May journal

SEWING
Quilts, crafts, and clothes. Covered it all this month.

1. X is for X block in the Squared Away Block of the Month. The X was March's block, and I also did April's block. Green done, yellow done. Still working on pink for May.

2. Four more blocks for the Night Sky quilt. I'm trying to get section 2 done of the quilt, but it's not quite coming together yet. I wanted to do more on this project, but at least I hit the minimum.

3. Two pairs of shorts, one of TA and the other for JK. More coming.

The purple speckles was from the remnant bin at Hobby Lobby. The ice cream cones are from Made EveryDay, the Boardwalk Delight line.

I think I resolved my Shorts conundrum. I have the Kid Shorts pattern from Made Everyday but it only goes to a size 10. SM is way out of that now. I was trying to figure out how to size it up, and I probably still could. But I discovered that Oliver+S has a FREE!!! Sunny Day Shorts pattern online, so I printed it off. They're made differently - Kid Shorts does not have a separate waistband, Sunny Days Shorts does. They're put together differently, even though they look pretty much the same when they're done. And hey, I don't know that SM will even fit into a 12 anymore - I've been buying her 14/16 at the store, and even went to the Juniors section when we were shopping for a dress for her last week. So we'll see. But at least I have one more size up after the Kid Shorts 10.

4. On Sunday night this week, I got a sewing bug, and in just a little while, I made a swim cover for JK. Adam asked how this dress is different from any other dress ... it's not. It's regular fabric. But the top is too loose to be modest so we'll call it a swim cover. JK found the bow in my basket of random items and asked me to add it.

She's ready for the pool! Bring on the summer!

5. I started ... another ... WIP ... a fabric pennant garland for summer camp. I'm going to our church's youth camp with SM as one of the adult chaperones, and this is girly in that campsites are "decorated" somehow. So enter a pennant garland. This is just getting started so no photos yet.

It has the typical triangles but also flowers scattered randomly in between. I made a bunch of flowers as a hand-sewing project (and one was even swiped by JK - she had me stitch it to a hair tie). The gathering stitch would be MUCH faster on the machine, but I wanted a hand project to carry around and knocked out over 20 of them just while sitting in a women's church conference. This particular version of a pennant/flower garland is from the book Sewing Bits and Pieces by Sandi Henderson - I got it from the library for a different project, but this looked cute too.

This has been a great way to clear out blues that quite frankly, I'm not going to ever use in a quilt because the fabric is too rough, doesn't go with anything else, or I just don't like it. Putting those fabrics in a garland that's going to get the crap beat out of it by being outside!


THE HOUSE
We have a baaaaaaaack-splaaaaaaaaash!

This was the last major piece of our kitchen puzzle, and kind of on a whim, we just got it done. I wanted glass tiles in some shade of blue. When I was running errands at Home Depot once, I went through their entire in-store selection and really wasn't happy with it. It's mostly brown-toned, which doesn't not work with our gray/black counter at all. I found a couple of things and took samples home but nope. So we tried Lowe's and hooray! They had a lot of blues! We brought home a bunch, and the all-white that Adam liked and grabbed at the last second was the winner. The blues didn't look right with the counter - that was a hard match. The white/gray was also the cheapest - score!

I went to a Saturday night book club and when I got home, Adam had most of it up. (I need to leave him unsupervised more often.) I just had to come through behind him for the wipe-down of the extra mortar. (Typical. He makes a mess, I clean it up.) It still needs the grout and to be polished off, but the tiles are up! Hooray!

W is for WIP

WIP is "work in progress" and I am working really hard that this quilt does not stall out and become a UFO!

Here's the story so far of the Night Sky quilt, which has now been in process for 16 months. It's going slooooooow.

When I was making The Pink Babies quilt and said that JE would get it, SM told me what she wanted for her own quilt - blues and purples with stars, like the night sky, because she would be sleeping under it. Makes sense. My brainchild was to do star blocks in white with blue backgrounds, rather than colored stars on lighter backgrounds as is common. We named it Night Sky before I even started.

Then I went a little crazy. I did online searches for star blocks because I wanted a variety - this is totally a sampler quilt. I've made maybe a couple of duplicates, but in different sizes. Mostly everything is different, but mostly also half-square triangles. I guess that's the easier part.

This was block 1. I found it in a Google image search (no source), and mapped it out on graph paper. It's huge - 20 inches across. I call it a Woven Starburst.

I made the next 4 large blocks veeeerrrry slowly over time last spring. We were busy at the time with house projects - remodeling the kitchen and a lot of painting. Adam had his Summer of the Mental Health Crisis. But by September 2017, this is what I had:

P.S. This is NOT a "design wall." It's just some random space between the doorway and coat rack on the left, and the water heater on the right. I pinned up my blocks because I didn't want them getting lost or messed up. Plus, they're pretty! I like to look at them!

The three 8-inch stars on the left were Mindy's contribution, that she wanted to add when she saw the big blocks during our family reunion. The little teeny bear claw was randomly pieced together of trimmings from the big blocks. At this point, I diagrammed the whole thing out on graph paper to figure out how to set in the large blocks and where I needed to add filler of smaller blocks.

January 2018, a year after I started cutting fabric: the first of five sections was done! Working on my Christmas log cabin quilt was going pretty fast, because that's the same block over and over. But I purposefully set that aside to focus on Night Sky. This is still going slow because I keep finding more star blocks online! But section one (top left on the graph paper) is finally done!

I set a baseline target this year to sew at least 2 1/2 hours every week. I did pretty well in January and February, but this quilt has to share my time with a lot of other things, as you can see from my monthly journal reports. During those 2 months, I made four 4-inch blocks and three 10-inch blocks. Then in March, as soon as I finished SM's costume for the school play - seriously, 15 minutes later - I gashed my finger with my rotary cutter. There went over a week of no sewing time at all. Dang it! Night Sky was entirely neglected in March.

In April, I got myself sewing again with little projects of zip bags and the pillow, and I had to make JE's baptism dress. Now we're starting May, so I'm regrouping on the quilts. I'm shooting for at least one block per week/four per month on THIS quilt - any other quilt blocks (like the Squared Away block of the month, which I'm now behind on) are extra.

March journal

Very few photos here, because these things are either already in their own posts, or will get them when they're all the way finished ... here we go again for my monthly review.

SEWING
1. I bought new curtains for my bedroom from Ikea and they were WAY too long. I cut them almost in half to get the length where I wanted it, so now I have that extra fabric for the other small window and probably the bathroom. It almost seems like cheating to BUY curtains instead of making them from scratch, but hello - cheap Ikea fabric! The windows don't get to wear expensive fabric, my kids and I do.

2. SM's theater costume - I finished the peasant top in Feb, the skirt and apron this month. I also did an alteration job on a skirt for a friend, which took a lot longer than I thought it would.

Less than an hour after I finished SM's apron, I was cutting fabric for more zip bags because I never finished the batch on the list from right after Christmas. JK wants her treasure bag! And I sliced my index finger with my rotary blade ... so that ended all sewing for over a week, which was especially irritating because I was motivated to keep sewing! Who knows what I would have finished that day if I hadn't gashed my finger! It's still not fully healed but I could at least get back to work finally before the end of the month.

3. Doll quilt - Back to work with my own contribution for A Doll Like Me, which was going to be submitted to Project Quilting 9.6 as a scrap project ... but I ran out of time for that. I did get the pieced top entirely done but it still needs to be quilted and bound. This is where it sits now. It will have pink binding, which is also a leftover scrap! And I'm apparently cleaning out the baby-print flannel on the doll quilt project, because I haven't sewn anything for a baby for a really long time.

And I still need to get 4 more daughters to work on theirs. This is apparently an extremely long-term service project - I'm glad that ADLM has all the other contributions from the quilt drive to distribute first.

4. I made 2 more zip bags for gifts that will be given to their recipient tomorrow. Up to 11 now, and poor TA and JK still haven't gotten their's. If it weren't for that darn finger injury!! SM wants another one for summer camp, I want one for summer camp (I'm going with SM as a leader), and I'll probably make more at Christmas for the next bunch of school teachers. But those can wait awhile.

5. I worked on my DC map embroidered quilt off and on because I hauled it to two different book clubs and when I was chaperoning backstage during SM's play performance.


THE HOUSE
We needed to rearrange some curtain rods between the living room and one of the bedrooms, and FINALLY got that done. We took down the metal slatted blinds in the last bedroom when we put up the curtains, because I hate those blinds. (Too many years in apartments.) There is now only one set in my house, and they're in the basement next to the furnace. So we'll leave them. But the rest are GONE!!! Hooray!!!

Adam got another set of doors up on the kitchen cabinets, but doesn't like how they line up together, so he's probably going to take it all down and do it again. Where's the eye roll on Blogger ... just get the doors up!!! He keeps saying that he "sees every flaw." I'm really not sure what level of perfection he's going here but if he doesn't let some of those flaws go, we're going to die before the kitchen is done.

One of the garage doors has been sticking and not working properly. Conveniently, a former neighbor gave us a brand new door opener motor and pulley system, still in the box, when they moved 3 years ago. It's just been sitting there all this time, so Adam spent a Saturday swapping out the door opener system. (And it's one less thing taking up space! Yay!)

T is for theater club

At our middle school, theater/drama is not a class. It's an after school activity that anyone can participate in if they sign up. I like this much better than when I was in middle school, because if you didn't make the cut in audition, i.e. the teacher didn't already know you, too bad. Here, you're automatically in the chorus if you don't get a major role, so you still get to participate. SM loves theater and has already taken 3 or 4 acting/improvisation classes plus summer theater, and was so excited to be in a bigger play at school. There are 85 kids in the cast this year!!!

I kinda wish they'd given me a bit more notice, because I had only about 10 days (including 5 when we were out of town) to put her costume together for approval by the teachers. I thought they had a costume shop/stash but obviously not. Next year ... I will talk to them sooner. I had to rush this.

The play is Into the Woods Junior so SM needed to be a "fairy tale peasant." How did I do?

The top is a peasant top from this tutorial on Things of Cloth. You're supposed to add elastic to the ends of the sleeves to make them poofy but I skipped it.

The skirt is the Anywhere Skirt from Made EveryDay. I really like it and want one for myself! The red is a linen-ish heavier cotton so it's awesome for colder weather. She can wear this to church for the rest of the winter. I have a strip left over so I can make her a longer waistband when she outgrows this waist but can still wear the length. Just need to adjust the gathering. So this item could conceivably last many winters for her. Adam says this is one of the more professional-looking things I've ever sewn ... don'r look too closely at the buttonholes ... I thought about using brown wooden buttons but went with the black because she always ends up with black shoes.

The apron is something I put together just winging it, modeled after the pioneer-ish aprons my mom made for my kids years ago, and are in the dress-up bin. SM requested the white ribbon for a bonus.

S is for some more stuff for school

I'm apparently on a run with making the zipper bags from Noodlehead. I started in the summer with trying to make them as little totes for my girls going to school, and the first one BOMBED. Badly.

Because we're supposed to post the failures, as well as the successes, so everyone knows it's not all perfect in Sewing Land, here you go. The little pouch wasn't too bad when it was open - very wide, as planned.

But.  It was SO wide open that when I zipped it closed, it went completely flat because I'd cut the box corners WAY too far into the bag.

I was annoyed but tried again. My second bag was MUCH better! I used a stiffer interfacing and didn't screw up the box corners. Look at how nice and tall it stands up!

So with making the failure, then the good one!, that gave me the optimism to keep going. I had one started for JE that I came across when I was cleaning my sewing room to finish the Woven Star quilt, and it occurred to me to make them for the girls' teachers. I did the 2 for the school teachers, 1 for book club, finished JE's, and did another for RG so she wasn't stuck with the failure. So I'm up to 7.

The Pearl Bracelets fabric one and the botched one were the Small size on the pattern. All the rest were Medium. And check out the fun red fabric! Jane Austen silhouettes! RG's favorite color is red, and I bought the Ardently Austen fabric for her book quilt (which is still just a pile of fabric - not even a Work In Progress yet).

I have orders in for 2 more for my littlest girls - they want "treasure bags" too! My sister-in-law wants one for her birthday for traveling, and her girls are all about accessories as well as having birthdays soon too, so that puts my total at 12. We'll see if I'm sick of this pattern after the next 5, and if I ever make it again.

I've made only a couple of other patterns this many times - the Playtime Tunic into about 10 nightgowns, I have no idea how many pairs of Kid Shorts, and the Bento bag 7 times (one for each daughter for their dance bags, and 2 gifts). So this is kind of weird for me to keep going with the same pattern. Admittedly, I did get a package of 40 zippers from Amazon during my Christmas shopping ... I need to make some elongated pencil bags too - my girls are all about their markers and colored pencils. Artists, the lot of them. 

S is for school

We've homeschooled from the beginning, but this past summer, for a lengthy list of reasons, it was time to register our girls for the local public schools. SM went straight into middle school, RG and JE are at the elementary school, and TA and JK are still little and home. They'll join their sisters at school in a couple more years - the current plan is to put them in late, like at 2nd or 3rd grade. (Although with the way they keep fighting, they may go into 1st and K next fall just so they don't kill each other. But that's another discussion.)

So that meant that for Christmas, I entered the obligatory world of Teacher Gifts. I don't like feeling obligated (and I do), but at the same time, I really do appreciate the teachers our girls have - they've made our transition from home to public school SO smooth! The girls aren't just tolerating it, they're thriving. RG is getting a ton of therapy that we couldn't find in private practice, particularly physical and occupational therapies. (Why is no one willing to treat special needs kids? The demand is massive!!) So big huge thank yous to the new members of Team Caudle! Presents all around! I seriously had to make a list of all of "my staff" to give gifts to, and I still didn't get to them all. Need to finish the list at Valentine's Day, I suppose.

Since I have far more time than money, I made:

- Zipper bags from Noodlehead for the 4th and 2nd grade teachers. They really are amazing. This was entirely from my fabric stash, and Mindy had given me a few zippers forever ago. I got more zippers in bulk from Amazon so I can make more for all the therapists for an end-of-the-school-year thank you. (If I get to it. That's the idea, anyway.)

2nd grade teacher - the inside was a blue with an abstract of the phases of the moon

4th grade teacher. I need to make this one exactly as-is again because my sister-in-law loved it, and her birthday is coming up.

This one was for a gift exchange at a book club - I nailed it on the fabric/zipper contrast.

- Pocket handwarmers for the principal and vice principal. They are not sit-in-the-office guys, I always see them out and about, including outside at all the recess times. These were all flannel scraps. I added some lemon essential oil to them, and Mr. T loved the scent. Mr. K raved about how nice they are because it's a SUPER cold winter this year!

- Peppermint foot soak - you have to scroll down in the link to get to the foot soak. I didn't just give little tiny one-time "servings." I put it in pint jars and labeled them to use 2 tablespoons at a time. This went to the special ed teachers, 3 therapists, and their extra-curricular dance class. I saw one of the special ed teachers in the hall after I'd left it in the office, and she said it smelled so fresh! She was excited to use it! I made 7 of these. Seven pint jars out of my house! Hooray! (We have a crazy amount of pint jars and we don't do THAT much canning, so I specifically looked for things to make that would be put in jars.)

- Cookie jars - particularly to get rid of the millions of Snickers bars that I stashed away at Halloween. We had SO MANY Snickers bars! And we have an obscene number of canning jars in the basement. So all I had to buy was the cake mixes, and those are a buck each. Here's something silly for you: I saw Walmart had cookie jars for sale for $5 each. Ha! I'll make it myself, thanks! We made five jars. These didn't end up going to school - we gave them to people around the neighborhood.

- 3 minute fudge - this is my secret weapon for the holidays. My alternate is to make it with the Ghiradelli peppermint chips and white chocolate. We took a bunch to the public library for the librarians on the children's floor, because THEY are part of our teaching staff as well!

Q is for quilting skills

4th quarter finish-along entry post
4th quarter link-up post on Sew Me


When I was 29, I spent a year working in Montana and due to a variety of circumstances, I had no living expenses except my car payment. I was able to save A LOT of money that year. So for my 30th birthday, I bought myself a plane ticket to Australia for a month. One of the souvenirs I brought home was a duvet for my bed and a couple of duvet covers, a plain purple jersey one and this one:

It's still near and dear to my  heart, but it's been sitting in the closet for years now. Last year, I was thinking about making quilts for my kids during our cold New England winters, and the idea came to me to make this into a quilt - lay it out with batting inside, quilt it, and sew it shut. I decided this would be my first test run for learning how to do free motion quilting. 

Last week, I literally crawled inside the duvet cover to lay out the batting smooth, and then pinned it all. Got it set up on my machine, and within 60 seconds of starting to sew, I had managed to get the fabric wrapped around the free motion foot, snagged in the machine, and snapped off the needle. Right.

Rule 1: GO SLOW.
Rule 2: Don't let the fabric get bunched up near the needle.

Picked out the stitches, and started over.

I was going to do swirls all over, but we see how that went so quickly. I think I'll backtrack and learn free motion quilting swirls on something substantially smaller ...

I just traced around the edges of the flowers, and didn't add any other quilting except an outline all the way around the edge of the quilt to make sure the batting stayed all the way out to the sides.

Don't look too closely at the flowers because heck yeah, this was a wrestling match between me and the sewing machine, and it's not very pretty. I'm being quite generous to myself to call this a new quilting "skill." The fabric isn't smooth at all - there are tucks and bulges all over the place. But from a distance, it works. JK, who is 4 and has claimed this for her bed, doesn't care. She just knows it's purple, and it's a quilt that Mommy made. That's good enough for me too.

what we're doing besides posting online

Holy. Cow. 5 months of the year already gone! The blog has been quiet because our lives certainly are NOT!

We decided in January to renovate our kitchen and Adam has been working pretty much nonstop since then. He built all the cabinets in our garage in January and February. We bought a new fridge so he could custom build cabinets around it. He did all the wiring to reroute the electricity here and there. He did plumbing with the sink and water hookup for the fridge. He retiled sections of the kitchen floor and it blends in really nicely - you can only tell where it is if you know what to look for in the grout. With moving a doorway, he learned how to make his drywall patching blend a lot more nicely. He's been a busy guy!

JANUARY KITCHEN:

TEARING IT OUT: Except for 4 days in April when Adam had to fix a sink plumbing issue, the kitchen has remained functional the entire time. My kitchen project job has been to clean up after him, occasionally hold something in place while it gets nailed in, and keep the kids out of his way.

GOOD RIDDANCE to the counter tile!!

Our friend Andy came over to help Adam with the final breakdown

A WHOLE NEW SPACE:

Current status: all cabinets and appliances are in place, and now Adam is doing the detail work like the cabinet facings and drawers. The counters are plywood with contact paper stapled to it, and will probably remain that way until the fall. We want an entire granite slab (rather than a teeny sample square like at Home Depot) and are trying to pay cash for the whole thing - so far, so good, but our budget got thrown off this spring from some kid-dental work. In the end, we should have a $40,000 kitchen for $10K or less. But that's still a hefty chunk in one year!

My house part just started this month - I'm the painter. So far, I've done the reading room in a light blue-gray with ultra white for the window trim. I started on the trim in the front hall area. There's a lot of blue edging tape up! We're testing paint colors for the kitchen. The blue-gray will carry into the kitchen, with an accent wall. Adam wanted it to be "cranberry." We played around with shades and ended up getting "Sugar Beet" from Home Depot. Adam was painting up the sample when JK (age 4) came running in. "Oooooo! Magenta!" HA HA HA! The hall from the front door all the way to the back bedroom will eventually be some shade of gray, and the girls want their bedrooms painted lavender. Still very much at the beginning of my part.

the old yellow getting covered with the blue-gray. The front door and hall are slated to change color as well.

I've done quite a bit of sewing here and there but nothing is done yet except the girls' bedroom curtains. Only one set is up because Adam stole the other curtain rod for the living room. I bought a new living room rod but we haven't swapped them yet. (Kitchen.) Photos of the curtains haven't turned out because of being backlit by the sun coming through the window ... still working on it.

In January, I made the first block for SM's Night Sky quilt - I saw a picture on a Google search for quilt star shapes (sorry for no source - I can't find it again), and figured out on graph paper how to make it with half-square triangles (HST). This is 16x16 inches - the starting squares were 5 inches. When made into the HSTs, they sized out at 4 1/2 inch squares to allow for a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides to finish at 4 inches. Yes, actually, it did take me awhile - and some pretty botched up blocks for another project (if you want 2-inch HSTs, you start with 3-inch squares) - to figure that out.

Then sewing came to a screeching halt, because my iron died in February. I just replaced it.  I'm now in process on a dress for JK (with 3 more clothing items waiting for action), and have done 3 more blocks for SM's quilt. I've also started some strip piecing for RG's quilt, and fiddled around with some fabric for a 3rd one. I've been bookmarking specific block ideas for the little girls - TA can't make up her mind which type of quilt she wants. I have about 4 ideas for her.

On a whim, I made a heart garland from felt and a ribbon for the windows in our front hallway for a Valentine's Day decoration. Felt doesn't require the iron.

I received a template of a map of Washington DC as a gift from my good friend Sarah - it's supposed to be all embroidered into a quilt that's about 36x42 inches. SM asked me who will get it for their bed - no one. It's going on the wall. I started working on it at the beginning of April. It's slow going and this is going to take me a LONG time but there's no rush. It's just for Adam and me, for sappy nostalgia. And yes. Yes, I am adding pink French knots to represent the cherry trees around the Tidal Basin.

The garden went in the last weekend in April. It's a lot less than we normally do, but it's all we can manage this year. We're not trying to feed our family for 6 months with it - it's just a delicious supplement. So we're not worried about the quantity of plants we put in or the harvest we get.

TA helped me put in the dahlias and canna lilies

And all of this has been in between Adam's job, homeschooling, dance classes, a ridiculous number of doctor appointments (2 kids in weekly therapy and dental stuff, plus everyone recently got checkups all on top of each other), regular chores around the house, church assignments, and just ... life.

H is for hatinator

My hat for "The Music Man" ...

Th original hat was in a box of random hats, and this was the only one that fit my head over my hair ... but it was too big, and the brim was too floppy. So I cut the dome and settled the top down into it further - you can kind of see the line on the top left in the picture. The stitching was really obvious so I knew I had to cover it with something ... obviously I went with lace. I also cut about a half inch off the brim and that helped A LOT. I originally wanted to get a feather boa and just wind it all around but I never made it to the store to get one. When I was doing the lace, I also pulled out the tulle, thinking I'd make some kind of bow but fortunately (because this was about 3 hours before the dress rehearsal), inspiration struck and I just twisted a long strip of tulle around and around and fluffed it up. Except for the stitching on the dome, the whole thing was done with a heck of a lot of glue in my hot glue gun.

And here we are!!

The hat in action! On stage, I was the Pick-a-little soloist ... "Just melt her down and you'll reveal a lump of lead as cold as steel ..."

And with three of my girls in "Wells Fargo" ...

P.S. This type of big foofy hat, in England anyway, is actually called a Hatinator. Here, we just call it a Kentucky Derby Hat. HA!

2nd quarter report

I did a first quarter report at the end of March ... so here's the 2nd quarter. Because I'm still sewing like a maniac (well, for me, anyway) but not blogging it. April and May were spent on the two big projects of finishing the Nancy quilt and the Fairy Tale dress.

I also made SM an Artemis dress for her birthday in May - she wanted a Greek mythology themed party, and her favorite goddess is Artemis. The Artemis symbol is a crescent moon, so I put them around the base of the dress edged with silver thread (my applique is a disaster - it got all bunchy), and I added silver ribbon and an embroidery stitch in silver thread at the top. The pattern was my stand-by, the Playtime tunic, turned around backwards. The folded open flaps on her neckline are normally the button-up section on the back. And I left off the long sleeves and just folded the arm holes under.

And since we're talking about the party for a minute ... you want Sue to do cakes for you!! I had nothing to do with this cake, except driving to her house to pick it up. And for one of the activities, SM painted a big picture of a Minotaur (mounted on a board for sturdiness), and the kids made slingshots and other throwing devices to have target practice. This was a big hit with the boys who came to the party.

June has been kid-clothes-catch-up time. JK has a family t-shirt that's too short for her to wear, so it's now a dress with a tiered skirt so I can add another layer later. She's worn it pretty much constantly since I finished it, including on our camping trip (until it was so filthy I hid it in the dirty laundry bag).

And for our camping trip, in a week, I blasted out 8 pairs of shorts and a skirt in less than 2 weeks, which have not been photographed because there's another way I'm lacking. Not blogging, and not taking pictures either. (Of course, half the shorts were for pajamas, but still.) But it is gratifying that every day, there's at least one handmade item being worn somewhere! Usually two or three!