister Linky is set up at the bottom of the post so you can link up how well you did at finding time to stitch.  

Moving out stash has been slow going, but at least it's going out and not coming in.  

Fabric used this week:  0.45 y
Fabric used in 2018:  22.28 y
Fabric purchased in 2018:  6 y
Net fabric out for 2018:  16.28 y

The out remains higher than the in.  Though I will admit, those Connecting Threads flash sales have been a very tough temptation.  But I've resisted so far.  Linking up with Quiltpaintcreate for this week's stash report.  

Have a great week of stitching and stash busting. 

1. Melissa G 2. maggie f 3. Julie in GA 4. Meloney

5. MartiDIY 6. Aileen K 7. di 8. Christina's Handicrafts

9. Shasta 10. Deana

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Rainbow Scrap Challenge: A Spot of Sunshine

Even with another day off, it seems like weekends go way to fast.  We took yesterday off to run a few errands, in particular to renew our drivers license.  Somewhere in the chaos of extra work stuff and around the house stuff, we completely forgot that's one reason we took off.  Thankfully, I remembered right a 4 PM, so rather than a coffee date we ended up standing in line at the tag agency.  Whew, at least that's done and we don't have to worry about it for 4 years. 

There was a bit of sewing interspersed with all the errands.  I finished one of this month's yellow/gold Squared Away blocks.

Squared Away Sampler
designed by Mari (The Academic Quilter)

I really love these golds with the brighter yellow in the back ground fabric.  The second block is partially assembled, the fabrics for the third block are selected, but haven't been cut into parts yet. At least there's been some progress and I'm not an entire month behind. 

That's all the scrappy goodness I have to show off this week.  Sashing continues on the Vintage Dresses and hopefully I'll have the center assembled and ready to show off on Monday.

Linking up with Angela over at Soscrappy for this week's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  Linking up on Sunday with Oh Scrap.   

Weekend Stitching: Just a Little Something or Other

Weekends always go so fast, even when the weather is nasty.  Though to be fair, this was a busy weekend.  My Guy and I were asked to play photographers for our local clean up day sponsored by the company we work for.  I covered one location, he covered the second.  I bailed just as the heavy rain started, DSLRs don't do so hot when it's really raining.  In the evening, we attended a retirement party for one of the scientists that hired in the same year I did.  His retirement leaves me as the last of that "incoming class".  It's going to be a bit odd going forward, as one individual noted that leaves me as one of the few who know where all the skeletons are.  

Most of last week was spent getting En Provence ready to ship out for quilting.  So there hasn't been a lot going on that's photo worthy.  I'm back to sashing the Vintage Dress blocks, but at the moment it doesn't look much different than it did the last time I posted about it.   I've been playing a bit more with the left over 1" strips from the frames around those blocks. 

These 4 patches will finish at 1".  Not sure what I'm going to do with them at this point.  I'll keep making them till I use up the strips and then decide the next step.  I don't usually work this small, but I'm having a hard time just throwing away such nicely cut strips. 

That's it for me this week.  I'm off on Friday, so I'm hoping to get in some very nice sewing room time that day.  Linking up with 

1. Julie in GA 2. maggie f 3. Meloney

4. MartiDIY 5. Aileen K 6. Kat @ Rose Prairie

7. Christina's Handicrafts

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Week 16: Stitching and De-stashing

Another cold and wet weekend.  Hopefully all the rain will bring May flowers, if they haven't all frozen yet.  It's a good weekend for stitching, but there have been a few other things on the agenda this weekend.  One of those is to look back at how well we did on finding those hidden pockets of time to stitch a bit. 

Even with a busy schedule this week, I did pretty well at eking out my 15 minutes. 

Days with stitching time this week:  7 out of 7 days
Days with stitching time this month:  21 out of 21 days
Days with stitching time this year:  103 out of 111 days
Success rate:  92.8%

But this week time in the sewing room didn't equate to getting a lot of fabric out of the stash.  

Fabric used this week:  0.06 yards
Fabric used in 2018:  5.64 yards
Fabric purchased in 2018: 6 yards
Net fabric out for 2018:  15.83 yards

Most of the week was spent prepping En Provence for quilting, so there wasn't much time spent at the sewing machine.  So even thought my outage numbers aren't anything to blog about, I'm still linking up with Quiltpaintcreate for the weekly stash report. 

It wasn't a bad week, but it wasn't a great week either.  Hopefully your stitching week went really well.