Log Cabin progress, walking

I am now at 12% quilted. I outlined the area that is done.

I am working toward getting the center of the quilt done which will make quilting the rest of this easy.

This morning I got stuck waiting for a train. It was going so slow and then stopped! It had two main roads blocked off. I am sure there were a few people late for work this morning. I sat for almost 5 minutes. You can just see the vertical reflective strips on the cars.

Since the weather cooled off, I try and walk at lunchtime. I might not walk today since it is forecasted to be in the mid-60's which is too hot for me in the full sunshine. Here is where I start my walk and head to the entrance. This road is a dead end.

Here is my view from the entrance back toward the office. Three lengths equals a mile. I try to make at least two laps. I will try to do three laps once it finally drops into the low 50's.

Quilting, baking, and cleaning up the mess

I will start out with reporting on my quilting progress. I am now 9% done with quilting the log cabin quilt. I had no time on Sunday to quilt. Since the square footage of this quilt is 75 SF, 9% doesn't sound like much, but when I say I am 7.36 SF done to me that sounds like a lot more. LOL!

I felt like I spent half my weekend in the kitchen. I made the cake layers Saturday late afternoon. I had a hard time sleeping that night because the house smelled so good. Sunday morning, I was up at 6 and started making the frosting for the cake. You can't believe how much butter and powdered sugar was in that frosting! Along with that I added 2 1/3 cups of crushed Oreo cookies. The cake was a big hit. It was so rich I had to slice the cake in very small pieces. My frosting turned out a bit darker than the picture in the magazine; I must have mixed mine too much.

I had gone to JoAnn's Saturday morning to get a zipper for one of my hoodies and I had a bunch of coupons. I also needed a bigger decorative icing tip and saw these cases for tips. It is a pain having to dig around in the utensil drawer to find my tips so with a 50% off coupon the tip case came home with me.

I needed to use up the shredded zucchini I had in the fridge so I tried out a new recipe for zucchini muffins. Someone had given me a bag of walnuts which I needed walnuts for these. I made these muffins after I had iced the cake.  Geeze, more dishes and cleaning up to do!

Then I put a batch of chili in the crock pot (more cleaning up!), packed the car and headed to the birthday celebration. We watched the Browns lose and then I headed home. I had to get my activity minutes and exercise minutes in when I got home so that pretty much shot the rest of the weekend.

I couldn't help myself

Last evening consisted of mowing the front yard, tying up my zebra grass again - one of the ties had broken, loading up the trash bin with deck boards, watering that patch of grass seedlings, doing a load of laundry, riding my indoor bike for 40 minutes, and using two bobbins of thread quilting on the log cabin quilt. I could not help myself and had to figure out how much I quilting I have done. It stands at 4%! LOL!!

I haven't bought much fabric this year, but Hancock's of Paducah was having a sale so I took a look. I found two pieces of Timeless Treasure fabric with skulls on them that will be perfect for the back of those Harley raffle quilts I make every year! Good fabric at $4.99 a yard - can't beat that with a stick!

This weekend my plan is to quilt on the log cabin quilt, get outside and putter around the yard a bit, and bake a birthday cake. This is the cake I plan on making. It is a cookies and cream brownie cake. I will show you on Monday how mine turned out.

Have a great weekend!

A bit more done

Get ready for the log cabin quilt pictures for the rest of the month. I haven't bothered to figure out the percentage done yet; maybe Monday I will have enough quilted. I have been so tired lately I haven't had much energy to do much. Meanwhile, I got a little bit more quilted.

Small start and another project

I spent some time last evening cleaning and oiling my machine to get ready to quilt the log cabin quilt. I got a small start. This one is going to take a while to quilt. I would be happy to get it done by the end of the month.

My nephew dropped off a project for me. I need to make covers out of a furry fabric for bungee cords. He and his dad made a new road case for his guitars, and he needs to bungee cord the bodies of the guitars, so they don't bang into each other during transport.  The furry covers will protect the bodies from getting scratched since the bungee cords are kind of rough.  That is a fancy road case with the lights!

Now I'm ready to quilt

I took another look at the wrinkly border and decided that with my 44 years of quilting, sewing, and alteration experience since I made this quilt top,  I would be able to fix this. I unpinned the pin basting, ripped the seam out, laid it down and smoothed the border fabric, taped the seam down, flipped the right sides together, and resewed the seam. Here is the before and after.

I would call that a success! Here you can see how much longer the border ended up. I would have thought there was more fabric than that causing the wrinkle issue.

Since this was the second larger quilt I had made, I thought I would show you the first large quilt I ever made. It took me six years to hand quilt it and in that time I remember I made a bunch of baby quilts too. The baby quilts were machine quilted very simply. The log cabin and the thousand pyramid quilts were made before there were rotary cutters so all those triangles with cut with a pair of scissors using a cardboard template. How did we ever have the patience to make quilts? LOL!!

I saw a picture of a thousand pyramid quilt in this magazine we got in at work which sent me off on my journey to become a quiltmaker.

Yes, I still have that magazine after all these years.

18th Finish for 2022

It was a busy, busy weekend and I got some stuff done! On Saturday, I finished the vintage 4 patch quilt! After washing it measured 64" x 72". I did overdye it Sunday morning in a brown dye to help tone down the section I added and the borders.

I did go and do a bit of shopping on Saturday. I need three 8" cake pans for a birthday cake I need to make. I only had two 8" round cake pans, but I bought three since they were a bit heavier than what I had and I wanted all the layers to bake the same. I needed a bigger offset spatula and that was on sale. I had to get the gray skull spatula just because and I found some Texas sized muffin papers that are hard to find. I double up the coupons by using the ones for 40% off and 25% off my entire order.

I did work on my denim jacket a bit. I need to repair the lining which I should have done before it got so bad. I made a pattern for the piece I needed to replace at the neck. I then machine sewed it on the jacket.

While the lining was open at the neck area, I decided I needed to fix the inside pocket first. It took a couple hours, but the pocket area all fixed. There is handwork that will be needed to repair the lining at the neck area. Here is the before and after

I then made some chocolate zucchini muffins.

I then worked on my oldest quilt top that I pieced. I made this top in 1977/1978 so it is  44-45 years old. It is a scrappy barn raising log cabin. I started quilting in 1975 and didn't have a scrap pile like I do now. I worked at a JC Penny's store and we sold fabric. I would buy 1/8 or 1/4 yard pieces of every print we had, because I thought all quilts were scrappy since that is all I had seen in a magazine we had at work. I knew nothing about quilts when I started.  The top measures 94" x 115". It is a good thing I have this 8' x8' table!  Here I have it partially pin basted.

As you can see the table is not big enough for this quilt. I pin basted as much as I could. Then I dropped down the leaf so I could reach more of the quilt to pin baste.

I then pulled unpinned basted part of the quilt up on table, smoothed it out, and got it pin basted.

This quilt was the second large quilt I had made and back then I didn't have a large table to work on. I remember eventually I used a door propped up on saw horses as a working table. Anyway, the border at one end of the quilt is a bit full so there will be some working in of the fullness when I quilt this. I might look at this again and see if taking it apart and resewing it would help because it is pretty bad.