Still keeping all the balls in the air

I’m having a bit of my “parent feels like juggler” thing going on.  There’s balancing what the kid needs and what I need and what I need to get done and Rob deserves at least some attention. 

I have my first speaking engagement this month.  That’s pretty exciting.  Sydney and I have started taking pictures, and Rob has done a short video and I’m making a list of all the things I need to take.  The subject is my vintage machines and how I use them in quilting.  That’s a subject I’m fairly familiar with…;-)

It’s also time to enter my quilts for this year’s Austin Area Quilt Guild show.  Yesterday we took pictures.  Of course, silk is nearly impossible to photograph, so I still don’t have a good one of that, even though we tried everything we knew about lighting.  I need to give up on good photos of that.  It’s just not happening. 

And, part of entering the quilts is finishing them before the first of September so they’re ready to hang in the show.  But, I’m pretty well on track for that since I started quilting the tops in January.

But, I still found a bit of time to work on Rob’s  holiday quilt.

I got these three sections pieced.  Okay, so this thing is so fast.  I cut for about four and a half hours one morning.  That cuts the whole thing out and you bag it into four bags (you don’t need the misc bag that the pattern calls for).  And, then I started piecing the sub units and suddenly, whole sections were going together.  There are very few seams to match.  It’s a piecer’s piece of cake. 

I know that one of my followers bought the kit.  BEWARE if you prewash the panel that came with it.  It shrinks significantly. 

Those little line up stars around the edge were supposed to be the cut line, but you can see how far outside the cut line I had to cut the sections to get them to be the size they needed.  The stars end up showing in the piecing, which would be okay, but they don’t show consistently.  So, I spent part of my time re-cutting these smaller and adding borders or making borders wider to compensate.  Spend some time thinking about where and how much you need to cut if you end up in the same boat.  Sometimes, I only needed to compensate on two sides and not all four.

And, there had to be some gardening time.

This is my little succulent vignette on the front porch, including the gnome garden.  I expect my gnomes will start to climb into other pots soon. 

And, here’s the picture we’re using of the Indian Orange Peel quilt.  It would already be entered, except we’re having trouble with a name.  So, I have today to settle that.

Have a great Monday. 

Lane