WIP: Back in the Saddle

After a month of sleeping at my own apartment for a grand total of one night, I finally returned this past Saturday, and am enjoying having a place to myself again (though probably not as much as my cat is enjoying having an other-cat-free dwelling!) A couple weeks visiting the boyfriend and a couple weeks at my mother's house trying to help her move, and here I am, almost in August, feeling like I've done nothing this summer! But such is the nature of summers.

My mom's move was an immense project--she and my dad bought that house in 1979, so I'm one of the few people I know who didn't move at least once during their growing-up years. My great-grandfather built the house in 1921, so even though it is almost 100 years old, it has had only two owners! So it's been an emotional move--not to mention a difficult one in the physical sense, since houses tend to accumulate a lot of things in 34 years. :) It is really strange to see the house emptied out. Luckily, she is only moving one block away--to the house my grandparents built. I guess we are a family that prizes familiarity!

Last night I finally returned to the sewing machine for a bit. I've got a baby quilt I need to send to Arizona, since the baby was born, um, last week. (It's not like there's no warning on these baby things, yet I never seem to get them done in time...)

My first instinct was to name this quilt "Dirty Bubblegum" but I might have to rethink that one.

This is my first time using triangle paper. I think I like it, though I hate tearing off paper. Overall though, I do think it streamlines the process. I'll evaluate fully once I get them all done.

I've also started cutting for a quilt that is going to be the best, most amazing quilt ever. I'm really excited!

Linking up with WIP Wednesday.


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Finish It Friday (Yes, really!)

I started this quilt last summer (see here, where my completely unwarranted optimism is hilarious in retrospect.) My problem is once I miss a deadline (like a wedding) my instinct is not to finish it as fast as possible, but to be like, "Oh well. It's already late." And so I end up finishing wedding quilts many months after the wedding. :)

The building in the background is the courthouse in my tiny hometown. I love it. A more skilled photographer could do more with that backdrop, but I was in a hurry. And my mom's arms were tired of holding up the quilt. :)

The recipient was visiting her family in Nebraska, and I got to go see her for her birthday. That spurred a hurry to finish. My best friend helped me baste it, as she is interested in learning to quilt. We accidentally pinned half of it to the carpet and had to re-baste. Rookie mistake. :) Anyway, at the recipient's birthday party, I found out she'd be in Grand Rapids the following week for business. Coincidentally, I also happened to be going to Grand Rapids the following week to visit my boyfriend. This bought me another week to work on the quilt.

And I finally finished it!!!

It's nearly Independence Day, so please enjoy how I went all 'Murica! with this photo, capturing a waving flag with my quilt.

We had lunch together and she loved her new quilt! Just in time for the hottest part of a midwestern summer, of course. ;)

 The backing is a Simon + Kabuki print (from the line "Nesting"--not bad for newlyweds, eh?) that I got for super cheap on eBay. I've never ordered fabric from eBay before, and it is a little scary since you don't have some of the assurances you have with other online retailers. And I admit that this did smell faintly of cigarette smoke (urgh) when I got it, but it wasn't overpowering and seemed to dissipate over the year (urgh) that I had it sitting around waiting to back the quilt.

 I was very nervous about quilting the stars. I thought I'd use the walking foot, but the idea of all of that turning and shoving the quilt through my machine's throat made me want to cry and throw things. So I marked it and FMQed it. SOOOO much easier. Seriously, it went very quickly and it turned out, if not perfectly, pretty darn good. I did do something very stupid, which was sew around the perimeter of the quilt way too early in the process. It meant that I had no room to ease fabric as I did some of the lengthwise quilting, and there was some bunching and puckers. Oops. Lesson learned.

 In other news that makes me feel productive and accomplished, I ground down and refinished my super-cloudy headlights myself and they look AMAZING.

One down, one to go. Or, before and after. 

I've had Sebring for 10 years, since I started college. He's 11 years, 151,000 miles young, and is still a champ!

Scary-competent. And try not to covet my socks too hard.

This is long already, but if you are a Google reader person you should switch over before July 1st but you already know this and if you want to use Bloglovin' the link is on the side of my blog etc etc. :)

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday, because I finally did, darn it!

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Almost Done!

I think I'm going to finally have a quilt finish soon! Next week, my friend who got married last September is going to be in the town my boyfriend lives in for business. Handily enough, I'm also going to be there next week! So the race is on for me to finish the quilt.

I cut so many things close with this quilt, that I wasn't surprised at how my binding ended up:

This is all the extra I had, and I didn't have any more of that fabric.

Living on the edge, it's what I do.

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WIP Wednesday: Earth Mother Quilt and an Apartment

Happy summer! It's actually been unseasonably cool here, but I'm really ok with that, because I know we'll get weeks and weeks of 95+ degree weather at some point, and frankly, I hate sweating and like saving money on air conditioning, so summer can just take its sweet time as far as I'm concerned!

Here's what I've been busy with:

Drove it all by myself for 1200+ miles. Good training for my future truck driving career.

Biggest takeaway? I have way, way, way too much stuff.

This is my real WIP lately.

 

Sigh.

My great mother came out a day after she finished teaching for the semester and helped me move back. So I owe her big time! Don't worry though, she's going to cash in on it. She's moving this summer too. From a house she and my dad bought in 1979. So that should be fun. :)

We had time for one quick sightseeing stop on the way. 

Incredibly, I also managed to finish a quilt top before I left New York. I wanted to get it done so I could photograph it with some lush greenery and pretty waterfalls, but true to form, I finished it, then failed to get any photos of it in gorgeous natural surroundings. So instead, it is photographed in my living room. Quality lives here, folks.

You may remember this quilt is for a friend who got married. Last September.

Sadly, the new place seems to be infested with a vug under the rug:

via

Linking up with WIP Wednesday!

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Blogger's Quilt Festival

If you regularly check in here, you have seen this quilt before, but it's my favorite so far and I wanted to have it done for the last Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I didn't. So, bear with yet another presentation of ye olde Partly Sunny Quilt!* If this is your first visit, thanks for stopping by, and I hope you like the quilt!

I made this for the wedding of one of my best friends last July. (Well, the wedding was in July...the quilt was finished in December. Oops. Explains a lot about the snow in the photos though, huh?)

I love this pattern (Chain Linked by Amy Smart) because it's very easy, yet has a great deal of visual impact. It's a fun way to showcase some favorite prints, and I could easily see myself using this pattern again.

Specs:

"Party Sunny" (pattern: Chain Linked by Amy Smart)

Finished size: 61.5" x 82.5"

Quilting: By me! I echoed the white "chains" 1/4" away from the edge.

First blogged here.

Check out the hundreds of other amazing quilts at the festival!

*So, the name is new! I'm trying to name my quilts more creatively than "gray and yellow quilt" or "hourglass quilt." The lame name syndrome needed to end!

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WIP Wednesday: May Flowers (sans Pilgrims)

Greetings all!

Things finally started to bloom here over the past weekend. Finally! It's so wonderful to see buds starting to open on trees--soon, there might be actual leaves! My family and friends in the midwest have had to wait extra long for spring this year, but this is pretty typical for central New York, sadly. But I guess it makes it all the sweeter when it finally does arrive! Snow is expected in Nebraska today or tomorrow, and I told my mom I'd only feel sorry for her if she got 4", because last April 26, that's how much I got here last year. She argues that the fact that it's May, even if it's only four days later, counts for at least a half-inch of pity per day. I'm not sold!

Anyway, it's lovely here. :) This week is supposed to be warm and sunny, so that ought to coax out the trees and flowers that are holding out.

Pictured: Not my house. (Former president's house at Cornell.)

Oh yeah, I finally got most of my quilt top put together! I think there are going to be some fancy borders on it though, and since I hate math, I've been avoiding it. :) I couldn't miss photographing something with the beautiful trees though!

I've realized that this month I really need to get some quilts put together, because it's so gorgeous here, and when I move at the end of the month, I'm going to lose all of those beautiful photo op spaces! Where I'm going, there are no waterfalls. :)

Happy May! I hope it's not snowing wherever you are! Linking up with WIP Wednesday. Pin It

"Stop Instagramming Your Perfect Life"

Warning! Somewhat self-indulgent non-sewing post ahead. You have been cautioned. :)

I read this article today, and thought I'd share it, since it seems to be something that crops up in the blogging community a lot, and especially on the heels of Heidi's post about fighting perfectionism. The internet is so great in that it connects us with people we'd never meet otherwise and gives us more inspiration than we know what to do with. I love the internet, I really do!

Yes, I love technology. But not as much as you, you see. But I still love technology. Always and Forever.

But I also know that it has an adverse effect on me a lot of the time. It is difficult to be 28 and stuck in a dead-end grad program with no transferable skills and little shot of finding a career that I actually give much of a flip about, while friends are at the point in their careers that they are starting to go somewhere. It is difficult to have just enough money to make ends meet while others are taking fun trips or buying houses. It is difficult to think that if things don't work out with this boyfriend, that really might have been the last shot and I'll end up alone and family-less, as my newsfeed parades an endless stream of wedding photos and baby pictures past my face and I begin a slow descent to cat ladydom.

While I love knowing what people are up to and the inherent nosiness I have is easily satisfied by Facebook, I don't think it makes me very happy. So why do I use it? How can I use it better and remove that totally unnecessary stress from my life?

This article, "Instagram's Envy Effect" by Shauna Niequist really made me confront these questions:

I’m not anti-technology or anti-Internet, certainly, but I do think it’s important for us to remind ourselves from time to time that watching other peoples’ post-worthy moments on Facebook is always going to yield a prettier version of life than the one you’re living right now. That’s how it works... 

Our envy buttons also get pushed because we rarely check Facebook when we’re having our own peak experiences. We check it when we’re bored and when we’re lonely, and it intensifies that boredom and loneliness... It makes sense, then, that anyone else’s fun or beauty or sparkle gets under our skin. It magnifies our own dissatisfaction with that moment. When you’re waiting for your coffee to brew, the majority of your friends probably aren’t doing anything any more special. 

But it only takes one friend at the Eiffel Tower to make you feel like a loser.

Preach it, sister.

I took this detour today because I think it's something that probably a lot of us can relate to (I mean, we all follow Camille Roskelley's blog, right? How do you not feel crappy about your living room or your hair after that?) Comparison can get one really, really down. And speaking for myself, I have a great deal of things to be thankful for: a good family, the support and love of an incredible group of friends, good health, the opportunity to spend a few years doing funded study at a great school (even if it makes me want to tear my hair out), a warm and safe place to live, plenty (too much? :) ) to eat, and to do it all in a country with many problems, but also many privileges. The problem is, it's so easy to let myself forget ALL of that, and focus on what I lack, and others have. It's petty, and also not so awesome psychologically.

And I don't think that it's bad to post photos of your adorable kid/trip to Switzerland/expertly cultivated and thriving all-organic garden/6-carat engagement ring. If you feel guilty about doing it, maybe it's worth reflecting on your motivation for posting them. But in general, I think this is less about what people choose to share, and more about how I choose to consume it.

While I don't have an action plan in place quite yet, it's been good for me to think about why I let selected images from someone else's life have so much power. I'll probably consider using Chrome Nanny (this is an awesome tool if you find yourself spending too much time on one site--and it's a free plug in!) to limit how much social media I'm ingesting. I can close browser tabs instead of leaving all 25 open at once for easy access (yes, I'm one of those people), forcing me to be more mindful of what I am choosing to open and look at. If these things are affecting my happiness and well-being, there is no reason to let them. I'd like to look at my life not through the lens of an Instagrammed Eiffel Tower, but through other, more meaningful lenses.

So there is my little foray into non-sewing psychology. :) I hope you'll forgive me, but from what I read, it seems like an article that might be thought-provoking for a lot of others, and I wanted to share it.

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