2017 report; 2018 plans

I always like to look back on my first post of the year to summarize what I accomplished the previous year so here I go!

I had 21 finishes for 2017 including 9 quilts that were on my UFO list. So my UFO list is now 36% smaller which is not too bad.

I emptied 25 spools of thread in 2017.

I got this big vase and have been dumping all my empty spools over the last 7 - 8 years. I have no idea why or what I will do with these. LOL!!

The amount of quilting thread I used in 2017 was 17,360 yards. I started the year with 124,600 yards and bought 10,000 yards when Superior Threads was having a sale. The thread I bought was for t-shirts quilts and the blue baby quilts I will be working on over the next couple of months. Here is what my quilting thread stash looks like.

Now my fabric stash. I was really trying in 2017 not to buy fabric. Let's just say I failed! I did buy 24 yards of skull fabric for the backs of T-shirts quilts and I bought 24.5 yards of fabric from Hancock's that I got for a fantastic price. The majority of it is for the backs of quilts. So the bottom line is I bought 153.625 yards and used 127 yards.

Over New Year's Eve and Day I had a friend stay overnight. She didn't bring anything to work on so I said my scraps needed sorted and she was game. She likes to sort scraps because it is mindless work; I don't like to sort them as I find it annoying. Between the two of us and after she left I finished the sorting. I dug around the house to find more containers and here is what the scraps look like now.

Here is what they looked like before

I want to spend 2018 using up these scraps. I can see a lot of step zig zag, four patch and nine patch quilts in my future! I wonder how many quilts I can get out of these scraps?

Over the holiday I had to fix up a jacket for my nephew. He had bought white tuxedo jackets for $5 a piece and then dyed them. For this green one he wore when he played New Year's Eve at the Civic theater, he wanted some shiny fabric added for a yoke on the front and back of the jacket and at the sleeves.

The only way to do it so it looked half way decent was to take the lining apart

and take the sleeves partway apart.

Halfway through the 14 hours it took me to do this I thought to myself that now I understand the reason why I ended up spending a year working at the shop that made custom clothes for people who show Western horses. That experience gave me the skills to handle this intense project. Here is Michael in the finished jacket and the pants I dyed for him last year. I have another jacket to do, but no yokes to do thank goodness.

This is not the greatest picture, but here he is at the Civic. I just couldn't get a good picture with my phone, but visually he stood out with that green outfit!

My friend and I hung out in the lobby of the Civic at the merchandise booth. We would take turns going into the theater to watch the show. Here is the lobby where the restoration is still ongoing.

On the 29th the band played a private party at a place on Lake Erie. It was still light out when we got there so I took a couple pictures of the lake. It was cold!!

The inside of the place was decorated so pretty with lots of lights and a huge tree. The food was great, but the weather was terrible. It took us two hours to get home; should have only taken and hour and 15 minutes. It was snowing and the roads were slippery. I finally got to bed at 2 a.m. We had left at 3:30!

I spend some time working on installing trim and baseboard now that the floors are refinished. I needed to get my bedroom back together so when my friend came she could sleep in my bed. I got the base for my mattress set back up and when my friend came she helped me get the mattress from the kitchen to the bedroom - yes, my mattress is no longer in the kitchen!!

Here are the before shots of the closet and bathroom doorways that needed trimmed. It looked so bare without baseboard.

I set up a workshop in the living room for painting and cutting trim and baseboard.

I have all the trim and baseboard installed in my bedroom except two pieces in the closet. I ran out of painted baseboard so I have more set up in the living room ready for the second coat of finish paint. I still need to fill in the nail holes, nail some of the baseboard, and touch up the paint, but I was happy to get one room almost done!

I made a road trip to the Ikea store in Pittsburg to get some bookcases and a TV stand for the living room. That was an adventure! It was so cold to load the car and the lady was so nice that helped me. I was on pins and needles on the way home with the back door open. I had to stop three times before I had the door tied down right. There are no tied downs on the door so I ended up having to wrap the string around the license plate.

With the seat warmer on and the heat on full blast it wasn't too bad. With stopping one time I missed the exit sign for I-76 and ended up taken 80 West. 80 West takes you thru Youngstown and the traffic was heavy. I was hoping that people could see my turn signals when I changed lanes! I made it home, but I couldn't get the bookcases out of the car because they were too heavy. Keim Lumber came the next day to deliver baseboard, so I made giant chocolate/peanut butter chip cookies to bribe them to haul the boxes into the house for me.

The fellow who was a very large man said he would bring them in for me and that using my restroom would be a fair trade to him. LOL!! After he used the restroom he took a couple cookies anyway. Those are the boxes in the living room picture.

While my friend was here we did do a bit of sewing. I showed her how to put together a baby herringbone quilt. So here is the first quilt top for 2018

So my plans for this year are to keep working on my UFO pile, work on reducing my scraps, and get the inside of my house done or at least keep working on it.