Stories from the Sewing Room

I've done very little sewing (once again) because I couldn't decide what to do. Our furnace has been acting up and the floor heat wasn't working in the basement, so it was a chilly 62 degrees for over a week and I wanted to spend as little time as possible down there. The HVAC service man came twice on Monday. Things are working now, but we'll have to do a system flush of the geothermal lines soon. The basement was a comfortable 68 degrees yesterday, but I didn't get a chance to sew since I had a meeting in the morning and needed to take my son to an appointment in the afternoon.

I did make the binding for my Melodic mystery quilt and I've got about a yard of it stitched down.

I took a class on how to use the additional metal feet for my serger last week. We made all sorts of samples with flat lock seams, adding beading, inserting lace, gathering, inserting elastic, and creating a rolled hem. When I was driving home, I noticed it was almost time for school to let out, so I was at the light in front of the school trying to text my son to see if he wanted a ride home. The light changed, so I was trying to text and drive (don't do this!). I drove a bit farther down the road to the bank and couldn't figure out why he was sending me messages about a plane. Apparently my phone decided that the message should be "Do you want plane to pick you up?" LOL. I did my banking and went back and got him in my boring old car. 

I completed three quilts for others. 

Erika's mom's quilt, stitched with Ariana. 

Trudy's quilt, quilted with Peace.

The last of Ann K.'s quilts, quilted with Basic Swirl.

The weather was warm enough last week to pop most of my daffodils. Here are some pictures I took last night.

I'm also seeing buds on many of the trees. This is one of my crabapple trees.

This is a weeping cherry. Every year this tree gets into full blossom and we immediately have a large storm that destroys all the blossoms. 

We also had a few other weather-related happenings. The moon looked very large and tinted a bit Thursday evening.

We got up at 2:10 am Thursday into Friday to see the lunar eclipse. We stayed outside for about half an hour in the pleasant 57 degree night. I took this photo with my phone, no zoom, about 2:10.

My son took this picture during totality, around 2:26, with his DSLR and a giant zoom lens. 

I took this picture with my phone at the same time, zoomed way in. 

We felt that the eclipse was rather underwhelming after seeing the total solar eclipse last year. And we were pretty tired Friday.

Early Saturday morning, a bit before 5 am, the phones went off with a tornado warning. I slept through the racket (this is not the first time I've slept through it; maybe this is how I die?) and had to be awakened to relocate to the basement. I promptly fell down the last two steps and skinned my knee. Plus it was freezing down there. Good thing there are piles of my quilts in the living room. Still tired.

My mom called us twice on Saturday to ask if all our windows were broken from the golf ball-sized hail her news said we had. We did not have large hail at all. She was sure we had tornados over our house. The nearest confirmed tornado, at an EF-0, was about 12 miles south of us. The only damage I saw around us was a branch down in my neighbors' yard. 

These same neighbors are hosting some of the woodcocks on their property. They've seen them and said they were quite big and round. My son saw one flying away from their yard. I had turned around for a second and missed it. 

Our chickens are doing fine and occasionally laying eggs. They got a cabbage (hanging in the background) for St. Patrick's Day.

We're planning to relocate our vegetable garden to a sunnier location and wanted to get a water meter installed on our spare property so we had water access in the new location. We were declined because they said they don't have the water capacity to add new meters at the moment and are in the process of applying for permits to add another pumping station. They told us to call back in five to six months to try again. 😧 I guess we'll be buying some hoses to stretch from the house over to the new location. 

Linking with Quiltery, My Quilt Infatuation, and Alycia Quilts.