Bernina Mending Magic Strikes Again + Mildred's Tarnished Star Quilt

I know mending is boring, but it's way more boring to my neighbors and to random people I approach in the grocery store than it is to the people who read my blog.  (Tip: You can scroll past my mending adventures and skip ahead to the pretty quilt at the end if you want to -- I will never even know!)

I had a ridiculously fun time reacquainting myself with some of the features of my Bernina B 790+ sewing machine yesterday while saving two of my favorite pairs of shorts, and I had to tell SOMEBODY about it.  I picked YOU!  Do you see signs of mending in the photo below?  No, you don't, because it turned out perfect!

Left Tushie Pocket of My Favorite Shorts, After Repair

These are my favorite shorts because they have an elastic drawstring in the waist so I can cinch it in just enough to avoid Back Waistband Gaposis that plagues me so much in ready to wear clothing, but also because they are made of a very lightweight and breathable fabric that doesn't get all hot and sticky in the muggy Florida summer like most of my other shorts.  They came from REI several years ago and I bought three pairs of the same style, the khaki ones pictured here as well as a light gray pair and a dusty blue green color.  I've been wearing them a lot more since I moved to Florida in February, and the buttons on the left back pocket ripped right through   the fabric on the blue pair and the khaki pair.  How do you reattach a button when there's a hole through the shorts fabric in the place the button needs to be sewn?

Mending Program 22 Stitched in Aurifil 50/2 Cotton Mako Thread

I needed to darn the hole and reinforce the area around the hole before reattaching the button, so I grabbed some Steam A Seam 2 double-stick fusible web from my appliqué supplies, fused it to the back of this pink scrap of tightly woven cotton batik fabric and cut out a circle about the size of a quarter, and fused it to the wrong side of the pocket, carefully coaxing the loose threads surrounding the tear back into place to fill the hole on the right side.  

Keepin' It Real: Everything Breaks in February, But the Quilting Must Go On

Um, GOOD MORNING!  How was YOUR February?  I haven't written anything in so long that I don't know where to begin.  Do I just pick one or two things to share with you, or do I just dump a hundred and fifty photos in this post without explaining any of them?

Nothing terrible has happened to me over the past month, just lots of compounded nuisances on top of everyday concerns and I've been focusing on trying to stay on top of customer quilting while putting out fires left and right.  Here's the short version of my adventures over the last few weeks: car battery was completely dead the morning I had a dentist appointment for a routine cleaning, could not be jumped, had to reschedule my appointment and replace the car battery.  Then when I went to the dentist a few days later, instead of just complementing me on my excellent home care and giving me a free toothbrush, they told me I needed FIVE old fillings replaced.  The novocaine from all those new fillings had barely worn off when the garage door opener died and needed to be replaced.  Let's see -- next disaster was a cracked hopping foot on my longarm machine and then I stripped my needle set screw, neither of which was a big deal besides sucking up time.  Then we woke up to find water dripping down through the ceiling in the second floor hallway and discovered that our hot water heater in the attic had blown and flooded its drip pan.  Lovely.  Hot water heater replaced, but now there were water stains on the ceiling and if you've tried to hire anyone to do work in your home over the past year or so, you know that everyone is booked so far out into the future that you don't know which will come first -- availability on the painter's schedule or the Armageddon.  So my husband has been on ladders painting ceilings himself and I've been contemplating paint swatches for walls and cabinets when I'm not upstairs quilting, because (like everyone else) I've been spending way more time in my house over the past two years and I am sick of looking at these walls everyday.  Oh, and my espresso machine has blown a gasket and started spewing water all over the place, just to taunt me.  The way this month has been going, I wouldn't be surprised if the roof caved in before the end of the month!

See?  Nothing catastrophic, just a lot of distractions eating up time that I might have been blogging.  But you didn't come here for any of that, did you?  You came for the quilting!

Ginny's Tree of Life Quilt

Abundance Design Stitched in Glide Thread, Color Sea Mist

My client Ginny made this scrappy Tree of Life quilt as an anniversary gift for her husband, incorporating scores of different fabric prints that she has accumulated over the decades of their marriage.  We chose the Abundance quilting design by Karlee Porter because of the way it suggests vines, brush, and forest undergrowth around her tree.  Knowing that quilting designs generally disappear against busy prints, we chose a thread color (Glide in Sea Mist, affiliate link) that would blend more against the dark greens and browns in the tree and stand out a little more against her lighter valued background fabrics.