Mayhem and Chaos!

I love the tv commercials for the insurance company that features the guy that calls himself mayhem.  They are so clever.  And sometimes I feel like my life, home and interests are mayhem!

Monday was link up day for the Simply Needle and Thread challenge on Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville blog.  I am now, late on Friday night, writing my blog to add to the link up.  I was working on the oldest UFO in my collection. . . . a quilt made from a pre-cut kit that I purchased in the mid-70's.  It has 25 blocks.  And long ago eleven of the blocks had been quilted by hand.  Then it was put away and hadn't been touched in over a decade.  Perhaps close to two decades.  I got it out and have this month hand quilted three more blocks.  I didn't write down the time involved, but I worked on them pretty much every day and put in at least an hour each time.  Sometimes as many as three hours.  I am working on size and consistency of the stitches.  Previous blogs have included pictures of my recent endeavors at hand quilting.

Last week I was out of town.  I was visiting my other home a thousand miles away.  I flew.  So I didn't take the current hand quilting project.  I watched one night of quilt cam and wasn't working on anything along with Bonnie.  The next day I decided to work on something during quilt cam.  So I started cutting up remnants into strips, rectangles and squares a la Bonnie's Scrap Savers System.  Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of this project.  But it felt great to get lots and lots of strips, squares and rectangles put together.

After getting back to town and attending a memorial service and a gathering of family members, I came home and worked some more on the hand quilting.  But a stack of mens shirts from thrift stores was calling out to me, so I have spent a few evenings deboning shirts.  I didn't get a picture of the before stack, but I took one of the mass of smaller pieces.   Eight shirts were deboned in the making of this collection!

Smaller pieces from eight deboned shirts

Clearly there are a lot of blues here.  Five of the eight.  The pieces in the lower right are from a beautiful shirt that will probably go in the neutral bin, but it really has a lot of nice color in it.  I have trouble with acquiring neutrals, but when I did the shopping for shirts, I tried to get stuff I like as well as some neutrals.  Some of these blues might even go into the neutrals, or at least into a light pile!  I also have some red shirts to debone, they just didn't happen to be in this stack.  I probably need to launder them.

Which might be as good a segue into Chaos as I can muster!  I have trouble getting to all of the things I need to get to in terms of chores and quilting and other things in life because I get overwhelmed with stuff.  Both literal and figurative stuff!  But mostly literal!  I have too much stuff.  Its sometimes hard to figure out places to put all the stuff and get it out of the way in order to clean.  So there is definitely the CHAOS (can't have anyone over syndrome) in effect here.  

And over time this year I have acquired a lot of the wardrobe of a family member who has been losing a lot of weight and I've been losing it too and moving through her old size range.  So a bunch of shirts to be deboned and a bunch of clothes for me to wear are all sitting in the garage near the washer and dryer; just waiting to be laundered.  

Bonnie has been such a good inspiration on me to work on my quilting activities, maybe that will spill over into my extra-curricular laundering I need to do!  One can hope!  

And I will get back to the oldest UFO, soon!

Ok, so now it's Saturday night, or rather early, early Sunday morning.  After I got home from work a few hours ago, I did some work uniform laundry.  And after that load went through the washer, I put in a small load of shirts that hadn't been washed.  So on with that project.  Baby steps!

One week later . . . and an apology

I want to start off by apologizing for several blips in my attempts at this blog thing.  I apparently had made an error in the link to the second blog post that may have kept people from finding it the other day.  My apologies.  And then Monday the person whose blog I follow intently put out a plea to her fellow bloggers to get rid of the capcha word verification on the commenting function.  Apparently it is something that blogger puts in by default.  Turns out my blog was one that had that security step.  My apologies if that kept anyone from commenting.  I believe that I have fixed it so that you don't have to do that any more.  I understand why they exist, but they are irritating!  But on to the quilting!

Okay, so I am doing pretty good at putting in at least an hour of hand stitchery every day since last Tuesday or so.  And I've made progress.  I am not sure hand quilting is exactly like riding a bike . . . something you never forget.  I feel to some extent like I am re-learning this skill.  There are some things about it that I remember, but it's been a bit of a challenge to get my stitches relatively small and even.

Here is a picture of the block I completed this week.  It took many many hours.

Here is a picture of the back.  Not very pretty.  But I know I improved as I went along.

Here's a close up of the back.

There are now 12 blocks done.  Eleven from 20+ years ago and one this past week.  I did most of a block today, some of it while watching and listening to Bonnie Hunter on Quilt Cam.  I'm not real proud of the straightness of some of those stitches!  But I think my sizes of stitches are pretty good and even.  Bonnie talks about us all knowing what a quarter inch seam allowance looks like.  I'm thinking that this quilt, my first one ever, has more like 1/3 inch seam allowances.  And my shadow quilting is not beyond the seam allowance, it is in the seam allowance.  And some places are pretty bulky.  As I went along on this block I remembered an old skill, burying the traveling of the stitches between the layers.  Duh!

I will continue to do my one hour of quilting a day as much as I can, but this has also encouraged me to work on other projects.  I was so impressed by the project that Bonnie was working on tonight that I may try to start that project as well.  I've been printing off the Barrister's Block Sow-a-long blog posts all along, but haven't started it.  I love this latest group of blocks and Randy's fabric choices and am really excited to start it!

Please feel free to leave a comment below.  The word verification should be gone!  I'd love to hear from you.

If you are interested in following along on the Barrister's Block Sow-a-long Randy's blog is http://barristersblock.blogspot.com/.  She posts sow-a-long posts on the first and third Wednesdays.  And the block posts can be found in her archives.

This post will be linked to Bonnie Hunter's Quiltville blog post from Monday, which is a linky featuring blog writers who are also doing this one hour of hand stitchery a day.

Problem solved for 53 cents!

Yesterday I resolved to do one hour of hand quilting on an old UFO.  When I got it out of the closet and brought it downstairs with the quilt frame, the quilt frame was missing a wing nut (and a washer, as it turns out) and I didn't know when or where they'd gone missing, so I figured I was done until I made it to a hardware store.  I blogged about this yesterday.

To solve the problem with the missing wing nut, and as it turns out also washer, I went to my helpful neighborhood hardware store this afternoon.  After digging around in the washer and wing nut drawers for ten minutes or so, I solved the dilemma.  It cost me 73 cents to get out of there because I had a brain cramp and got two washers when I only needed one.  Oh well!  Maybe I'll tape the spare onto the frame somewhere!

The following picture is of the backside of the hand quilting frame for my quilt by the block quilt.  The green is the quilt backing.  The red print is part of the stretcher bar frame.  I've had this since the mid-70s too.  As long as I've had the quilt, or close to it!

The washer and wing nut in upper part of picture are the part that needed to be replaced.

Here's what the same area looks like from the front.

The front of the quilt block in the stretcher bar frame.  The block is safety pinned onto the red fabric leaders.  The screw at the top is what the front of the fixed area looks like.

And here is what more of the block looks like.  This poor thing has been straight pin basted for years and years and years.  As I pulled some of the straight pins out tonight while I hand quilted there was some rust.  But luckily none of it shows too bad on the block.

The lemoyne star block that I am currently working on.  

There are already completed 11 out of the 25 blocks.  I worked on this for about an hour and a half tonight.  First hand quilting I have done in probably 20 years.  The quilting is a little rough.  I think I need to find a thimble and a light bulb!  They might help!  The picture above is before I started any quilting on it.  I think I'll save a picture until link up next week!  

My quilt blog is called "Thanks to her . . ." and refers to Bonnie Hunter of Quiltville fame.  I will probably gush about her every chance I get.  But this quilt reminds me that there is a him that I need to thank.  My DH.  He is a late- and an ex-DH as he passed away in 1979 about three years after we divorced, amicably.  But he got me interested in handiwork when we were first together.  And I was married to him when I ordered this kit.  So the beginnings of my hobby (hobbies) are really due to him, even though I had done sewing prior to that.  He got me started in crewel embroidery by getting me a few wonderful kits.  I also dabbled in counted cross stitch, macrame' and a few others.  And I currently have a weaving loom, which lives at my other house.  So thank you, Bob, for getting me started down this path!  

It's about time . . .

As with a lot of people, one of the best parts of my day is to read posts from Bonnie Hunter's blog or in recent weeks, to watch her on Quilt Cam! (Her blog is at quiltville.blogspot.com.) This month is National Sewing Month and to mark it she asked if people were interested in doing hand sewing.  She got a great response.  So the quiltalong is called Simply Needle and Thread.  I thought about that.  I don't do a lot of hand sewing.

Then I remembered the oldest UFO in my collection of UFOs.  Some might call it another name, but since it's not done, it's a UFO in my book.  It is the first quilt I ever worked on.  It is from a kit I ordered from a popular stitchery catalog from the 1970's.  The fabric came pre-cut!  Woohoo!  I machine pieced it.  And I was intimidated about the prospect of quilting it.  One of my neighbor friends had a mother who owned a quilt shop in the area.  Dorothy consulted her mom and got back to me with the concept of quilting the blocks before they were put together into the quilt.

There are 25 blocks in this quilt.  It took many many years but they all got pieced.  And there are now eleven blocks hand quilted.  But I hadn't touched it or looked at it in years, perhaps decades.  So tonight I dug it out of the closet.  And the frame.  And somewhere I believe there is a little covered basket with hand quilting tools inside.  But I haven't located it.  I opened up the cardboard box and took out the blocks and backing squares.  And the batting that's been cut so far.  One of the finished blocks provided a small meal for a mouse.  But I think that'll be salvageable.

Damage by mouse.

I brought one of the blocks and the frame and thread, needle and snips downstairs to quilt on tonight.  Then I discovered that the frame is missing a wing nut.  So it's useless right now.  My sewing room defines CHAOS!  And I don't know if the wing nut disappeared this evening or twenty years ago!  Tomorrow I will make it to a hardware store with pieces of the from the frame in hand to get a replacement wing nut.

I really appreciate the encouragement that I've gotten from Bonnie.  She is such a dynamo.  Now if I only had her energy! And I am not giving up on this quilt either!  

If you are interested in seeing her blog about this event go here.