It’s been a rough few days. Not personally, but from a community basis. We’ve been in the national news. I’m involved with an alliance working on issues regarding how we ended up in the national news. It’s heartbreaking.
I’m glad my daughter had come home for the weekend so we were able to hang out some. We didn’t do anything special, but it was nice to have her here. After spending several hours in Zoom meetings over the weekend due to the issues going on, I decided not to worry too much about being productive otherwise. I got the newest Louise Penny Gamache novel, All the Devils Are Here. I hadn’t loved the last book but this one is better again. I’m blasting through it. It’s nice escapism.
Despite not being worried about productivity, though, I reminded myself how therapeutic I find my sewing machine to be. I also reminded myself that I had a couple of projects I could work on that required no actual thinking—they were very repetitive.
So, of the two, I decided to finish up the top of the impulse jelly roll project I’d started years ago.
I think I’d mentioned in a previous post that I’d decided to use up the leftover strips from the jelly roll for the border. I cut them into 4 1/2” wide rectangles, stacked them so that I could just chain stitch in a somewhat random way, and went to town. You’ll see I didn’t bother doing math to make sure I’d end up with exactly the right length of evenly-spaced strips. I just sewed strips together, sewed them onto the borders, and then lopped off the ends to make it square.
I know to some of you this would be like a toothache. Every time you looked at it, you’d wince. I’ve chosen not to stress it. Typically I’m a bit compulsive in that way as well, but I’m reminding myself this was an impulse project and just meant to be fun. I’m looking through stencils and designs I could mark into the centers of those snowball blocks—feather wreaths or other some such—to give me the chance to practice my FMQ more.
So stay tuned. It might be awhile before I get back to this project, though. Now that it’s a completed top I want to get it off my design wall so I can work on the layout of the Halloween embroidery quilt.
I have a quick notion review. Don’t blame me for spending your money.
In a past Sew Sampler box, we got samples of a new pin on the market, called (unoriginally) “Magic Pins.”
The samples were three sizes, but these pins are available in a wide variety of thicknesses and lengths.
Oh, how fast I fell in love.
My past favorite pins were very long and very fine, with a glass ball head. I loved those things. And you can tell. They had become a collection of warped, burr-covered, blunted pins that weren’t quite as useful as they had once been. I’ve tried other pins and gotten other samples, but none really took. Until these.
So this is what my magnetic pin holder is full of now.
Oh, how I love thee, let me count the ways…
These are shorter than I usually use but when I was pinning the borders this afternoon I found that I actually liked the shorter pins. Go figure.
They’re smooth as butter. (Maybe just because they’re new, but hey.)
I absolutely love that pin head. It’s a silicone grip. So easy to pull out as I’m feeding things under my presser foot. They’re supposedly heat resistant but I haven’t tested that yet. I simply found them so much easier to pull off my pin holder, stick in the fabric, pull back out of the fabric, and toss back onto the pin holder.
I’m so happy.
Check them out. (The link goes to Fat Quarter Shop—I don’t get anything out of you using it; the pins are available elsewhere as well. This is just a nice selection of them.) At some point I’ll likely pick up some of the other sizes, but for now these will do me for the majority of my pin usage needs.