A Finish!

No, unfortunately, it's not a quilting finish ... it's a puzzle finish.

I'm ready to start another ... but before we can do that, I need to haul out my GO cutter and cut my connector hexie fabric into 2-1/2" squares. I'd like to think that I could get all the hexies basted while we're traveling next month, but I'm not sure. 600+ hexies ... our trip is going to last 2-1/2 weeks, so that would mean that I'd have to baste 35 hexies/day. Our time on the Island is usually pretty slow-paced, so it could be possible.

A year ago, we converted the closet in the spare bedroom that I use for sewing (we call it the sewing room, but I get about a third of the space in that room) from a standard bedroom closet to a stash closet by having shelving installed. Previously I had my fabric stored in a couple of very large plastic storage tubs ... with no organizational plan at all. So if I wanted to use a fabric, I had to basically take everything out of one tub to sort through all the fabric. Of course no matter which tub I pulled to dig through, the fabric was almost always in the other tub. After we got our shelves installed, I transferred the fabrics to separate plastic storage boxes ... each color had its own tub. That worked fine for some colors (yellows or purples for instance), but NOT for my blues, reds and neutrals (my go-to colors). It had gotten to the point where those tubs were so full that I couldn't lift the box off the shelf to dig through to find the fabric I was looking for ... and because there were so many fabrics in those large boxes, I had to dump out all the fabrics to paw through them all to find what I was looking for. I'm not sure that the new system was all that much better than the old system. Last week I purchased some new smaller storage boxes ... just big enough to hold my fabrics, wrapped around comic book cardboard. That means that I have more than one box for some of my colors, but I will sort them by category or piece size. And because I'm folding the fabrics around cardboard, I can see at a glance what is in each box. If at first you don't succeed, try try again. Ha! Here's an after of one of my neutral boxes.

 And to give you an idea of what a huge improvement my reorganization is making, here's a before of my reds.

 One of the benefits of taking my time to reorganize my stash closet is that I've come across some fabrics that I'm pretty sure that I'm not ever going to use. When I finish this reorganization project up, I'm going to have to take a look at those fabrics and see if I can't find them good homes. ;-) And yes, I said WHEN I finish this up ... I was making good progress when I ran out of cardboard. Thanks to Amazon Prime, I'll have more here on Thursday, so there's an end in sight to this task. In the meantime, there's fabric and boxes everywhere in that room. It looks like a tornado touched down. :-o I can't say reorganizing was a fun way to spend my afternoon, but it will definitely be worth it when it's done.

I didn't spend the entire day in the sewing room ... I was able to get in an hour or so with my needle and thread, quilting on my Kiss quilt, between finishing up the puzzle and starting in on the stash reorganization. I hadn't sat down with it in a week, since last Tuesday ... at this rate, I'm never going to get that quilt finished. I hope to spend a fair amount of time quilting today ... I'll be watching my Ts this afternoon, but not until 4:00. That should give me plenty of time to quilt.

Can someone tell me why smoke detectors wait until the wee hours of the morning before they start chirping to warn us that the batteries need to be replaced? At 2:00 this morning, I was rudely awakened by the detector right outside our bedroom door. DH replaced the battery ... no change. I suggested that he try resetting it by pressing the test button, which didn't accomplish anything ... no end to the chirping and more importantly, no test pattern. Hmmm, perhaps the detector had gone bad and needed to be replaced ... nothing we could do at 2:30AM. So DH went back to bed (this is one time when having exceptionally poor hearing is not a problem). After another 20 minutes or so of enduring that awful chirping, I got to wondering if there was a circuit breaker that controlled that detector ... sure enough there was. I tried turning it off (just until we could get the detector replaced), but the detector kept beeping. This made me think maybe it was the battery, so I decided to try resetting it myself. Success! The silence was heavenly! Of course by then, I was wide awake ... there was no way that I'd be able to go back to sleep. What else was I to do with the three hours before DH would be up? Why quilt, of course! ;-)

I hope that whatever you planned for today included a little something that brought some joy!
Kathy