Circling Around

I did not have a lot of time to work on this quilt yesterday because I spent the afternoon in town running errands and at Ruler Club, but I got a few of the smaller squares quilted with the new circle rulers:

I like this a lot. I’m still wondering if it’s “enough” quilting, though, or if I should add some fill. I might take it to Ruler Club next month and ask for opinions there. We had a good Ruler Club class yesterday. There are about 15 women signed up for this six-month session. Some are quilting on domestic machines, some on sit-down machines like mine, and some on machines on frames. The instructor uses a different machine in each session. Yesterday, she demonstrated on the same machine I have, but on a frame. It is fascinating to see the differences. (As much as I love teaching, it is also great fun to be a student.) I also took the Kindness quilt for show-and-tell, because I used one of the rulers we’re using in Ruler Club to quilt the narrow red border on that one. I think it helps to see how other quilters use the rulers on actual quilts, not just on the practice piece. I spread it out and we looked at it and people asked questions and offered suggestions.

The more I use rulers, the more I love them, which is a bit of a surprise to me. I thought, when I bought the Q20 last year, that I would be using it mostly for free motion quilting and edge-to-edge designs. I am also glad I got the table for the Q20 instead of a frame, because I think I would be frustrated trying to quilt on a frame.

The store owner suggested that those of us with sit-down Q16 and Q20 machines start another club and meet monthly, but I am running out of room in my schedule, LOL. She and I also discussed the idea of making the Serger 101 class a standing monthly class, which is fine with me. If I have students, I’ll teach it, and if no one signs up, we won’t offer it that month.

I still have to schedule some serger classes with the other quilt store. And the T-shirt class is next Wednesday. Sometimes I think about my mother taking Stretch and Sew classes in the 1970s and I just laugh. Who knew.

My friend Susan and I are planning a trip for the end of the month, but we’ll have to see if the weather cooperates and if The Diva will behave. Susan’s daughter lives in Pullman, Washington, which is about an hour south of Spokane. I would take Susan as far as Spokane and her daughter would drive up to meet us and retrieve her for a few days. The big quilt store in Spokane has a class I’d like to take, so we’re looking at scheduling the trip around that.

Everyone wants to travel with me, LOL.

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I got the first tray of lettuce planted yesterday:

The way this works is that those rooting plugs sit in “net cups” suspended in the liquid growing medium. (I use Texas Tomato Food.) As the lettuce plants grow, their roots come down through the openings in the net cups to access the growing medium. I’ve got the lights adjusted so that they are fairly close to the tray, which keeps the plants from getting leggy. I can move the lights up as the plants get bigger. The lettuce I’ve been using is a variety called Green Ice that I had left over from last summer.

I’ll plant another tray in a couple of days. The shelving unit has room for six trays of 18 cups each, so we’ll have plenty of lettuce. I also might do a tray with some herbs like basil or thyme.

I picked up some different washcloths at the Dollar Store yesterday—these are cotton, not microfiber—and will experiment with using those to serge makeup pads for DD#2.

Tomorrow is sewing at the old schoolhouse up the road. I haven’t been for almost a month, so I should put in an appearance for a bit. Maybe I can finish binding the Kindness quilt.