Wednesday, January 14, 2015

January Doings

Today has a rather fun date-signature of 1/14/14, and I bothered to notice it. --EEEEK! I'm only a year off, LOL! Ahh, well, tomorrow will be 1/15/15, right?

However, probably the numbers that are much more significant in my life right now are the -11°F below zero that we are registering on my outdoor thermometer.


Yikes, what a time for our elderly oil burning furnace to turn grumpy! Our furnace repairman has promised to come by Friday afternoon to service it. In the meantime, we do have heat, for which I am most grateful. We also get occasional spurts of awful smelling fumes, which are horrid.


Matthew and Felix did a great job trying to do snow removal from Monday's storm. That allowed me to get out of the house on Tuesday. Although I was a bit late for The Sunshine Quilting Club in Alton, New Hampshire, I did go to it. Sue was wrestling with installing a new needle after hers broke.


Those are stacks and stacks of prepared and pinned 4-Patches that she was sewing.


Finally, we were able to find the place in the Singer manual where it said to put the needle in with the flat side towards the back of the machine!  Then it sewed beautifully for her.
The snow and cold made me lazy about loading my Singer Featherweight, so I was happy to just stab a few hand sewn seams of my Birds-In-The-Air block for The Farmer's Wife quilt.


When I got home, I was well enough ready for some faster progress, LOL! Some Civil War scraps had been sent to me by my very dear friend and benefactor, Ila. They became more Sawtooth Stars.


I expected to make an identical pair by recreating one like this one, but I ran out of the corner background fabric. If you'd like the link to Barbara Brackman's Civil War sew along, the link is here.


That's the inherent beauty of working scrappy, if you run out of something, you can just substitute a similar value piece or pieces. There's no angst!


These two will "read" as the same. Why I like to do them in pairs? I really cannot say, but it does please me.


Today is also OBW, or "On-track-with Bonnie Wednesday from over on the Quiltville chat group.
In spite of evil smelling furnace fumes, I did make some more progress on the Double Diamond units from Step 2 for the Grand Illusion Mystery quilt.


They go slowly because I am making the bonus HST's from both the pink and the black flippy corners.


These blocks are spectacular!


After brunch, I'll be sewing more of the blocks together.

Happy sewing!







5 comments:

cityquilter grace said...

smelly furnace? ewwwww, hope all gets sorted out soon....my wednesday blocks are done as well and your GIMQ is gorgeous! how many more blocks?

Janet O. said...

Oh, yum, love the colors in those stars!
Hope you get those smelly fumes stopped soon. That can't be good!

Feathers in my Nest said...

Hope he's able to fix your furnace...your stars are beautiful..yes, soo cold.

Beth in MN said...

Your block for GI looks fabulous. I intend to start doing some serious cutting out of GI so that I can take it on retreat. Your little hand sewn Birds-in-the-Air blocks are going to be adorable. Isn't amazing what we can how things work when we read the manual? LOL
Hugs

Rosa Nelson said...

Those quilts look great, despite coming from old scraps. Goes to show that you can’t just throw stuff away that can still be used for another project. Anyway, it can really be difficult to get by with that kind of temperature. And in your case, it’s much harder due to your grumpy furnace. I hope the problem was fixed soon after, so you wouldn’t have to do your quilting while suffering through smelly furnace fumes. Thanks for sharing this with us. All the best!


Rosa Nelson @ HVAC Philadelphia

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