Monday, April 27, 2020

Life in the crayon box


Life is always unpredictable.  Who knew when I wrote my last post 6 weeks ago that we'd be where we are now.  Certainly not me. As you might imagine, when this all started I wrote a list of house projects to work on and of course most of them are still on the list.  They'll get done, in time.

Homeschooling has been the biggest time suck of all.  DD's teacher started the remote learning by assigning a week's worth of work every single day.  Thankfully that problem was dealt with around the beginning of week 3 but it took tons of extra time to get the missed assignments caught up.

Like hundreds of other quilters around the country, I've been making masks.  I started making the rectangular type but I've found that I much prefer the style shown on the right.  They do take  a little more time to cut out the pieces but the fit is so much better.  FYI....in case you aren't aware, Candice West of Barn Catz Studio and Deborah Levy Art teamed up and created a template for this style.  They are really inexpensive and make the process go that much quicker.  If you are making the contour style and don't have a set of the templates, head on over to order yours today.
 I've been keeping pretty busy with lots of other activities too like spearheading and collecting over 350 cards made by local Girl Scout troops for one of the senior residences.
 I made more masks.
 I painted dear daughter's room.  She's been wanting an update for a while and this was as good as a time as any to get it done.  We've added 3 new pieces of furniture and are now waiting on a few accessories to arrive to finish it.  I'll share the before and after pictures once it's all done.
 At the end of last week I made the final blocks needed for the last pieced border for my Choose Your Own Adventure Quilt from Moda's summer 2018 quilt along.  I'll start piecing the blocks together this week, depending on how my back feels.  With all the mask making I've been having problems with my upper back, between my shoulder blades, so sewing time is carefully limited.
 I helped dear daughter finish her Giant Paper Dahlia which was an activity for the Girl Scout Flowers badge that my troop is working on.
 I made even more masks, these are kids size for a local shelter's day care program.  I haven't taken pictures of all the masks I've made but I've completed 130 so far.  If my back wasn't being such a pain (literally) I would have completed more. Last fall I received a lot of fabric from a fellow Girl Scout leader who's mom passed away last year and that's what I've been utilizing for the masks.  I can't think of a more perfect way to honor her mother than by using her fabric to do good.
Of course I'm also finding ways to keep the girls in my troop engaged during this time and we've started weekly Zoom meetings to check in, chat, play games and have some good laughs, which we all certainly can use right now.  Our cookie season is on hold as we were due to pick up our initial order the weekend after this all began.  We will have a much briefer cookie season at some point as they are sitting in the warehouse and they do have to get delivered and sold, but right now no one knows when that time will come.  

I still have some customer quilts which were completed in recent months to share and I have a few new ones here to get quilted so stay tuned.