All I did was sew...

Technically, that is not true. But, at some point, I realized that I had grown tired of my sewing room and longed to be somewhere else.

I didn't think that would ever happen.

I made a quilt top for Project Linus. I hope to get it pin basted this week so I can quilt it this weekend. This is not one of my most beautiful quilts. But, I do find it quite tranquil. This is the one with the schooling bass fish on it and it is all blues and greens and teals and a bit of muslin to make it sparkle. I really expected to like this quilt better than I do. But, hey, it's a comfort quilt, not artwork. I think it will do it's intended job quite well.



And, I finished the muslin for Peter's shirt sew-along. Okay, if you're thinking "tsk, tsk! doesn't follow instructions well, does he" then you should know that I was having tension and feeddog troubles with my Grandmother's singer 15-91. I fiddled and I futzed with the tension and the whole time I was sewing to test it out. I'd get the tension perfect in a scrap and it would be fine on the shirt for a while and then suddenly, it would start to loop or the stitches would get tiny, even though I had them set for 12 stitches per inch. Before I knew it, I was down to the cuffs and the tension still wasn't right. So, I pulled out another machine and finished this one off.

The shirt came out okay. My featherweight did not like making button holes in 6 layers of fabric, so I made all the buttonholes on my Pfaff 7550. The cuffs are a bit narrow and they're squared off. I plan to use a rounded, more modern cuff on my "official" shirt. And, the collar is too narrow for a buttondown. That's okay, except I already had one buttonhole cut on the muslin before I realized that, so I was committed. It's taken forever to figure out where the button can go to keep from pulling the collar down. Again, it's okay because this narrow collar doesn't need to be buttoned down. The cuff is all I plan to do different than the pattern. There's a rounded cuff pattern included and I'm going to add a half inch to the width of it and that should make it perfect.



But, I decided that I wanted more practice before I cut that beautiful piece of linen. So, I'm making a second muslin. And, this one, I'm only as far along as Peter was yesterday.

Here are the pieces; sleeves, collar and the old cuffs. I'm going to cut new cuffs for this muslin using what I learned from the last one. The fabric on this one us really terrible. The wide black stripes are woven tightly and between them is loosely woven, so this is a real bear to press. While I expect that I will wear the other muslin around the house, I doubt that I'll wear this one, so will do the buttonholes for practice, but not the buttons.

Poor Sydney. She cut her blocks for her quilt and used the wrong side of the 9 1/2" square ruler, so some of her pieces were 9.5" x 5", which they should be, and some were 9.5" x 4.5". She was very disappointed, but we found scraps and she was able to sew strips to the ones that were too narrow and re-cut them. Unfortunately, that left her discouraged and she didn't do much more sewing than that. We'll see if I can get her re-energized on that. I sure hope so. I have a good sum sunk into a beautiful piece of batik that she's already cut up.

Take care and hope you're having a great week. Lane