That was intense

I've worked some long days in my time. There's a huge difference between sitting at a desk for long hours and sewing for long hours. I'll take sewing anytime over a desk job!

Of course, I'm leaving today for the weekend sewing events in Earlton and North Bay and of course, there's a quilt that has to be sent to a magazine. Those deadlines often fall like that! Note to self - get better organized!

Anyway, when I started yesterday morning early - I had 12 of 18 blocks of one sort made and I hadn't even cut the remaining 17 blocks. I opened up my audiobook and quickly got to work. I almost had all of the blocks sewn together by lunchtime. Yes - I can focus when I want to. I barely stopped for a break, I had no interruptions and I seriously think my main focus was to listen to the audiobook and oh, by the way, I made a quilt while I was doing that!

After a quick but decent lunch break, it was back to the sewing machine. I had two borders to sew on and to make the backing.

I had a wee bit of a SNAFU with this quilt. It would appear that I wrote down the finished size as 55" by 73". Yet, I had 35 blocks in the quilt and the blocks were 12". So if you do the math, you can see that something was off. I think the blocks were "designed" as a 9-inch block, but that didn't work for the two different blocks in the quilt. They needed to be 12". Anyway, when it came time to make the backing, I was short a little bit. I dug into my stash and found the EXACT amount needed. That took a little bit of time to get sorted out. It was tight to quilt, but I had about 2 inches on each side.

The quilt measures 70" by 95" - "slightly" larger than it's supposed to be. Oh!  The quilt was loaded and was ready to start quilting by 4 PM. All I can say is thank goodness that I have that computer for the long arm - I'd be sunk without it. And it performed beautifully.

The binding was made and it's now half on the quilt. As I was sewing the binding on, I realized that I still have to deal with a sleeve for the quilt!

I'm in good shape as far as that quilt goes.

I trimmed that other large quilt that I had quilted earlier in the week and I think I'm going to need to empty the scrap cutting basket. It's a tad overflowing.

The scrap bucket on the cutting table

Thankfully, I have a couple of pillowcases that I picked up last week. This is going to have to wait until I'm back. I won't have time this morning to deal with it.

Pillowcases to make cat mats from

Has anyone noticed that everything you buy in a thrift store has this very strong peculiar odor? Why is that and what is it? It must be industrial detergent that they wash everything in?  I don't know, but it's pretty strong.

I'm in the process of finishing packing samples for the classes. That shouldn't take too long and once I get that sleeve dealt with, I'll be out of here. It sounds like the weather is going to cooperate so that's a good thing.

I came across this great article on creativity. Check it out. Bottom line - creativity is NOT just for the arts and crafts world. I've been saying that all along!

Don't forget that today is the last day of my blog posts on QUILTsocial. Some great stuff about the technology in today's machines and some embroidery. I love it!!!

On that note, I'm out of here. I've got a few things to tidy up before I leave and it's going to be a long drive so I want to be out of here at noon!

Have a super day!!!

Ciao!!!