Sunday, August 30, 2020

True to my plan I worked on my daily blocks today. This block, as well as one a day or two ago, appealed to me and made me want to get back to them. Bigger blocks, a lot of pieces and, often, some mistakes and I didn’t get nearly as many done today as I thought I could. But that’s okay, I’ll keep going as the days go by.

I’m done for the day now except for a bit of hand stitching tonight. But first I’ll get some supper and make a Johnny Cake.

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Yesterday I made a deal with myself – work on the appliqué for a day and then spend Saturday on some daily blocks.

The appliqué work yesterday had a few issues but by the end of the day I had six of the ten blocks finished. It was too close to being done for me to put them all away so I finished them off this morning. But since this is my August UFO I decided to stitch the blocks together before I put it away. And then I decided to attach the two rows to the other rows of the project. So, at the end of the day I’ve made good progress on my UFO and put it away for another day (probably the next time it ends up on a UFO list).

We got the final setting yesterday for the mystery quilt so I think I’ll get it laid out this afternoon. I like the layout but I don’t think I’m going to like the colours I picked. Too late now to do anything about it though. It is very large and it barely fits on my design board (the floor).

Tomorrow, I promise, I’m going to get at a daily block or two.

Friday, August 28, 2020

To keep myself accountable I’m reporting that I have indeed started the appliqué on my quilt. The first couple of blocks went very well but this latest one has been giving me problems.

I bought a new type of sewing needle that was supposed to go through the fusible interfacing without gumming up the needle. That didn’t work as promised.

In order to have the colours I wanted to use I had to switch to some spools of much finer thread and changed to an embroidery needle in the machine in the hopes it would stop the fraying. That worked reasonably well.

Now my machine is skipping stitches with the zig zag and I think it is entirely due to the gumming up of the needle. I have one more small bit to do in the colour I have loaded and then I may go back to a heavier thread and a “regular” sewing machine needle.

I can’t seem to win but I’m not giving up.

Thursday, August 27, 2020

It is nearing the end of the month and I’ve done very little to move forward on my August UFO Challenge. I’ve been avoiding it and I know why.

The blocks that I’m doing involve appliqué – a lot of appliqué. And I don’t like doing appliqué. I use a product that makes it easy to cut out a design and attach it to the fabric but from that point on it is pure torture for me.

What machine should I use? How many different kinds and colours of thread do I need? What kind of stitch will I use. When I appliqué on cards I do the appliqué stitching as part of the quilting but this is a quilt and that method won’t work as well on a larger piece.

So I’ve avoided it – until today. I set out all the blocks and I even did a very little bit of stitching but then it was time for lunch.

While I had lunch I started to rewatch the Shetland series that correspond to the last two books I’ve read. And here it is supper time and no more stitching has been done; I didn’t waste my time entirely though as I did some knitting.

Turns out the first episode followed very closely to the book – with the exception that Perez’s wife was hardly mentioned (in the book this is where she was murdered) and the murderer was a completely different person with a very different motive.

Except for one image in the second book I couldn’t remember the story at all. Not surprising as when I watched the episodes on Netflix not only was the murderer a surprise but pretty much the entire story was changed.

Now back to that appliqué – maybe tomorrow!