Works in Progress

I am always working on several projects at once, and it sometimes seems like madness, but I swear it's not.  I am in the strange and wonderful place where I do the same thing for work that I do for fun and mental health, so I have to be pretty attentive to divide my time between client work and my own projects.  I generally have 4 active projects going at once.  The first two categories are client and personal handwork, which includes hand piecing, hand quilting, applique, knitting, spinning, crocheting, cross stitch and embroidery. The last two are client and personal machine work, which is general sewing like face masks, plus quilt piecing, binding and long arm quilting.  I have to divide my day and try to not get sidetracked by shiny things so I can hit each category every day. 

Several years ago I was working and teaching at a quilt shop and I met a woman who was born with all the organizational skills that I was born without.  We are complete and total opposites, in every way, so obviously, we became very good friends. I talk her through some more fluid, hippy, touchy feely things and she became my personal Time Management Wizard Life Coach. She is MAGIC when it comes to explaining scheduling.  She did try to make me go completely electronic and get rid of my sticky notes and old envelope lists (GASP) but that didn't work out so well.  ANYWAY, she showed me how to block out chunks of time (probably pretty obvious to the rest of the world) and designate those chuncks to specific actions, instead of being all loosey goosey.  She explained that perhaps I should keep a spread sheet of jobs on my laptop with all the pertinent info included instead of just piling them in the corner with random jotted notes and maybe, MAYBE a contact phone number. I have come a long way, even if I did convert her spread sheet into a foam board with color coded sticky notes and a 3 ring binder.  What can I say, I'm a tactile person who loves office supplies.

So, all that being said, I set reminders on Alexa to tell me what I should be doing and when to move on.   I alternate activities to keep things interesting and also to boost my productivity.  I start out with about an hour of personal machine sewing.  I have found that if I save it for the end of the day, I never get to it so I do it first thing.  Right now, I am quilting this Halloween quilt.  It's called HocusPocusville and the pattern is by Meg Hawkey of Crabappple Hill Studios.  I did the embroidery in starts and stops, and all told it took me about 3 years.  After it was all pieced together, it sat in my pile of tops for about another 3 years.  I had hoped to get it finished by Halloween, but I don't think that's going to happen. I need to expand my free motion skills for the sky portions and come back to it.  I also need the long arm for client quilts on deadlines, so I will finish quilting the center portion and take it off the machine to be revisited later. 

Next on the list is Client Hand Work, again, about an hour.  Another friend and I have stayed connected this year by setting aside the hour from 1pm to 2pm to watch 1 episode of something, virtually together.  We watch our stories.  We start at the same time and text about the episode as we're watching.  We choose things we have watched before, because we're adults and do what we want.  We have been watching Battlestar Galactica, but had to take a brief foray to Dexter because the SyFy app moved BSG to a different platform that I don't have, so I had to order a dvd copy of season 4.5  to watch the last half of the last season.  But now we're a third of the way through the Trinity Killer season of Dexter and are committed to finishing it before heading back to space.  I do hand work while I'm watching, mainly so I don't feel guilty about the time. Currently, I am working on these English Paper Pieced hexagon snowflakes. A client started the quilt and then decided that she would be 874 years old before she got it finished, so I piece a couple of snowflakes a month for her.  

Then I move to client machine work.  I set aside about 3 hours a day for that.  Time to turn the Shudder TV app on and put the pedal to the metal.  This is what I'm working on now.  My client has had these family album blocks that were appliqued and embroidered in the late 70s or so.  I am finishing them into a quilt.  So far, I've trimmed/sized them and have started adding sashing and cornerstones.  I started out my quilting business by doing vintage quilt repair, and I really like to use vintage fabric for repairs whenever possible, so whenever anyone had any old fabric they wanted to be shed of, I took it.  I also bought bags of vintage fabric at yard sales and thrift stores.  I happen to have a large tub dedicated to fabric from the 60s and 70s and shockingly, I found a piece of yardage among the scraps that works perfectly as the cornerstones and the border.  Thanks to the Quilting Gods, there is enough.  I did purchase the sashing fabric, just a solid taupe that works beautifully with the blocks.

 

Then it's time to walk the dog, visit the garden, fold laundry, make supper and all those other evening chores.  I close down the sewing room and TRY to get everything organized for the next day's work.  After supper is done, and the barn critters are put to bed, it's time for my own personal handwork.  My favorite part of the day.  This is what is in my hands right now.  It's a Halloween cross stitch stitch along (SAL) by Alyssa Westhoek of Stitchonomy.  She released the frame pattern ahead of time so SUPPOSEDLY you could get the frame all stitched out and ready before Oct 1st (Narrator: she did NOT get the frame stitched and ready).  Then, every afternoon during the month of October, she releases a tiny pattern to stitch into the frame. Since I was NOT on the ball at all, I had to order some floss I was missing for the project, after the official start of the project, so now that it's arrived (yesterday) I am back tracking and filling in the spots I had to skip.  It's a super fun project, since I'm such a Halloween nerd.  Once I get caught back up, it won't take up my whole evening, so I'll also have a side project to finish out my day.  Most likely gift stuff.  It's getting to be that time of year.

I am adding an In Progress page to my website that will have more details on all the projects I'm working on. Patterns, techniques, and problem solving specifics, plus more photos so y'all can see what I'm up to.  And finished products, of course.  It is In Progress right now (hahaha....see what I did there?), but it should be active soon and I will definitely tell you when that happens. 

Show me some pictures of your projects, whatever they may be!

Y'all stay healthy and wear those masks!

D