Painting? Quilting!!!

 Here's what I should be doing this week: scraping and painting the south door from downstairs into the solar space.  There are two sets of windows and doors like this.  One on the south side and one on the west side.

When we bought our place these frames had been roughly painted without scraping off the "fly dirt" in the corner.  That kind of freaked me out, so several years ago I started scraping them down to the bare wood, priming and painting them.  I'm inclined to tennis elbow and had an overuse injury in my right shoulder in 2006, so this is rather difficult for me.  Jim pitched in and helped by doing a lot of the scraping, but there are still areas that need a fine touch.  I'm using a heat gun, which really simplifies the work.  It's still a JOB!

The west door and windows are finished, but this needs to be done, and it needs to be done this summer!



In the meantime, THIS is what I am doing!  This is S's quilt, and I last posted it on March 10.  That was when I had all the blocks completed and laid out on the living room floor.

I got the 7 vertical rows on the right of the quilt all sewed together, and then got too busy to continue working on it.

This morning I felt free enough to go back to it.  The two vertical rows on the left got done this morning.  They are rows 5 and 6, so now I need to get busy on rows 1, 2, 3, & 4.

It's taking me a while because about half of the 9 patch blocks need to be taken apart and resewed.  The problem is that they turned out too small.  And I learned a lesson from that!  The next project I will check the size on the first blocks that I sew and avoid having to take a whack of them apart to redo.

The problem turns out to be that my 1/4" foot sews a FAT
1/4" seam.  When a block has several seams in it, the result is a block that is about 1/4" too small.

That actually happened on the previous quilt also, the Cascades.  I solved that problem by sewing the top together with very skimpy seams, not a very good solution!  But I think it will be all right when it's all quilted, which should strengthen and reinforce the top.

Somehow or other, I just didn't twig that I had to set the needle position to the right.  Now I know better.  When I'm aiming for a 1/4" seam I need to set the needle to 4.2, a bit to the right of 3.5, which is the center position.  LIVE AND LEARN!!!  But, hopefully next time a little sooner!

While I was at the sewing machine this morning this very interesting bird perched on the balcony railing.  I quickly got the camera so that when I go to the "Birds of Alberta" book I can identify it.
On its breast it had a red bib.

Wonder what it is?