Monday, August 21, 2017

One Stitch at a Time

It's been busy here. I had to make the three hour drive to Spokane so my Bernina could get in a maintenance. It's one of those trips that is usually planned around someone flying in or out of the airport, but this time it was all about the sewing machine.
Applique for Hey Grandma!
And because they do it first come, first serve, I was too late to get on the list for the next planned maintenance. Won't be getting my machine back until the first week of September now. Ughh  Oh well, this guy does a fantastic job and I had gotten fairly disillusioned with the {much closer} maintenance service available in our area. Good thing I have a reliable backup! And also, the next trip over to Spokane will include some serious school shopping. Our closest big city shopping apparently doesn't have the appropriate stores needed for, oh yeah, attaining the coolest shoes? My girls were more worried about other girls showing up in the same exact clothing. Not my son. No, he is much more concerned about the shoes.

In the meantime, there's been a little bit of applique done on the Hey Grandma! blocks. I had the leaves all drawn out on the back of the fabric and was scared they were gonna be too small. It looked pretty discouraging at first try. Luckily I hadn't cut out more than two so it was easy enough to cut them larger than the drawn lines {I never draw my applique pieces so tight there isn't a little bit of wiggle room}. You wouldn't think it would be a substantial difference, but even an extra 1/8" of an inch gives enough to fully cover the width of the stems. So relieved I didn't have to ditch this fabric and go find another. This was exactly what I wanted in terms of color and print!
Hand Quilting for Flock of Geese
There has also been a bit of hand quilting done on the Flock of Geese quilt. Simple Kantha-like stitching through the flying geese blocks and an overlapping circle design in the wide sashing strips. So far I'm just doing an echo around the birds, but may come back and do more there. We'll see. It's been very relaxing overall. Just a meditative stitch, stitch, stitch and the occasional dilemma over specific thread color!
Signs of summer...
My husband is a contractor/carpenter/fix-it-guy and earlier this year he fixed a door for a customer. Didn't feel like he wanted to charge for such a simple repair and of course the man insisted. After some wrangling, they decided he would be paid in peaches later when the customers peach trees had ripened. Yay! We had to go pick them ourselves, but whatever. That is NOT a problem for us! I've been elbow deep in peach juice though, getting them prepared for the freezer. We do so love frozen peaches, peach pie, cobbler and of course, peach smoothies. Yum......

13 comments:

  1. Audrey Soy fan del acolchado en círculos ¡¡¡ me encanta!!!
    siempre digo que debe ser mi vena Celta....
    que buenos bizcochos harás con los albaricoques

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  2. Love your big stitch quilting, want needle and thread do you use? I hope you ate some fresh peaches before they all went into the freezer :)

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  3. peaches look great and so does the quilt. Good thing you are not allergic to picking peaches - peach orchards make me break out in hives, my brother and one daughter do too - we all had hives after picking peaches one year - doctor said is the peach dust that gets a lot of people.

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  4. Love all those greens in your Flock of Geese! That is a long way to travel to have your machine serviced, but it is worth it if they do a good job.
    I have just googled Spokane, to see approx where you are in the US, our Aussie daughter is living on Vancouver Island, you are Much closer to her than we are!

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  5. I like that stripe you selected for the stems. A different look but works well.

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  6. Such beautiful blues, greens, and browns. Love the stitching you've added. And love those peaches. I'll come help you eat some pie. Or we could make scones.

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  7. you will be eagerly awaiting your bernia`s return. Had mine serviced last week but today I am taking delivery of a janome 8900 with an 11" arm maybe I will be able to quilt better with it. Love the birds on your flying geese quilt so colourful. Happy shoe shopping. I picked loads of plums the other day from my tree, this year they are not deep plum color but are ripe and taste good

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  8. I had to laugh at the shoes situation ; all three of my boys were the same way!!

    I think that fresh local peaches was a priceless trade!

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  9. I love the barter system and I think you did well indeed. Yum! I'm so glad you didn't have to scrap the leaves on Hey Grandma as they are perfect!

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  10. I don't blame you about taking your machine to someone you feel good about. I take my machine 98 miles north of where I live and it's worth every mile. Sorry it's going to take a while to get it back though. Knowing you. . . you'll be able to find a way to fill the time with hand work - ha!

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  11. Those leaves are soooo tiny! Your quilting is looking great. Can't wait for the stone fruit to start coming in - guess it will be another couple of months though so I'll just drool over your photo!

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  12. I really miss the wonderful peaches we had when we lived in Northern Indiana - grocery store produce just doesn't match the flavor of fresh from the tree/vine/farm kind. LIKE that flying geese layout a lot -- was it a pattern or did you make it up yourself?

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