Weekend Work

What was the best Mother’s Day present?  That my husband got up with the kids and let me hide upstairs for much of the morning and sew.   In all honesty, actually, it turned out to be a lovely day.  Nice weather, played outside with happy kids. And, yes, some sewing.

I’m making a stacked coins quilt for my brother’s niece, and the requisite charm packs arrived in the mail on Friday.  (Summer Fun by Moda, my brother’s choice.) I started cutting and piecing the stacks on Friday night.

May I take a moment to pause and thank the quilter who taught me the joys of chain piecing?  Holy moly, what a life saver that was.  Before I learned that trick, I would have sewn and pressed each one of those blocks, one by one.  All 144 of them.  Instead, I zoomed through six at a time.

Anyways, I spent much of Friday and Saturday evening piecing the stacks. I threw all of the coins into a plastic bag and picked pretty randomly from it. I retained veto power, but mostly trusted the judgment of the bag.  When I was down to only about five left (per stack), I did take them out and sort them to make sure I didn’t end up with about 15 blues in a row, but otherwise it was random.

Got the sashing on last night, and today I embroidered the new baby’s birthdate (french knots in red thread).  I’m pushing to finish as quickly as I can, in part because I know my brother is kind of chomping at the bit, in part because I have plenty of other projects on my to-do list, and also because my sewing time will be cut into this week with visitors and other plans.  Not a bad thing, to have a life outside of my sewing machine, but still…