Over My Head...

     I AM IN DEEP with everything in my life these days! I suppose it's natural that whatever approach you take to quilting is probably the way you approach life in general, and in my case, this is so true. So pay attention to your quilt-y habits for some cheap psychoanalysis. My number of quilt UFOs is matched by other projects I'm working on right now, in "real" life. I’ll try to hit it all briefly-- there’s no time for much more!

Garden-- looking fabulous and ready to go. (95% of this may have been done by someone other than myself, but I got it rolling!) I think I have planted my lettuce and onions a bit early. Some of our nights are still below freezing which can I tell by the chicken's water in the morning. There are still plenty more lettuce seeds and onion sets to try again. Seedlings are everywhere, inside.

Chickens-- we're still crushing the egg farming business, NOT literally. We have all our original twelve babies, now one year old. The four new ones are super skittish and there hasn’t been much time to play with them. My favorite hen, Buttercup, is getting picked on-- we have to put this grape smelling purple goo on her to make them stop. She's a "Buff Orpington"-- the DD has nicknamed her the "Buff Grape-ington" for now. You can see her right under that birch swing-- she's missing a few back feathers.

Orchard-- we have about a dozen more fruit trees arriving soon. Last year we planted six and they all made it through the first winter. Not sure how much fruit we’ll get this year, but we had a great first season-- our mailman Tom always commented on their progress as he drove down the driveway each day. I was able to surprise him with some peaches, when he pronounced them ready last August! Blueberries are also springing to life.

Bees-- I thought we lost them! Not much activity for the spring-- now all of the sudden, they are swarming. We have a second “nuc” coming soon-- this is what they call a purchased set of frames with bees and a queen. Yes-- you can get them mailed to you! I’m not going to make as good of a beekeeper as an egg farmer. I cannot tell which is the queen at all. You’d think for an artist, I’d see the difference right away. We’ll have to see how this situation develops. In the meantime, the DD is queen bee-- she gets it, or maybe just has better vision.

Quiltopia! It is happening. I moved ALL of my stuff out-- down to the garage and some in the house-- it is complete chaos here. I still have my little sewing corner in the living room, fortunately. Doing all that moving, I am really SORE today-- my next job is stapling rolls of plastic over the ceiling-- you know what that is-- an OVER THE HEAD activity-- don't you think the title of this blog is clever?

It's a huge upstairs space and I'm going to have a workstation for every activity-- sewing, digitizing, longarm, YouTube videos-- even scrapbooking. Quiltopia, indeed. I'll have to come down eventually-- no bathroom and no kitchen.

     Will all of these projects reflect my quilt-y ones and only get to 95% finished? Maybe! I can anticipate Mr. SFO will take quite awhile to get trim around those windows. I can sew without it. We’ll see what happens. 

     On the digitizing end, I did finish the April Village of the Month with not a moment to spare.  This one, for some reason, went through many iterations-- that bike traveled around those few square inches for a greater total distance than the Tour de France! Every time I work on the file, I rename the designs... Holland A, Holland B, and this one got all the way up to J. I hope you like it. There's a ton of summer themes to choose from now-- lake house, beach, patriotic, but before we get into that, I may throw in a "Sewing Village" for May. What would a sewing village have in it? Quilts hanging on the line, thread spool mountains? Give me your wisdom.

    I did continue to stitch along a little each night last week, in spite of everything going on. If you recall from the last post, my goal was to finish six reindeer. So I have two, and the other four are well along the way. I’ll consider it a win if they are done by Tuesday night-- Wednesday is May, if you can believe that. I’ve discovered the “Tilda look” is gotten by mixing really tiny pieces with big pieces. It’s super cute. Problem is, she doesn't tell you how many pieces you need of each size-- you are supposed to "count" them from the diagram-- then multiply by six. These two grade school math skills could definitely use refreshing in my case, judging by the leftover pieces I have.
    

   No progress on Release 2 of the Moonbeams Quilt. Release 3 is the first Friday of the month-- so that would be this week-- probably trying to get that done is a stretch but it’s next on my list after the Chatterbox quilt. I finished up 260 of these units-- no small feat! 

    Now it’s time to make the blocks. I hope this project starts moving faster-- the April Sew Sampler box is in hand, again a winner. I'm  not usually a pastel fan, but just look at that gingham. I ordered a finishing kit.

      Back to Chatterbox-- I now have to sew pairs together-- so here's some overthinking for you on how to get a nice mix of colors. I have light blue, white, red, gold, and dark blue units, and I don’t want two of the same color together. 

    I laid them all out by color in columns. I’m going to start with the light blue units in Column 1, because I have the most of those. I take the first light blue, and skip over all the other light blues-- I sew it to the first white unit in the Column 2. Then, I pair the same light blue with the second, then the third whites in that column. Then I move on to pairing the same light blue with the reds, golds, and dark blues in the 3rd, 4th, and 5th columns. That makes nine different combinations in all, with the same light blue fabric.   

     Then I do the same thing with the second light blue fabric-- sew it with each of the other colors. I will get nine more. I continue this with the last two light blue fabrics-- so I now have 36 combinations, all different.
    Now I'm done with light blue-- the next column is three different whites. I don’t go back and combine the whites with the light blues-- we already combined all of those together in the first round, right? So I’m only working to the right. Each white print gets combined with every red, yellow, gold, and navy blue. There are three white fabrics, and six other colored fabrics, so I have 18 more unique combinations.
   Now we move to the red column-- again, they only get combined with colors on the right--there’s two different reds and four golds and navys, so this time I only get eight new combinations-- it decreases each time. The last set is down to two golds and two navys-- just four more combinations.

   After all of this, I have 66 paired units all different, to work with. There’s still a ton of units left to sew together, so it looks like there's enough to repeat the whole process. This time, I can sew the light blue blocks to the right of the colored block-- I would end up with 132 unique units. You have to be careful when you get near the end of the process though-- you don’t want to be left with, say, four light blues. So take stock at that point when you have about a dozen pieces left to make sure your going to be able to mix until the very end.

     I cannot tell you how much I am enjoying this distraction--- okay, my adding and multiplying may need help, but I used to love "Probability" in Math class-- that's what this is.  Maybe I should just go ahead and join the DULL WOMEN’S CLUB on Facebook-- I think I qualify!
    And you-- still reading this! Bless you. It is such a comfort to me in life to know I have true friends who will read this far, and a few other blessed people who are truly interested in my process of making unique units with hundreds of pieces. You are all going to inherit the earth.

  Now let's get out there and make more progress this week-

are you ready?

xox

Carol