Day 6, Wednesday, ended up being mostly a lounge day in front of the TV, doing embroidery.
I spent the morning in my sewing room working on the first couple of months of clues for the 2019 Cotton Cuts Puzzle Mystery Quilt, Cosmos.
Which makes me realize I have a big “oops” in previous blog posts. My bad. The one I just finished is NOT Cosmos, but “Pastures New” from Spring 2018. I did it in the Portofino colorway. That’s what happens when you work on three at once—you totally forget which one is which. (The one I did in 30s fabrics is, indeed, “Stratford,” and I’d done the colorway Juliet. This one I’m working on now is actually “Cosmos” and I’m doing it in the Reiki colorway, which is all batiks.)
Clue 1 went just dandy.
Clue 2, however, was a little more problematic as I realized when I got to the last few steps that I was somehow missing one square of fabric. One. Square. I looked all over my sewing room to see if it had just flown the coop but it is not to be found. I had to send a message to Cotton Cuts and they’re sending me a replacement square.
So the first picture is what I was able to complete of Clue 2 (Clue 2A and three out of four Clue 2B), and the second is the one last Clue 2B that’s awaiting the one, sad, lonely square.
I have to say, for all that I have had difficulty with mistakes in these puzzle mystery quilts, I can’t fault the customer service. Kimberly always gets back to me so fast and fixes the problem immediately.
After that, I sort of lost steam—plus, my sewing room/home office is the room above the garage; our garage is insulated but not climate controlled so my sewing room/office is always hotter or colder than the rest of the house, depending on the season. By mid-afternoon, even the fan going full-blast doesn’t help. I’ve been doing mornings in the sewing room and afternoons downstairs where the AC lives.
So, Wednesday afternoon I spent several hours watching “Marcella” on Netflix and embroidering.
One block finished, another block better than halfway done. And then my fingertips wore out.
I only have 2 1/2 blocks left to embroider and then I can start piecing everything together! Woo!
Today I got back to Cosmos again. Only this time I did two things:
I got out my 3M clips and hung the swatch card on the wall next to my cutting table so it would be easier to reference while I’m working on these blocks. Doh. Why didn’t I do that before with all of these? So much easier than constantly trying to figure out which pile of fabric pieces it ended up under.
I actually counted out all the pieces included in the month’s clue to make sure it matched what they said I should have before starting to sew. Go figure.
So, month 3 is now done.
Wish I could say it went swimmingly.
It floundered.
There was a mistake in the instructions that resulted in me having to do some seam ripping in order to put pieces together in a different combination for a later step.
At least this time I had the right number of fabric pieces, so I was ultimately able to finish the month.
I do have to say, though, that while I was taking a break from sewing (and sitting directly in front of the fan to cool down a bit), I was scrolling through quilty things on my computer and thinking about my Accuquilt dies and scrap quilts and such, and came to the realization that signing up for another one of these puzzle mystery quilts would impede my ability to do some stashbusting with my Accuquilt this fall. I can make myself my own dang kits, as it were. Mistakes aside, I do enjoy the puzzle mystery quilts because it’s fun to see how they ultimately come together, but for now, I have cancelled the subscription I’d done a few weeks ago to their fall mystery quilt. I’m anxious to work on some of my own designs again.
I finally did my pool yoga yesterday—first time of the season. Boy did that feel good. It’s supposed to get up into the 90s today so I suspect I’ll be in the pool again this afternoon. It’s a vacation-y thing to do, after all. If I do more sewing or embroidery, I’ll do another post later.