Feeling Blue?

I know that we took a shot at the light and bright blues earlier this year.  Blue is one of those colors though, that I can never seem to get under control.  Here is our chance to whittle down the stockpile of blue.  Hopefully you will have a bit of the darker shades of sea and sky to occupy your sewing time this month.  

Sunday Reorganization

I am slowly moving back into my sewing space.  It is taking some time because I am cleaning and reorganizing as I move things back in again.  I had a nice little stash of everything in the main bedroom while all the kids were here for Covid lock down.  We are back on lock down again, but we have lost Anna to summer camp.  Honestly, right now I'm thinking that she is safer in Maine than all of us in Florida.  They tested all of the campers and counselors before they left and after they got there and then are isolating for two weeks to make sure everyone is safe before opening up all the regular camp activities to mixed groups.

In Florida the governor has closed the bars again and reduced the capacity of restaurants to 50% starting Monday.  Honestly, given his choices so far, I am surprised he chose to step back from the original opening plan. I hope that it will help, but schools will be opening very soon and I'm not feeling super safe right now.  A few of our older and sicker teachers retired at the end of this year which makes me very grateful that they won't be exposed to classrooms in the fall.  

So yesterday I remembered that we had not caulked the new baseboards before throwing everything haphazardly into my sewing room for temporary storage as we refinished the rest of the floors last summer.  I have no plans to refinish the floors right now, but I did spend yesterday very up close with several tubes of caulk.  the wood trim is gorgeous now, clean and tidy.  That led me to notice several spots where the paint had been dinged or dented in the past year.  So today it was me and a can of touch up paint getting busy.  I do lead a glamorous life as you can tell.  

After all that though, I started to reoccupy my sewing room.  I felt that there was too much wasted space on the bookshelves and wanted to squeeze in a few more scrap baskets.  So I stacked my yardage for each color under the corresponding basket and moved the neutrals down to the bottom.  This is my entire stash on one bookshelf.  Isn't it pretty?  Mostly scraps, but that is what I tend to use, so it all works out well.  

I did a grocery pickup yesterday and they were out of the pizza dough I ordered.  I decided to make some in the bread machine instead and used up the very last of our yeast.  I haven't been able to find any in the local grocery stores.  I guess I'll start making more cookies and fewer loaves of bread.  Life is full of difficult decisions after all :)

Still giving thanks everyday for a morning sunrise walk.  Its been super hazy the last couple of days.  Kurt thinks it is the dust storm. 

ScrapHappy Saturday

It is the last pink Saturday!  Where has the time gone?  

Not a bit of sewing happened for me this week, but I had planned on that.  It was supposed to be the week when I flew to Texas to do AP Capstone training.  Instead it became the week when I sat in front of a Zoom screen all day every day for training.

I am done with work now for a solid two weeks, so sewing will happen.  First thing on the list though, is to reoccupy my sewing room.  Anna made it safely to Maine for camp and successfully passed her lifeguard test.  That makes her room available again.  She will come home from camp just long enough to pack up for college.  Though I don't know how long college is going to last this year, the plan is to go back to life as normal.  I'm not going to comment on how normal life is right now other than to mention that Florida had almost 9,000 new cases yesterday. 

We are still getting in a beach walk each morning.  Yesterday there was a motorized glider going back and forth.  This morning there was a virtual race.  The beach is surprisingly busy right around sunrise.  

Scrappy and Happy on Saturday

Of to a super late start today!  I have been working all week to grade AP Biology essays and forgot that today was Saturday.  The weeks get all out of whack sometimes.  

ScrapHappiness on Saturday

I was long-arming for most of the week, but I did get these pink nine patches framed as I was sewing together the borders for Dear Jane.

 Here is the bottom half of Dear Jane

And here is the top half.  Now it is just the sides left to sew.  Most of the blocks were already done for the top and bottom.  There are more than a dozen left to go to finish off the two sides.  Deep breath and on we go!

Mister linky is below.  I'm still using the legacy version to get the HTML plugin to work.  I'll have to dig in this afternoon and try to figure out the new Blogger just a little better.  All this messing with computers eats in to my sewing time though!

Busy Week

It feels like summer!  I'm working for the next two weeks, so this one is bursting with lots of projects.

It took most of a day to set up the quilting machine, but it was completely worth it.  The new quilt is done!  I think that I will call it Beachside.  

We've been enjoying our daily sunrise walk.  It will be sad when school starts again and the mornings get busy.  Speaking of school, our governor released a plan yesterday to open all the schools at full capacity starting in July, so that will be interesting.  I'm on our schools reopening committee which meets via Skype next week.  High school and social distancing don't go well together, so things are going to be fascinating.  I don't been to be overly paranoid, but we are setting daily  records of new cases right now and we have the Republican National Convention to look forward to now.  

While the quilting frame was assembled, I quilted up a top for a co-worker of Kurt's. 

So that left today to sew together the bottom border for Dear Jane.  The blocks were all done, and now they are joined together.  Not sure if I will sew the row onto the quilt now or later.  

Anna was sad that her summer job as a camp counselor in Philadelphia went away when the camp was cancelled.  She just managed to find another job though at a different camp in Maine and she is excessively excited right now.  She needs help booking flights and getting a Covid test before next week.  She also wants some new masks before she leaves and has already picked out fabric.  Life is never dull around here.  

  

ScrapHappy Saturday - Rain Edition

Another rainy Saturday.  Sounds like a good time to get a bit of sewing done.  What are your plans on the first Saturday of June?  I am looking forward to seeing some pink! 

Still playing with the new Blogger update.  So far it doesn't want to work with the HTML code from Mister Linky.  That might be a bit of a problem.  Big sigh.  One issue at a time.  

Test Post

I just learned that there is a new version of Blogger.  I must be totally out of the loop.  Maybe it is just that my bandwidth is full from so much time spent on tech support for distance learning.  I've been working on renewing my Google Educator Certification though, but I haven't gotten to part 2 yet, which is where Blogger lives.  I'm going to try adding a photo in now.

Well that was interesting, it wouldn't let me see the images.  I randomly chose this one of our Art teacher on Wildcat Challenge day.  That is our field day for juniors and seniors which happened right before what turned out to be our last day of physical school for this year.  Obviously randomly choosing photos isn't ideal.  I'll try again.  

It went better this time.  I tried "upload from computer" instead of photos.  This might take a bit of adjustment.  

Friday Progress

 It is another rainy day.  I had four more blocks to go for the bottom row of Dear Jane.  So that is ready to get sewn together. 

I did some ironing of the back for the Snail's Trails quilt.  I think it is ready to go as soon as I work up the steam to get the quilting frame assembled.  It was nice to have it set up all the time, but I am happy for now to just get it out when I am ready for quilting.  As much as every day under quarantine blended into the next, it has gotten really blurry now that summer vacation has started.  I'm almost looking forward to having work to do in a couple of weeks just to break up the pattern.  Even though grading AP exams isn't going to be nearly as fun remotely, it will still be fascinating to see how they handle all the changes this year.  

Summer Days

 Look at my new ironing board cover!  It was getting pretty ratty, so out came the staple gun.  Tada!  Good as new again. 

With the ironing board fresh and clean, I put in a brand new rotary cutting blade and came up with enough squares for the back of snails trail.  I had about 75% of what was needed and tried unsuccessfully to get enough Kona cotton in ocean colors at Joann's.  Trying still to avoid crowds, I attempted the curbside pick-up.  That was a fail.  The online ordering mechanism doesn't filter by whether the fabric is available or not.  So it took almost an hour of thumbing through all the shades to find a hue available at my local store.  Then, after waiting 4 days for my order to be ready for pickup, everything was cancelled as being out of stock.  What a bummer!  I then actually went to the store to find something that might work.  A grocery store before a hurricane is better stocked than my local shop.  Post apocalyptic might be too strong a description, but not by much.  So after all that, I ordered from Connecting threads and waited patiently for my fabric to arrive.  Lizzie helped my layout the blocks this morning and I am ready to sew the back together.  Yay!  Small victories.  

Dear Jane Back from the Dead

 I had a nice sprint of finishing off UFOs at the beginning of the quarantine.  That was during spring break though and work soon got busier again.  Now that summer has officially begun, I decided to pull out another project and get it finished off.  The top border for my Rainbow Scrap Challenge Dear Jane quilt was done, and so I got that one sewn on yesterday. 

There are about 25 more blocks that I need to finish to get this quilt done.  Here are the next two. Just three more and the bottom row will be done.  As much as I loved making the Dear Jane blocks, I just don't enjoy the triangles all that much.  It is rainy this week though, so staying inside and getting some sewing done sounds good to me.  I've got a couple of weeks before my summer obligations kick in, so I will make the most of them.