Getting Organized

Things are pretty much back to normal in Ye Olde Sewing Room today.  My thread racks are back on the wall.  (Yes, I have a lot of thread.  I told you I love thread as much as I love fabric.)

The Winter Wonderland quilt is back to doing the job it was hired to do...covering the plumbing access cabinet.

The white board I use to keep track of my projects is hung back up, and I've switched out the quilt that was hanging where Mr. Bear now hangs.  It's nice to have the change.  I was tired of that other quilt.  It was my second quilt ever made, and so it had been hanging there for a long time.

My design wall is back up on the wall.  My design wall is a Block Butler.  I really like it.  It's a sheet of stuff that feels sort of like a thin foam, and it's sticky on both sides.  It sticks to the wall without any kind of hanger, and then my blocks stick to the other side.  With usage, it loses its stick sometimes, but I just spritz it with water and my blocks stick as good as new.

I was a little worried when we pulled it down because, stupidly, I hadn't saved the sheets of plastic it came with, and so I had no way to protect its sticky surface...or other surfaces from its stickiness.  We carefully pulled it from the wall, trying very hard not to stretch it.  (We didn't.)  I was curious to see if it had left any residue on the wall or damaged the paint.  (It hadn't.)  I folded it over on itself, leaving the blocks in place, and then put plastic garbage bags down where I laid it to protect the surface of the furniture.  When we went to stick it back up, it went up in minutes...no fuss, and no muss.  This is a great product.

So what else?  Smitty is happy to have his sewing room bed back.

And I wasted no time getting back to sewing once everything was back in its rightful spot.

I guess that means I was in my rightful spot too.  And I started my October NewFO!  It's the October block for the Folk Arts Cat quilt.

I still have a little work to do on this before I put it aside until next month.  It has a checkerboard sashing between the blocks with some pieced cornerstones.  There is also another applique that goes on the sashing. I went back and forth about whether to make the sashing as I go or whether to wait until the end.  I decided to make it as I go, and so I want to work on that a little today.  

And don't forget!  The NewFO Linky party goes up this Wednesday.  Are you ready?

This morning, however, I started making my way through the laundry, and then I decided I absolutely had to do something about the recipes-to-try stack that has been accumulating for the past year.  I've been in this situation before...with a stack of recipes five feet high (well, maybe five inches) that I go through each time I make out a grocery list.  It gets to be unworkable after a while.  It's the downside of being a person who loves trying new recipes as much as I like starting new quilts.

Several years ago I had a stack like this and I went to the trouble of sorting through all of them and making out hanging file folders so that I could work with them without having to go through each and every one every time I wanted to find something.  And then, the folders got so huge that they became unworkable.

So then I went back to accumulating a stack.  I lied to myself saying that anything that didn't get tried in a month would get recycled.  Right.  And now I'm back where I started.  This morning I went through the stack you see above and filed them all away again.  I wonder how long it will take me to accumulate a new stack five inches high so that I can file them all away again.  

I have vowed to go through these folders one by one to weed out recipes that have no hope of making it into the kitchen.  I make this vow about as often as I vow to exercise more and lose weight.  And so far, I'm sticking with that vow, although I got a little sidetracked with people working in the house for the past two weeks.  They seemed trustworthy enough.  Still, I didn't feel comfortable leaving them alone so that I could go exercise, and so I fell off the exercise wagon.  Tomorrow, I will get back on.  Really.

As for Smitty, he's back at work intently watching car racing with his dad.  We've all had a busy week.