The Sunbonnet Sue Quilt is Done

I finished sewing down the binding last evening:

I am so, so happy with how this turned out. I will pack it carefully this afternoon and get it ready to ship tomorrow. I am hoping to get the binding finished on the first of the baby quilts tonight so I can send that one off tomorrow, too.

The keyhole top is ready to drop off at the quilt store:

This is the New Look 6555 pattern, but made a size smaller than the first version. This one fits me much better. The fabric just came in to the store. Sue, who does the ordering, needed to round out an order with one of the fabric manufacturers, so she added a couple of bolts of woven rayon. I snagged three yards of this one when I was there last week. This class is scheduled for the first Friday in May.

[My sewing studio could benefit from a good-quality clothing steamer. We have Amazon reward points waiting to be used and I just need to decide which steamer to order.]

I used both the sewing machine and the serger to assemble this. The Janome was giving me tension issues, which was unusual. That machine is not temperamental at all. After some consideration, I changed the brand of thread—I was using black for the topstitching around the neck binding—and that solved the problem. Black thread is the most prone to being damaged or uneven because it has to be processed more harshly. Black yarn can have similar problems. I’ve run into tension problems with black thread on both my serger and my sewing machine.

Whew. I have had a productive couple of days. This feels like a good time to step back and reassess.

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When I went out to do chicken chores yesterday afternoon, the sun was shining and the snow was melting. I thought to myself, “Wow, it’s actually hot out here,” and then I looked at the thermometer, which read 35 degrees. Hahahaha. Mid-30s does feel like a heat wave after a few days of -12F.

Reports are that the farm store is selling out of chicks as fast as they arrive. Sigh. I would rather not incubate my own, but that is looking more and more likely.

Having exhausted all the mountaineering disaster videos, I was looking for something interesting to watch while I finished the quilt binding. I found the YouTube channel of a young Swedish woman named Elin Abrahamsson. She makes historical clothing. I don’t think she has uploaded any videos recently—the last one appears to be from seven months ago—but I watched several of them and enjoyed them very much. She covers the historical aspects as well as the technical sewing ones. The video where she dyed fabric using woad she grew in her garden was wonderful. Woad gives a dye similar to indigo and was grown in cooler climates. I can’t grow it here, though, because it’s a noxious weed in Montana.