Baby Stars — Janet Szabo

I’ve quilted about two-thirds of the baby quilt. I’ll finish it today and get it bound this weekend. I’m doing a combination of free motion meandering and rulerwork stars. Amanda Murphy has a set of star rulers and the smallest one makes a star about 1-1/2" across. I’ve wanted to do this combination on a baby quilt for a while and I love how it looks:

The thread is light yellow on both the front and back.

I had tea with my friend Anna yesterday afternoon and came home with a skirt of hers that she needs to wear to a funeral next week. She had taken it to someone in town to have the elastic replaced and whoever did it made an absolute hash of it. I took it all apart last evening and will replace the elastic properly today for her. I have no desire to get into mending and alterations as a business but I will do work for friends on occasion.

I was unable to find the men’s pants pattern yesterday in town. I stopped by the store on my way home and several of us were commenting on what a huge loss it is to the local sewing community not to have a Joann Fabrics anymore. One woman had made a pair of bib overalls and had to settle for the strap hardware that was at Hobby Lobby, which was the wrong color. Hobby Lobby is really missing out on a stellar opportunity to expand their sewing department. Of course, this is the same company that won’t use scannable bar codes, so their cashiers have to enter every single item by hand, which results in checkout lines 30 people deep during the holiday season. And now they are no longer carrying McCall’s patterns. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they are unable (or unwilling) to step in and take up the slack now that Joanns is closed. We have a Michaels, but they have not yet expanded their fabric and yarn department and I have no idea if they will or not. It’s a small store. Walmart has some fabric supplies, but they don’t appear to be doing much restocking. Our store has been sold out of interfacing for months.

The quilt store has made a Herculean effort, especially with fabrics, but they can’t carry everything. Garment sewists seem to need more notions than quilters do. Online ordering (ugh) seems to be the only recourse.

I am doing better than most, having amassed the equivalent of a small Joanns store over the past decade, but even I am going to run out of supplies at some point.

Enough whining. I bought fabric for the men’s pants pattern yesterday at the store—Kona Crush, which is wonderful if you haven’t yet seen it—in a lovely deep caramel color. These pants aren’t for me, so I can use a color I normally wouldn’t choose.

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I host my podcast with Buzzsprout, and every year, they provide a recap of the previous podcasting season. These are some of the stats from 2025:

I recorded a total of 1586 minutes
I recorded a total of 43 episodes
The podcast is listened to in 116 countries (wow)
The podcast is listened to in 5074 cities
Seattle has the most listeners (hey people!), followed by Chicago and Sydney, Australia
There were 69.3K downloads

I find all of that fascinating. I am excited to keep going in 2026. Next week’s podcast will be a great one, with a very special guest. More on that in the next couple of days.