DS home for a visit

 DS came home Friday night for a weekend visit with his girlfriend (who was duly impressed with the redecoration of DS's former room). It's lovely to have him back, although I did need to nip in the bud a joking proposal that if bills became too high then he could always move back home. I said firmly that of course if he really needed to but really that would be a backwards step as he is out in the world now. He's going to come home for Christmas as well which is something to look forward to.  We took them on a tour of three local-ish secondhand furniture places - they found a pair of bedside tables that they were looking for. I unexpectedly came across a TV stand which is made of mid-brown wood which will look less out of place in our front room than the semi-hideous painted-by-me stand that we bought nine years ago as a temporary stopgap when we were renting and waiting for this house to become available.  So a win-win shopping expedition.

Before they came, I finally, finally, finished Block 15 of the Australian BOM.  This sucker took me dozens of hours, possibly even into triple figures, and certainly I could have cut out and sewn a quick quilt top in the same time.  It's the feature block of the quilt, so the remaining embroidered blocks (four more I think?) should be smaller and less work. It's turned out fairly well. There will be buttons sewn on to the green 'button card' at the left. I think the block is about 15 inches wide from memory.

I also finished Quilt number 10 on the frame, the Cottage Stars, which I quilted with a heart-shaped panto.

Today while they were still asleep (they are both late risers), I loaded on quilt number 11 which is an antique top I bought from the Mary Koval salesroom at the St Marie Aux Mines quilt fair in 2017. It is  labelled as "1870 Hourglass quilt top".  I've now loaded it on to the frame. Having worked with it, I think the reason it was abandoned and not made into a finished quilt is because all of the triangles are cut on the bias (on the diagonal across a square).  So they are all stretchy, which makes the quilt top bubbly and the edges very fluttery.  I have tamed the edges as best I can to get it onto the frame, but inevitably there are going to be some puckers.  The alternative would be a lot of work to gather the edges to a set measurement then stabilise them by attaching borders.  I did that many years ago on another distorted antique top, it was a huge amount of work and I'm just not feeling like doing that again.  I'm using Hobb's Heirloom 80/20 wadding for this one, a change from the Hobbs polyester that I've been using up until now from the roll I bought. But being a vintage top, I think it needs the cotton wadding which will shrink when I gently wash the quilted top.

I've spent some time this week preparing projects for another sewing retreat that I'm trying, this one's a little closer to home but DH is going to drive me so  I can take my sewing machine this time.  I'm going to be taking an overlocking course on 2.5 of the four days, and the other 1.5 days I can work on my own project.  I've decided to tackle a project in my queue which is the Edyta Sitar pattern 'Winter Village', only I'm going to make it in her 'Little Sweetheart' line of red and pink fabrics which came out a few years ago. So I won't add the snowflakes and I may not add the branches either, we'll see.

This week I sewed the binding onto the Mennonite top, the one I added the tree border to, so that it will be ready to use as a Christmas decoration.  I did some of the stitching while listening to Chookyblue's zoom party from Australia. I do more listening than talking as neither of my webcam microphones seem strong enough to give me priority in the zoom conversation, quite often I am halfway through a sentence before Zoom starts transmitting my words and by then someone else has usually started talking.  Back in my Citizen Band radio-using teenage years, some of the male users had booster mikes which made them 10 times louder on air than anyone else, maybe I need one of those :)

Just in time for winter, I finished (again) the re-knit of the Aldi boucle t-shirt, sewed it up (again) and tried it on (again).  The body fits now, but the sleeves were still too full.  So I've pulled out just the sleeves and am reknitting them 10 stitches narrower.  Sure getting my money's worth out of this cheap yet nice yarn!  That's the nice thing about knitting though, you can generally get a do-over.