To-Do Tuesday #7 (March 21 - 27)

 March has been a busy month, particularly last week, just not necessarily at the sewing machine.

Tuesday evening last week, our guild program committee organized a Jelly Roll Race and those participating broke up into teams of 3 or 4. There was a flurry of activity, selecting fabrics that were brought in by members, and then starting the race, with one person sewing, another pressing and cutting, and another matching fabrics to put through the machine. Talk about putting the pedal to the medal. Some of those ladies just fly! It was a lot of fun! We ran out of time to finish the tops, so they were taken home to be finished. It will be neat to see the resulting quilts. These are the fabrics I brought to share. The blues are much brighter than the picture. 

On Friday, my two friends, Tracy and Tracy (yes!), and I took a bus trip down to the Quilters Anonymous Quilt Show in Monroe, Washington. 

The bus trip was organized by another quilt guild about an hour from us, so we had to be up very early and left by 6 am to drive to where the bus was leaving from. 

We met some lovely ladies from the neighbouring quilt guild and had a great time viewing the amazing quilts at the show.

There were 14 vendors at the show, but I had the most fun shopping at the guild’s “pound sale”. I bought about 8 yards total of fabric (most FQ or larger, and one piece was over a metre (40”)!) for $21 USD. In Canadian dollars, that works out to $29.40 or $3.68/yd (the exchange rate is $1.40 CDN for $1.00 USD ☹). Even with the terrible exchange rate, the price was really good.

I also picked up four new-to-me used books and paid $2 for one and $3/each for the rest. Fun!

We stopped at Joann’s Fabrics on the way back and I picked up this fun striped fabric that will be perfect for bindings on donation quilts for kids. The cute foxes and interesting black print came home with me, too. 😀

On Saturday, our guild participated in our first “Repair Café”, hosted by our local recycling society. It was a great experience, as a number of people approached us about joining our guild, one lady is joining us at our community quilts sew day, and a number of people brought in quilts to get advice of how to repair them. One gentleman brought in a quilt that his grandmother had made him in the early 1980s. I volunteered to try and see what I could do to help save the quilt as it was badly damaged/well used. I started working on it right away, but realized there was a lot more work than I could accomplish in just a few short hours, so I spoke to him and he agreed to leave it with me. I’ll share more about this in another post.

On Sunday, we celebrated a family birthday with dinner (we ordered Chinese food, yum), cupcakes and running around playing in the backyard!

Yesterday, I continued working on repairing the quilt (and forgetting all about my to-do list). So… here’s my progress on last week’s To-Do List:

• Sew the rest of the pink/grey blocks (I have 54, I need a total of 80 blocks).

I managed to sew six more blocks. I’ll just keep this on my list. LOL!

• Write a quick tutorial on the alternate assembly method for the Zip block.

This week…I promise!

• Set a timer for 30 minutes 3x this week to sort, put away, put for donation or throw out "stuff" in my sewing room. Track my progress!

I did spend about an hour cleaning up the mess I made looking for suitable fabrics to patch up the quilt. I’m going to say that counts. 😉

To-Do Tuesday #7 (March 21-27)

• Gather fabrics for an online workshop I have today. Eep! As soon as I finish writing this!
• Pack up machine, supplies for guild sew day on Wednesday at local shop
• Finish repairs on the 1980’s quilt. Document the process.
• Keep sewing Sew the rest of the pink/grey blocks (I am up to 60, I need a total of 80 blocks).
• Sandwich Scrap Snap Quilt and start quilting.
• Set a timer for 30 minutes 3x this week to sort, put away, put for donation or throw out "stuff" in my sewing room. Track my progress!

Linking up to Quilt Schmilt To-Do Tuesday