weekend update

I was all set on Friday to start sewing up some jeans for my boy and count them in Jacquie's Spring to Finish UFO challenge. And my machine, pardon the french, kind of crapped out on me. I have 5 machines that sew in my house (OK one is an antique and doesn't actually sew, but it could if I took it in and got it tuned up) and I can't make a stinking pair of jeans. This led to me using my trusty pocket knife screwdriver, and undoing things, and removing globs of lint, and putting things back together, I thought the right way. (What a terrible sentence. Oh well.) Well, it wasn't the right way, so I undid it and found that I smashed a part. This was on my ca. 1980s machine, the heavy duty one. My newer machine is a lightweight and cannot topstitch on denim, no way.

Anyway this led to me going to the sewing machine store yesterday, and finding what I hope will be my new machine sometime in the next couple of months. Maybe for my birthday. It's the Janome 6260, and the saleswoman had it stitch through 9 layers of denim for me, which it did fearlessly. It's also a quilting machine and has lots of great features but mostly is a sturdy machine that can handle the dread denim.

I will still need to take in my old Viking and get it repaired. Ugh. It hasn't been in the shop for several years though (since we were in Oregon) so I guess that's ok.

Yesterday I worked on my blue/red scrap quilt some more and it has a layout planned and everything now. It's going to be similar to my lavender scrap quilt I made at the beginning of the year, only this one will have navy blue fabric and denim for the sashing. This week I'm planning on working on that some more, hopefully getting the top finished, making shorts for J, sewing up some more napkins, and something really fun--making L's first baby quilt. I'm going to use my Heather Ross Mendocino fabrics and hopefully add some hand dyes for a quick and cute strip quilt. We are going to do strip baby quilts for church sewing group starting in July so I will be getting yardage figured out for making a strip quilt in baby quilt size and lap size. I will also figure out how to use Moda honey buns to make a similar quilt. I'll post the yardage/instructions here when I get them figured out.