#craftygoals Check-In: July 2023 #3

July 28, 2023Leave a comment

Not the most productive week, crafty-wise, but I did get some stuff done.

Last week’s goals were:

Finish the Patriotic Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt and get it in the mail!
Possibly start on the Farm to Table Baby Quilt.
Scrappy Thursday: Either keep working on the Mixed Berries quilt or start a scrappy Christmas gift. (I’m pretty sure the Leaders & Enders quilt is not going to be happening right now.)
Use music lesson time for EPP and not phone scrolling. (I can’t really make a more specific goal for this quilt each week because it’s so dependent on so many different people’s schedules lining up.)
Possibly finish Nilla the Unicorn.

Patriotic Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt: Not finished, STILL. Everything except the label is done, and the label is even created, just not attached to the quilt. Sooo close, but…summer evenings just don’t induce me to do a lot of sewing.

Farm to Table Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt: Not officially started, but I did pull out the fabrics at some point this week to take a picture of them for some reason.

Scrappy Thursdays: I decided to keep going on the Mixed Berries Quilt because I’ve been waiting to work on this one for FOREVER and I’m not feeling any of the other quilts right now. I cut and sorted all the blue fabrics for the large blueberry blocks, got one block’s worth of purple fabrics cut, and started on red. It turns out that I don’t have a lot of purple scraps, which is weird because I know I’ve bought a ton of purple fabric over the years because it’s Rachel’s favorite color…hmmm, methinks I need to go dig out the box of fabrics that Rachel curated for the quilt she was working on during the pandemic. I’m thinking there might be some purples hiding in that box.

Smitten Quilt: I was so good and used all 2.5 hours of music lesson time to stitch away on my EPP and I finished up another combo block of small hexies.

Nilla the Unicorn (Knitting): She’s done! Time to write up a blog post about her!

Alright, let’s talk next week’s #craftygoals:

Get the Patriotic Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt out of my house
Start sewing like a mad woman on the Farm to Table quilt
Keep plugging away on the Mixed Berries quilt.
Find the Rachel box and see if she’s hoarding purple fabrics.
Keep using music lesson time for EPP. It’d be good to get another combo block done.
Knitting: I have no idea! I was going to order yarn to make a Little Cotton Rabbits pattern, but then the yarn was going to be $85 and that just gave me pause. I could knit from my stash…ugh, so boring. Or I could start moving forward with some Halloween decorations I have on my mind, OR I could start moving forward with designing and knitting a hat I have on my mind. We’ll see…

Well, that’s it for the #craftygoals July 2023! Still getting my feet planted beneath me for a solid crafty foundation, but I have high hopes for a more productive August! See you next week with a new month’s list of projects!

#craftygoals Check-In: July 2023 #2

July 21, 2023Leave a comment

Hello again, my crafty lovelies! I missed a couple beats on the crafty check-ins, but I’m trying to get back into it again. I do this every year: I think that summer vacation will mean lots of downtime and I’ll use that downtime to sew and knit and embroider and paint and all the happy creative things that make my heart sing, when in reality summer vacation is doing a lot of stuff with the Brookelets and trying to get the house cleaned up and ready for the next school year. Not an actual lot of time for crafting. AND THEN I think, “OK, well, just wait until autumn and when the kids go back to school because then you’ll have time for crafting.” But nope! That’s when pep band, drama practice and everything else starts. The teenager years are busy, busy, busy!

The Big Declutter 2023 Project is still going big in our house, so that’s cutting into crafty time tremendously. Also, the kids have become obsessed with spending time together as a family in the evening, and I had scheduled the bulk of my sewing time for the evenings because they normally do not want to spend time together after dinner…so…yeah…even less crafty time happening because I’m choosing to spend time with my kids when they ask for it. It’s weird and I don’t know how long it will last, but I’ll show up for every minute until it ends.

Patriotic Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt: I officially started and finished quilting it today, so major progress finally happening on this project! I ran into a lot of problems getting my new machine set up, and the craft room was a disaster that needed some decluttering, and then blah, blah, blah…took a while to get going on the quilting. After I’m done writing this post I’m planning to head back into the craft room and trim it and hopefully get the binding done today. I’d really like to get this into the mail on Monday.

Scrappy Thursdays: I started working on my Farm Girl Vintage “Mixed Berries” quilt this week! I have background squares and stem squares cut for all sixteen 12-inch berry blocks.

Going forward, I think I need to boot the Clementine Quilt out of the Scrappy Thursday line-up because I simply don’t show up to work on it when it’s its turn. I am not gelling with this quilt right now, and I think it needs to be back into hibernation so I can get some actual work done on anything else. Clementine’s time will come, eventually.

Next week I’m supposed to work on the Leaders & Enders quilt, but that might change because I have no plan whatsoever for it and I’m eyeing Christmas on the horizon and I’d really like to start on some Christmas gifts. We’ll see…

Smitten EPP Quilt: I pieced my first of many of the small hexagons into a large hexagon filler block, and started working on the second one. I need to cut some diamonds for the filler blocks. I work on this while I’m sitting in the car at my kids’ music lessons, so it limps along in the summer due to last-minute cancellations and the like. It’ll pick up steam in the autumn when lesson schedules are consistent again.

Nilla the Unicorn (Knitting): I’ve made it a goal to knit for thirty minutes after lunch most days. Renaissance bought a cross stitch kit on one of our excursions in recent weeks, and so she joins me outside each day as well and we stitch in the sunshine together. It’s one of the best parts of my day!

Since my obsession with the Little Cotton Rabbits has not died down, I decided to do a test run with knitted animals and dug out a knit unicorn kit that I bought four or five years ago for Rachel at the Madrona Fiber Festival that she never got around to knitting up and I’ve been working on that. My family has named it Eeyore and insists that it’s a donkey because it turned out that I had no yellow worsted-weight yarn scraps to make its horn and I’m waiting for my KnitPicks order to arrive so I can do that.

So that’s it for the last two weeks. #craftygoals for the upcoming week are:

Finish the Patriotic Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt and get it in the mail!
Possibly start on the Farm to Table Baby Quilt.
Scrappy Thursday: Either keep working on the Mixed Berries quilt or start a scrappy Christmas gift. (I’m pretty sure the Leaders & Enders quilt is not going to be happening right now.)
Use music lesson time for EPP and not phone scrolling. (I can’t really make a more specific goal for this quilt each week because it’s so dependent on so many different people’s schedules lining up.)
Possibly finish Nilla the Unicorn.

Fourth Monday in January

January 24, 2022January 23, 20222 Comments

Monstrously behind in my crafting schedule, but there’s just not much I can do about freak nerve pinchings, and I really needed to get that COVID booster shot. This week has a little bit of extra free time in it because the kids don’t have school on Thursday and Friday, so I’m hoping to get a little more crafting done on those days. We shall see.

The fast and dirty rundown:

Cat Lady Quilt: Done and blogged.
Rachel’s Birthday Gift: In-progress, near completion. With the loss of almost two weeks of creating time, I had to give up on the idea of keeping this secret, so Rachel knows about it. It’s another circle skirt, this time made from the “Cast a Spell” floral print in the “Spooky & Sweeter” collection that Art Gallery Fabrics put out last year. It works well that she knows because I needed to measure her and then I figured I’d ask her if she even liked the idea before sinking hours of time into making it. It’s been super cute–she “wanders” into the craft room and stands behind me while I’m at the sewing machine and watches as the skirt gets stitched, and then wanders away, only to reappear an hour or so later to check on my progress.
Mini Charm Chiffon Baby Quilt: I ran into a hiccup on Rachel’s skirt and needed to take a break from it, so I went around and gathered up the various materials I needed to work on this and prewashed everything that needed it. Ready to baste. Could potentially finish this week.
Far Far Away Quilt: Also prewashed everything for this with the Chiffon stuff. It’s A LOT of fabric! So excited to hopefully get to working on this.
Brickhouse Quilt: Blocks 1-4 done.
Clementine Quilt: Almost done with Month 3. Probably finish this week.
Berry Quilt: Haven’t started, but will probably start this week.
HST Leaders & Enders Quilt: Haven’t started, probably won’t get to this month.
Nereid Mitts: Done! Need to photograph and blog.
Building Blocks Socks: Putting in the time, so they’re coming along.

It was a very productive weekend after many weeks of feeling poorly. It’s amazing how much you’re actually capable of doing when you finally start feeling better.