Sew I See!

Trying to stay "in the groove" with this craft blog!  The key does seem to be posting regularly, even if there's nothing momentous to report.   You may have noticed the font size on this blog changed recently.  I've been increasing it, because when I checked how it looks on the tablet (and maybe the phone, can't recall), it seemed too small for comfortable reading.  I hope this will make it a bit better.  - - - - - - - I didn't do a whole lot of crafting this long holiday weekend, but I did some.  There are now a couple more string blocks for the HST project and another inch or two on the current diamond painting.   What I'm more excited about, however, is that I finally resumed work on the freestyle words that have been sitting on the design wall for ever a long, long time.  As always in these cases, once I started working on it, it went fairly quickly and I enjoyed it.  (Why does this happen so often?)  I didn't spend that ...

I finished a larger-than-usual (for me) diamond painting, since last time.  There wasn't much left to do, after I filled in most of it while Donald was travelling in July.  (He went to a figure-painting show in the Netherlands, then visited his family in Sweden.)  I needed a break from it, so set it aside.  The last 1.5 inches or so went pretty quickly, once I got it back out again.   It's a 40x60 cm diamond painting, with an image of jars of wildflowers against a dilapidated wall with peeling paint-- I mean, against a shabby chic wall.  😜   * * * Sidetrack!  Is shabby chic still "a thing"?  I'm sure some people are still decorating in that style.  In fact, I recently saw a decorating magazine where many things looked like the "primitive" or "country" style I remember from the 90s.  Are those things back in style or did they just never go away for the people who love them?   I think I've officially reached that ...

Well, clearly I haven't done a good job of keeping up with craft blogging!  I'm busier these days, but the problem really isn't that I don't have the time.  I waste time online each and every day, reading things that at best bore me and at worst leave me in a worse mood.   I have other things I "should" be doing, yet I still end up drawn into the black hole of time-wasting on the Internet.  I'd feel guilty just saying, "You know what?  I'm really just not going to organize my closet or scrub the shower today.  Yes, there are weeds, but I'm not going to do any weeding right now, either.  I'm going to sew/quilt/doodle/blog!"  It's easier to just sit at the laptop and allow myself to pour minute after minute into time-wasting online, rather than committing to shirking duty 😁 by investing my "wasted" time in something I'd actually enjoy.   Some pointless Internet scrolling is okay, but after a certain point, I'm ju...

I applied the binding to the latest quilt ("Retro-Cali Ribbon Stars").  Then it spent a week waiting for me to stitch down the last side of the label.  I tend to put off hand-stitching, because I don't love it.  When I finally did it, though, it really wasn't that bad, so I went ahead and stitched down the label for the long-languishing second "Tall Tales" quilt that has been nearly-done for such a long time.  I labeled both quilts, let the ink set (at least 24 hours recommended), and gave them their first washes.  Photos and "ta-da" posts to follow soon, I hope.   In the meantime, there are a couple of other projects I can share progress reports on.   First, I completed the fox diamond painting Kimberly gave me for Christmas.  I'm happy with how it turned out!  (They always look better from a distance, but here's a photo, anyway...) I'm already zooming through the next diamond painting-- a picture of flowers in glass jars.  Th...

It's been so long, I don't remember where I was with this project, the last time I blogged about it!   A while ago, I made some oversized string-pieced stars.  I wanted to do string-piecing on the treadle, without having to think too much about it.  I just used whatever was in my "every color"/"busy multicolor" bag of strings, with a few more solid strings pulled in, here and there, to supplement the variety.   The strings were much fun to sew on the Minnesota, and then I took them to the modern sewing machine to make half-square triangles by pairing the string squares with solid white.  Still fun, but not as much fun as the string-piecing, to be honest!  I stalled out.  For months, I had three of the four blocks finished, and pieces for the fourth block moping around on the design wall...  Sometime after the start of the new year, I decided it was tine to get this project off my to-do list.  I finished the fourth block, joined them...

Gosh, I knew it had been a while since my last blog post, but I didn't realize it had been that  long!   For more than a year, now, Donald's been sole owner of his web-design business, and I've been pitching in where I could, originally with small, sporadic jobs.  I've been depositing checks, mailing invoices (before everyone switched over to email), copywriting, emailing reports to clients, occasionally doing some of the simplest parts of building websites and filling in the content-- that kind of thing.  As time has progressed, the work has become more consistent.  I still handle the monthly checks and assist with the occasional data entry, etc. for new sites, but my primary focus is on copywriting-- specifically, writing for SEO (search engine optimization).  I usually enjoy it when I have an idea.  When I don't  have any ideas (or the idea involves researching and writing about health problems and medical procedures 😱), it's somewhat les...