Difficult

Small project Sunday was interesting. I completely constructed the thin borders for my Jacqueline wrong so last night was spent ripping them out and today I'll have to reconstruct them. Paper pieces were taken out for the checkered border and with two of us, took nearly a half of a movie to remove all of it. Thank you Jim for assisting in this tedious process!

The giant rail fence is quilted and today I shall attach the binding for the customer. Hopefully. 

The very large border

It looks like our quarantine may be extended??? I feel bad for the folks who don't have hobbies or a passion. To me, it's just another day, or even a week(s). Except for the weekends, and an occasional customer dropping by, I don't generally go many places or see many people. I guess I love quilting too much to be in everybody else's business or to have to go somewhere to entertain myself. 

And I'm so grateful I do. 

With the assistance of YouTube, the internet, the blogs, and the web sites, I have plenty of interaction with the world. Or at least enough for me anyway. I hope you find your passion some day to be in the same position of contentment I've managed to find. 

Web Site

Building a web site even with something easy like Wix takes a LOT of time. An hour each morning and evening is getting me going, but wow! The time investment is HUGE!

My new DIL created a logo for me and while I like it, and it works fine, it's just not quite right yet. After pondering for a few weeks about this situation, I finally drew this up and, quite frankly, LOVE IT!

What do you think?

I think the wording needs to be a bit bigger. No?

Meanwhile, I continue to long arm during the in-between times.

Taking Advantage

Since we are "quarantined" to our homes, the work element in here is pretty high. Lots of hours yesterday doing a variety of things here in the studio. Working on my ever developing web site was first since I like getting administrative issues out of the way in the morning.

Then, these were sewn together.

Border sections for my current Jacqueline de Jong

These were the 584 squares I mentioned yesterday. After getting these together, I started another customer quilt.

Jill's giant rail fence

Why is that pic upside down? Here's a better one.

Jill's rail fence corner block

After long arming for about six or seven hours, I then turned a corner into something different. Our month is winding down and I hadn't yet started my small wall hanging for the month of April. Fabrics are pulled and the designs are on fusible. I'll continue with it later tonight.

I'm supposed to have a new customer coming this morning, but I'm not sure if the weather will cooperate. She doesn't want to come into our home since we are to maintain "social distancing" with this virus situation so we are hoping to do the planning on the back deck. There's more than one way to work through obstructions I always say and this is the solution we came up with. Yeah!

584 Little Blocks

The next phase of my Jacqueline de Jong is a checkered border surrounding all the rainbow curved sections. The colors are gradient and have to be meticulously pieced. She provided paper pieced templates to do the piecing with and I chose to stick with those.

10 hours later and are all together. They still need to be trimmed, paper removed and then put together in rows, but the paper piecing is the hardest part with the long, skinny papers needed to assemble them into something useful.

Here's all the trimmings.

Trimmings from the checkered border in my JD piece

 Kind of pretty!

I have some errands to do today (despite the "lock down" we're supposed to adhere to). But I need to get some things done and mom needs help with moving chores. I'm afraid there won't be much sewing done in the studio today.

Lock Down

Our governor closed our doors yesterday until April 13. Non-essential businesses are ordered to close. All travel is ceased unless you are an essential employee to an essential business. So glad I work from home.

Jim has to work since he is considered an essential business, but he'd prefer to be working.

This is what I accomplished yesterday.

Jills Shadow Box Quilt

Jill wanted me to bind this for her too and the reason for it being completed. I can't call any of these people to come get their quilts because I'm a non-essential business. But I'm getting a lot done for them so when I can let them in the house, they'll be all ready to go.

But my Jacqueline de Jong pieces blew up all over the studio after working on Jill's quilt. Today needs to be spent getting these out of the way to make room to work on other pieces without having 2" squares flying everywhere.

I'm going to take advantage of the lock-in and work diligently in here for the next three weeks. This way I'll be ready when I need to go outside and start working on the yard/flowers without feeling guilty about customer quilts being neglected. I've chosen to look at this in a positive light rather than complaining about it. It's a stay-cation!

New Web Site

I've kicked Wordpress out of my life. After struggling with that site for a year, I couldn't take it anymore. I tried feverishly to get my site running through them and frankly, was more confused the longer I worked with it.

Bummer though...they are holding my URL hostage and won't release it. I had to rename my web site and do some damage control of the weekend's work with WIX, but I think the site is "roughed in" enough to at least provide a little information.

The new web site is now called (drum roll please)...

I LOVE QUILTING AT THE LAKE, or ilovequiltingatthelake.com

I'm not changing my business name, just the physical URL to get to my information out there for potential/current customers.

Now that I've wasted a portion of my morning dealing with that, I can start doing some actual work in here. I'll be loading Jill's first quilt this morning and get it started. I have a Sugaridoo row to make. Some Jacqueline de Jong strips to start (there are lots of those to work on) and then who knows where the day will take me.

Catmosphere is complete and Hannah will be the recipient for her birthday in May.

For Hannah's birthday in May

Time to quilt!

Moving

No, I'm not moving. Heavens no! I love our house. Love, love, love it!

But my web site is moving. Currently hosted through Wordpress, I'm moving it to Wix today. Wordpress was too difficult for me to navigate and was struggling to identify blog versus web...and seemed to always post on the wrong thing. Of course.

My needle was moved on the long arm. When it came back from the shop it was set at about 6:31. I moved it back to about 6:25 and no more skipping. Weird. So my quilt currently on the frame to test why it was skipping should be finished today.

Catmosphere

And my mom IS actually moving. I was supposed to head over today to help pack books, but she is getting snow and we're getting some kind of sleet/snow/rain mix here. Therefore, giving me permission to work on the web site today. And one of my quilts.