Loving My New Toy!

 Now that we've mostly finished seting up Jeff's home office, I've gotten the opportunity to spend a few days playing with my new toy, a HandiQuilter Long Arm. I am loving it. OK, the learning curve is pretty steep, but I have mostly learned the basics and can do a decent edge-to-edge quilting project.

Yes, I'm going to be swimming in quilts soon, so I guess it's a good thing I started giving them away last year. 

The quilts I practiced on in the last 3 days.
I'm going to have to learn to love binding.

It will probably be quite a long time before I feel experienced enough to quilt my really fancy quilts, like the Snake River and Finger Lakes Log Cabin quilts. For now, I am just playing with quicky scrap quilts until I can learn how to use the machine well enough to feel confident I won't mess something up.

If you have an interest in my continuing quilt endeavors, I blog about them at my crafting blog.

Uplift Desk Assembled

The inexpensive maple table worked great for Jeff's Uplift Desk. It took us an hour or so this afternoon to get it assembled.

I've pulled our Ergotron Monitor Arms out of the storage space, but we're missing the attachment screws for the back of the monitors so I've ordered some. They'll probably arrive before Monday.

This desk should help Jeff work more comfortably and now that he is sorted, I feel like I can go disappear into my quilting studio and play with my new toy.

Quick Desktop Project

In January we ordered Jeff an Uplift Desk frame, but the solid wood tops were crazy expensive; like $550-1000 expensive. I couldn't bring myself to spend that much when we have a garage full of wood and some pretty decent tools. But⏤as is so typical for us⏤neither of us had enough motivation to drive the process so the boxes just sat. 

After a bit of looking around for more affordable options, I had an idea. I would look for a beat-up table on craigslist or FB marketplace and we would simply take it apart and, if necessary, sand down the top and refinish it. I obviously preferred something that was solid wood and could be cut to size without exposing the cheap inner core of veneer pieces.

Finally, I found this table on the marketplace for $25. The wood is a bit more knotty than I prefer, but it was an amazing deal and was solid wood. 

It was slightly larger than would fit in Jeff's desk space so we needed to cut 3" off one edge. It took us far longer to clean up the table saw and space around it than the actual cutting. Then I got started on sanding right away and am nearly finished putting on a few coats of finish.

Hopefully, we'll finally be able to assemble the desk tomorrow but it takes 4 hours of drying time between coats of the finish, so we'll see if I can get enough in throughout the day today.

I'm still hoping once the weather gets nice outside we'll still work on something more decorative with lots of different woods for Jeff's desk, but this will do for now.