Halloween Sewing

Happy Halloween everyone. I hope you all found something fun to do. I miss pre-pandemic Halloweens. It's our favorite holiday and we enjoy having parties, when possible. Oh well. We can only hope next year will be better. Instead, we watched Hunt for Red October in honor of Sean Connery's passing.

After I finished making the backing for the train lap quilt in the morning, I thought about making a quick Halloween lap quilt, but then I shifted into finally working on my Harvest Gathering Quilt from my WOOFA list.

My feet are tired from spending half the day cutting out most of the pieces. If I am motivated to work on it again tomorrow, I should be able to finish cutting everything out in another hour or two.

It would be nice to finish another big project before the end of November.

Quick Train Lap Quilt

Today I finished up the Autumn Steam quilt flimsy for my father. The design isn't quite as nice as the original design offered by eQuilter, but that quilt is twin size and way too large for a lap quilt, which is the size I was shooting for.

I spent several days planning and psyching myself up to butcher down the panels so much, but I think it still turned out pretty decent. I'll piece the backing tomorrow. I'm going to use up the rest of the train track fabric along with a black train print, also from the Autumn Steam line of fabric.

Update on Saturday: Finished the backing. I used up the remaining train track fabric.

Sold Prineville House

We decided to sell our house in Prineville to the renters, so yesterday Jeff and I ventured to Prineville to move a load of our stuff from the workshop. We got almost everything in one trip. The house closes later this month, but we have until January to get all our stuff out. We're planning to return in the next few weeks, before the snow starts, to move the last load. 

Mason Bee Harvest

 Our friend Liesl came by this evening and helped us harvest our mason bee tubes. It was fascinating to see the process of unwrapping the tubes. There were quite a few pests that had invaded the tubes, but we still had a good number of cocoons for next year. We think we started with 75 cocoons this past spring and we ended up with 182 good ones for next year.

I'm hoping to make at least one more bee house for the front yard by next spring. We have so much scrap wood, we should be able to make at least one more.

Jeff installed the new shed step this weekend.

I finally finished sifting all our hardware and fasteners and the bins have moved out to the garage wall, at least temporarily until we build a better storage rack.

And we got nearly all the bulbs planted. There's just 10 more left. I'll likely get those done tomorrow.

Oct Friday Night Sew In

For this month's FNSI, I had planned to finish the overnight bag I started in August. I still need to finish sewing the lining.

But instead, I ended up spending most of the evening cleaning my sewing room. A couple months ago I started sifting the boxes that were stashed in my bedroom closet. I had boxes that moved here from California ten years ago and I'd never unpacked them. I finally did. I found quite a lot of stuff that belonged in my sewing room.

I've spent several hours this week trying to unearth my sewing room tables again. I thought I'd get the room cleaned by this evening, but there was still a pretty big pile of fabric stacked up and I spent probably three hours ironing and folding everything so I could put them up in my fabric stacks. My table is finally clean and I can work again.

It took so long, I barely got any sewing done. All I managed to finish was a new collar and leash set for Bailey. 

I also got everything ready to start a new project. This is actually not a UFO as I just bought the fabric to make a new train quilt for my father. This is a design offered by eQuilter and I know my father will really like it. Since these are mostly printed panels, it should go pretty quickly.

But I won't be starting tomorrow as I finally got my first box of 160 flower bulbs and I need to get started at planting them tomorrow. I hope it won't be raining all day.

Built Shed Steps

Jeff finally had time to work on our shed step project. These were built with pressure-treated plywood and 2x4s leftover from building our shed.

He built it much better than what I designed. The steps I designed probably would have fallen apart much more quickly because he would have been screwing it into the edge of plywood. He added blocking and screwed all the pieces into it. 

I am going to stain it with the green stain I used on the stools before we install it in front of the shed but I'd prefer to paint outside and the forecast is for rain until Thursday. I'll be hoping for some sun later this week so I can finish this project.

Hardware Sift

Our garage organization project continues. Today, my Harbor Freight parts storage boxes finally came. I wasn't too happy with Harbor Freight as I had to order them a second time and pay shipping twice, but I did finally manage to get them.

I spent several hours today sifting through the large crate of misc hardware and fasteners I set aside during my garage cleanup. This should make it much easier to find things for future projects,. I've got four more bins that I haven't opened yet, so we have some room to grow.