Saturday, April 24, 2021

I wasn’t able to finish my cards last night. It turns out I can knit and watch subtitles but I can’t sew and watch them. I finished off a scarf and thought my knitting basket was empty but when I looked today I see that I have enough in there for another scarf and a hat. I was looking forward to finding a new project but I’ll wait until these two things are finished.

I had to (emphasis on had to) go out to the quilt shop this morning. They have been collecting money for a farewell gift for one of our quilters and I’m responsible for creating the gift certificate and transferring the money to the quilt shop in Castlegar. I’ve been working on the gift certificate and once I knew the amount I was able to get it sent to Staples for printing. In cases like this I really miss having a colour printer. But I had quite a few quilting pages that were waiting to be printed so I sent them along too. I’m way behind in keeping up with my project book but maybe this will get me back into it.

I finished off the morning by stitching the binding on the cards. They will be ready for the mail next week or, in some cases, the following week. I decided for the rest of the day I would do some sorting out and tidying up in my sewing room. I got about half-way around but now that I’m at the cutting table I have more than a day’s worth of fabrics to sort out, trim up for scraps and put away in various bins and cupboards.

It looks like I’ll be at it most of the day tomorrow.

Friday, April 23, 2021

I thought I might have a short day in the sewing room but it hasn’t worked out that way. I was working on cards again; getting the quilting done on the five of them was quite quick.

I usually do an envelope backing on the cards but I decided after my last batch that I would go back to putting a binding on the cards. The envelope is a bit faster but the quilting is more difficult when it has to be done after the card is more or less finished. And I haven’t been terribly happy with the look of them – it is harder to keep the pattern centred.

I was part of a Zoom meeting recently and the presenter was making small landscape cards. She used various textured yarns around the edges rather than putting on a binding. I wanted to try it but I used all my textured yarns in my recent scarves and afghan. So I wondered if ribbon would work.

I found a wide enough ribbon but I didn’t get very far before deciding it wasn’t going to work. The ribbon wasn’t soft enough to do a good corner and I felt like even if I had the ribbon on the front and back the unfinished edge of the card would show through the top, bottom and sides. The ribbon wasn’t wide enough to do an extra seam to close those edges all the way around. Lace might be easier to work with but I think I’d have the same issue with the unfinished edge showing unless it was a wide lace. I may experiment with the idea another time but for now I want to get these cards done.

I still have three cards to stitch the binding on and there will be lots of hand stitching but I have all evening.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

I spent all morning in the sewing room working on cards. I have one more left to finish in this particular batch. They will all need to be quilted right away so they can go into the mail. One of the ones I worked on yesterday and finished today needs some adjustment; I hope I can fix it without starting over.

While I was sewing I kept looking for excuses why I shouldn’t go out to work in the yard this afternoon. Sadly I didn’t come up with a good one and since it is Earth Day it seemed appropriate to be digging in it. I’m about to admit defeat on one of the beds. The ground cover (Snow on the Mountain) and the Daisies have pretty much taken over everything. I managed to find the three hostas that we knew were there but unless this weeding perks them up they aren’t doing very well. I think they should be moved and then I can let the other plants go wild.

For the rest of the afternoon I’ll continue to work on my cards. We’re having dinner from one of our Indian restaurants tonight; we haven’t ordered much from them but they have a special vegetarian dinner tonight in honour of the day.

Wednesday, April 21, 2021

I’m often confused about one thing or another but I’m having a hard time remembering that today is Wednesday and not Monday. I think there are two reasons for this particular confusion. Coming home from Texada on a Tuesday rather than our usual Sunday evening (when our weeks were much busier than they are now) makes me think today must be Monday. And garbage day was Monday from February until Easter and it has only recently switched to Wednesday. I put it out this morning because I got a notification in my e-mail but I never really gave any thought to what day it was.

I had to get the Sunday Song Circle video posted to the Hall’s Facebook page this morning. I’ve done it once before so I wasn’t anticipating any problems. I tried it three times using Safari as my browser but when that wasn’t working I switched to Chrome where I tried it twice. When I still had no result I e-mail one of our younger Board members for help. Before he got back to me I received a notification from Facebook that my video had posted. Then I got another one, and another one until all five videos had posted. I quickly removed the duplicates. I remember now that last time I did the post I read somewhere that I’d get a notification but of course I’d forgotten that by today. Tyler did get back to me and told me that I probably did it correctly and it just takes Facebook a bit of time to get it loaded.

I’ve been working on cards the rest of the day. There are five in this particular group that I’m working on; I have two done and one more cut out.

The first one had 40 pieces in a 6.5″ top so you know the pieces were small. I used the precise piecing method that I had the refresher class on last week. Had I not done that I expect I would have thrown the whole thing out. It isn’t perfect but it is a pretty good job.

The second one involved appliqué as well as some embroidery. I tried a different method of machine appliqué today. Rather than use a product to stick the pieces onto the background before appliquéing I used glue (an idea that also came from the piecing class). I’ve avoided embroidery wherever I can but I decided to give it a try today. After watching a YouTube video I realized I’ve been doing the stem stitch all wrong up until now and the embroidery today worked out well.