What I've Been Doing Instead of Quilting

Well, the sewing is just not happening. I grab a few minutes here and there, but not enough to blog about. The list of things I WANT to make keeps growing, but between house stuff, christmas stuff, and just pure laziness, somehow quilting is falling to the bottom of the priority list.

Here's a recap of what I've been doing instead:

I've discovered that home ownership comes with lots of trips to Home Depot. Lightbulbs, weatherstripping stuff, little weird screws I don't know the name of, returning lightbulbs because they're the wrong size, looking at rugs, coming back to buy a rug, command strips, garbage cans, a strip of wood to hang a quilt with, more lightbulbs, looking at christmas trees, coming back to buy a christmas tree...it's a good thing Home Depot is about 6 blocks away from me.

My sister told me about this show this summer and said she stayed up almost all night watching it. At the time I thought that sounded silly and foolish - staying up all night for a stupid TV show? Well...I did the same thing last weekend. This show has serial killers! Sexually fluid detectives! Scottish accents! Cliffhanger endings! Plus it's only like 10 episodes long, so you can enjoy your binge in a day and then go back to normal life and things like regular pants and tooth brushing. Strangely enough, I also found this to be one of the most feminist shows I've seen, which is another reason I think I loved it so much.

It's been awhile since I've read a book that has engaged me right from the get-go and that I think about throughout the day. This is a murder mystery narrated by three different women, and because they're either alcoholic, mentally unstable, devious liars, or all three you can't really trust what anybody says. This makes for a disorienting but compelling read. I haven't finished it - I have about 80 pages left, and still no clue whodunnit.

Scrappy String Blocks

So, I'm all moved in and will be posting a few pictures soon. My sewing room is set up, and I've been working on a few little projects here and there.

When I was packing up my old sewing room, I found a box of scrappy string blocks I'd sewn together almost three years ago and had forgotten about. The blocks were all finished, I just needed to sew them together into to top.



Strings are what quilters call scraps that are strips. We always have oodles of these leftover from squaring up fabric or from making blocks. These are are constructed using plain white fabric as a foundation, and then sewing the strings on top of it. Because it's two layers of fabric, this quilt top as a bit of extra heft to it that I like.

This was the first thing I worked on in my new room, and it was a perfect easy project to have to get back in the swing of things. I found a few other forgotten treasures while I was packing, so I'm working on getting some of those finished up.