Scraps of My Life quilt finished

I finished it! Woohoo! This is my quilted as you go string quilt. I've named it "Scraps of my Life". It has bits and pieces from my scrap bucket, a lot of the pieces being leftovers from other quilts. I am especially fond of this quilt because it's really comforting to sit down and cover up with and look at the scraps. I remember each quilt that they were made with and who they went to, and it's nice.

By the time I got to putting on the binding on this quilt, I was really ready for it to be finished. I used 2" wide binding strips, folded in half and sewn to the backside, then on the front I rolled it over and used a small zig zag stitch to hold the binding down. This is just a utility quilt, so it doesn't have to be fancy. I want it to be used and I want the binding to stay on!

I was pleasantly surprised when, at separate times, both my kids noticed the new quilt in the front room last night when they came home. I was using it, but I told my darling husband that I would be really surprised if either one noticed it. When they did, it made me feel good.

I don't know if I would do a quilt like this again, unless it were going to be a utility quilt. It was difficult to get the stitching straight when putting the quilted pieces together. Because the quilting was random, for the most part, this wasn't an issue, but if it were supposed to be uniform, I would have been disappointed in the final product.

I had fallen off the wagon with my diet last week, but this week I'm going to get back on track. Last night we had pizza for supper, and that definetely is not on my diet plan! Today we are having a pork roast. I have it going in the crock pot. When I get home from work I'll make gravy and mashed potatoes to go with it and we will have a good dinner.

Now I have GOT to begin that baby quilt for my co worker. I had picked out a pinwheel pattern that I wanted to do, but the more time passes and her due date gets closer, I'm thinking of just a big nine patch. Can you tell I really don't want to do this quilt?

This is getting to be quite a long post, but another thing I did over the weekend was scope out space for my future longarm. And when I say future, I mean in a few years. I measured the room in the basement where my son sleeps. It is 14'x14', and not really big enough to accommodate the machine and table I really want. I want a 24" machine on a 14' table.

My next space I contemplated was sectioning off a portion of our garage. The space I could use in the garage would be either 11'9"x18' or 11'9"x23'. The difference is if I want to partition myself from the rest of the garage or have the only access to the other part of the garage be through the room. My gut tells me partition it off and sacrifice the extra 5'. The room would be big enough for the longarm, however I would still need to keep my other machines in the house if I were to have enough room to move around the longarm comfortably. This would not be a bad option, because the garage is detached, and if it were bad weather, I would still be able to sew without going outside, and I would still be in the house if I were needed.

The third option is to build a free standing garage from a kit that one of the big home improvement stores sells. Instead of a garage door, of course there would just be windows and a regular door. This is the most expensive option, and would take up a lot of our yard and probably not add to the value of the property because it's a special purpose room that would have appeal only to us. That said, if I wanted it, I would not let that last part stop me from building it. The good part about it would be that we could put it near enough to the house and the basement walk out door that going between the buildings in bad weather would not be an issue. It would also be large enough to accommodate all the sewing machines so everything would be in one place. Still, very expensive to do and would probably raise our property taxes.

Another option would be to take over the other bedroom upstairs that is connected to my current sewing area. However, I have not measured this room and I doubt that it would accommodate a 14' table comfortably. I could consider going down to a 12' table, but if I'm going to do this, I'm going to wait and do it the way I want to from the beginning.

And last but not least, is the option of when the kids move out, we move our bedroom upstairs and I use our current master bedroom as the sewing space. It is large enough. However, I do not like this option because I do not want to have my bedroom on the second floor. I get up at least twice a night to use the bathroom. Our bathroom is connected to the master bedroom so it is not a problem. There are no bathrooms on the second floor and no way to put one in.

So, even though this is a few years in the making and things can definetely change, I have a lot to think about. It's better than dwelling on other not so pleasant issues, such as the decisions my children are making that I don't approve of...agh. No one told me teenagers were going to be like this! Or if they did, I wasn't listening! ha ha.