Sunday, April 26, 2020

I know a lot of quilters have been making masks. I didn’t jump on the bandwagon as the masks prevent you from spreading the virus but don’t necessarily protect you from the virus. However, if everyone you are around wears a mask it should help and it won’t do any harm.

I continued to read the posts (and there were a lot) about making masks. Batiks apparently are the best fabric because they are a very close weave. The masks can be attached to your face using either an elastic around your ears or tied behind your head. I watched some tutorials but I still didn’t think I would make any for us.

But the latest word is that masks are recommended in a few situations. Passengers on the inland ferries are being told to mask up (that doesn’t apply to any of our ferries apparently). Transit passengers are also being encouraged to wear a mask.

Since Christy is travelling to and from work on the bus and train I asked if she would like me to make her some masks. She said yes so I looked at a few more tutorials and decided on one that I thought would be easy enough for me to manage. The masks are single use (meaning they need to be washed after a single wearing) so for five days a week, one for leaving and one for coming home, I figured I’d need ten.

Six are now finished and I’ll carry on for the rest of the afternoon. I’m running out of elastic so the final few may have to have ties. They don’t take long to make but they take me more than the ten minutes promised in the tutorial.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

From the moment I got up today it has felt like Sunday. I’m really glad it isn’t though as it gives me one extra day to catch up on the things I wanted to finish during the week.

My week is scheduled with a different project every day; I tend to get bored if I have only one thing on the go. But this week my projects were particularly backed up and overdue.

This is my small design board; it is where I lay out blocks that I’m working on and it’s where I keep track of my leaders and enders – which will eventually become a project.

Those small bits in the bottom right are my half-square triangles that are set up to be sewn into pinwheels. Generally that is the only leader and ender I have. But I still hadn’t finished my clue from the mystery quilt from last week so as I worked on other scheduled projects it moved into a leader and ender project. And those strips in the centre also became a leader and ender project when I started putting together the pieces for the mystery quilt; they are for my April UFO challenge project which is nearing completion.

I’m happy to report that my mystery quilt clue is done for the week, the UFO Challenge is ready for the sashing to be sewn to the blocks, and I’ll be back to those pinwheels again tomorrow.

We heard from the accountant regarding some things she needed to complete our income tax – all of it has to do with Pat’s taxes. I thought I was done with his accounting work but apparently not – I got a look at the paperwork today and it is going to be timely. I guess I need to schedule a computer day into my mix.

Friday, April 24, 2020

I don’t clean my sewing room very often. I clear off the surfaces and put away fabric and paper work on a fairly regular basis. I vacuum the floor to pick up all the threads and bits of fabric that have fallen from any number of spots where I sit. I even dust on occasion, but very seldom. Unless I’m moving furniture around I don’t clean in any of the corners.

We’ve had such lovely weather that I’ve had my window open the past few afternoons while I sew. On a couple of occasions I’ve had wasps make their way in through the window, even though I have curtains and dangling things hanging from the casing that should scare them away.

These are big wasps and I usually hear them buzzing when they get it. That’s when the hunt starts. I try to get them back to the window if they have managed to get further into the room. Then I use whatever I can find to shoo them back out the window. This usually work.

The wasp that got in yesterday was stubborn. I got onto it before it had left the window but I couldn’t get it to fly high enough on the window for me to shoo it out. I have a few things that have their home on the windowsill so the bottom of the window frame isn’t visible. I tried and tried but I couldn’t get the wasp out.

While I was working behind some of the things on the sill I scared out a spider. I tried to get rid of it but it scurried away too quickly; fortunately it wasn’t one of those big ones we see in the fall.

But that wasp was still buzzing around the bottom of the frame. I had decided that I was going to have to move everything off the sill when I realized the wasp had got caught in the spider web.

I decided not to wait and see what happened but today, the wasp is done but that spider is still loose somewhere up here. The moral of this story is I don’t need to clean my corners!

Thursday, April 23, 2020

My Covid-19 blocks come off my Quilter’s Block A Day Calendar. Depending on the size of the daily block it will sometimes take part of the morning or sometimes all morning. There are fabrics to pull and cut, piecing and trimming to do. Often there is appliqué that involves templates which need to be transferred from the calendar to card stock and then traced onto the back of the fabric. The appliqué may involve using pieces of steam-a-seam to attach the shape to the block.

Today’s block had all of that – plus! There were templates involved – a lot of small pieces – and I had to create the bias tape for all those ribbons. And after I had everything pinned to the background all of the ribbons had to be hand stitched.

It’s no wonder I didn’t get anything else done today – and I don’t even feel bad about it!