A Prairie Home Quilts

With all my “road running” I have not spent near enough time working on these this month.  I’m just taking stock and trying to motivate myself for a few finishes as we near the end of the month.

1. Leftovers Again – Untouched.
2. Plaid Bargello – Still just strips. . .
3. Striped Shirt Boxes – I loved the ones I saw everyone making and now that I’ve started one, it’s just not making my skirt fly up.  I guess it’s all the cutting.
4. Crooked Path Table Topper – Finished top.
5. Scrappy Patchwork of the Crosses – First block is done.
6. Nevada – Untouched.
7. Baby Girl Bug – 4 rows of hexagons sewn.
8. Variable Star – Untouched.
9. Plaid 9 Patch – Untouched.
10. Rocky Glen – Untouched.
11. Streak of Lightning – This is the one that I messed up cutting the setting triangles and now the one project has become two — one in plaids and one in florals.  I did get more fabric ordered and the setting triangles cut for the plaid version.
12. Bold Streak – I have one more section of HST to put together and this one will become a quilt top.
13. Field of Flowers – Untouched.
14. Rose Basket – Untouched, but I did rehang it on the design wall hoping to get inspired.  It’s so close to done.
15. Layer Cake – 1 more block done.
16. Liberated Amish Get Together
17. Frederica Josephson Quilt

Cross one off the list and add two more.  That is what we’re supposed to do, right?

1. Layer Cake

See this guy below?  That’s me.  A roadrunner.  Meh, maybe not.  That’s how I feel.  Like a roadrunner.

Or maybe more like a chicken with its head cut off?  I’ll spare you the photo that expresses that thought.  At least I’m not being chased.

I haven’t been home much and when I am all I want to do is veg.  I’m not home right now [house sitting] and I still just want to veg.  I should be working on my Liberated Amish quilt top or at the very least — answering emails.  Instead, I’m sitting here contemplating moving the coffee table off the area rug.  The area rug has inspired a quilt idea so I want to photograph it.  [Right, Erin.  Like you need another quilt idea?  Seriously?]  Perhaps, it’s just my body that wants to veg.  My brain does not stop.  It fills with new ideas for quilts day and night.  SOMEONE. PLEASE. STOP. MY. BRAIN. so I can veg out in peace.

You are probably thinking that I’ve gotten lost in my newly arranged creative space and that’s why I haven’t posted.  Well, I do have my space rearranged and I LOVE IT, but I’m doing some temp work with the 2010 Census so I haven’t had time to enjoy my new space.  A drawback?  Not really. It does mean some extra money that I can use for shelving and storage and perhaps even a little extra for FABRIC.  So all in all, I’m okay with it.

Phase One of the redo of my creative space involves rearranging the existing furniture.  I removed a lot of the little  items that were cluttering up the space to another room for now.  As I find a new home for them, I’ll move them back in.  In Creating Your Perfect Quilting Space, Lois suggests making a scale drawing of your room and using index cards to make scale representations of your furniture pieces.  She then suggests playing with different configurations and taking pictures.  I think I have a dozen pictures…  (Yes, this is the kind of thing I love to completely waste time doing…  Sort of like coloring the same quilt design 50 different ways in EQ6 — which I’ve also been known to get caught up in.) I decided on this configuration for the first of the three phases.

The overhead lighting is a ceiling fan in the center of the room.  I have already replaced the bulbs with daylight spectrum bulbs.  I wanted my work areas centered under this overhead lighting a much as possible.

Start of the rearranging…  I emptied the corner near the closet by moving the corner cabinet to [basically] unusable space at the entrance to the room.  The upper cabinet shelves will hold decorative items and antique sewing notions.  There is some storage at the bottom of the cabinet on two shelves but they don’t hold much because of the “V” shape of the cabinet.

Ludo decided the now empty corner looked like a great place for a bath and a nap.  I disagreed. He left to find a hiding place soon after the vacuum arrived.  The small desk got moved into this corner where the first green cabinet was.  The second green cabinet stayed in place.

This is how the room looked when I got done.  The small desk on the left isn’t used for anything.  Basically it’s just being “stored” in my creative space.  I’ve since moved it out and put the rolling cart from the closet there.  I put my wooden ruler rack on top of the cart because it’s right next to the small cutting area set up on my “L” shaped sewing workspace.

I have a small clip-on lamp on the top right corner of the table where my sewing machine sits.  When it’s on, the shadow that you see on my sewing machine bed disappears.  I’ve added a divided basket on the table near the small cutting area to hold scissors, rotary cutters & miscellaneous notions.  It sort of hides the cables from the back of my computer…  I want to paint the basket so I’ll show you a picture when it’s done.

My new desk area.  Yippee! Lots of space on the left to spread out because I’m a LEFTIE. I’ve been in here several nights during the past week working on census stuff at my desk.  It’s been heavenly. See the new-to-me monitor?  It belonged to my youngest son — he gave it to me.  Everyone should have kids as great as mine. Seriously.

The dry sink is still obscuring my design wall which I don’t like/want.  If I put it on the other wall though, there’s not a lot of room to fit between it and the file cabinet when I’m trying to get to my desk.  I’m not sure what the solution is going to be.  This may be the one problem area of the redo…

And finally, the quilt rack.  This wasn’t in the room originally but I wanted to put it in here.  It holds quilts in progress and ones that need to be quilted.  It’s not the right shade of green so I’m going to paint it purple. Yep, purple is going to be my main accent color in here.  (I love color!) At the thrift store, I found the divided basket, a small saucer to hold my bobbins and a green inkwell-looking glass thingy for $1 each.

Total spent to date: $3