A Sunny Day

The weather heard my moaning and has, at the time of writing this, cheered up again. Although according to the forecasters it's not going to last.

Still, I got lots of sleep last night and am refreshed and back to having a sunny outlook on life. I got stuck into some serious quilting last night as I decided on the drive home to make a small quilt for Lia's Key Worker at nursery who is having a baby. Only thing is that she finishes on Friday. And Lia doesn't go to nursery on a Friday so the quilt has to be ready by Thursday. Yes I do mean this week!

She doesn't know what flavour she's having so it had to be a pretty neutral one and I remembered I had a lot of left over Winnie the Pooh fabric from when I made my nephew a quilt - cue half an hour of digging through my stash and comparing fabrics to make sure I had enough for what I wanted to do and then an evening of measuring, cutting and sewing. Quilt top is completed so tonight I will layer and quilt - only round the block quilting - and hopefully get the first two sides of binding on.

So I'm happy because I should get it done in plenty of time (well with a day to spare but given I only had three days to do it that's good time management) and also because I used up a lot of fabric from my stash that I had no idea what I would use it for.

DH put together an extension for our wardrobe at the weekend. Only another corner unit to end it off but he moved all of his clothes there and freed up some space in the rest of it so I now have more stash space. *grin*. This is not a reason to buy more stash, this is a reason to store my fabric in a better way and also to be ruthless about culling what I know I'm not going to use. I've already identified around 30 pieces of hand dyed cross stitch fabric that I will never stitch on and two kits I know I won't ever get round to doing and that was only clearing two small boxes out!

I'm trying to organise my fabric better - Christmas, Halloween and batiks all sorted into piles and then the rest by colour so I'm not constantly digging around for stuff or missing bits. I have very little fabric I don't like but the few pieces I do have I'm going to put to one side to practice machine quilting on. I did a course on free motion quilting a while back but haven't really done anything since (it took me quite a while to get the table for my machine for a start). I also want to try some patterns - I'm bored with just in the ditch quilting around blocks!

So, my stash de-clutter has started and I'm going to start listing things on eBay soon - if nothing else anything I sell will pay for a couple of Baby Jane BOM installments.

I'm also still working on the Big House Clean Up. My idea is to get it all done before we go away in three weeks and then when I am working less I can devote an hour each day to cleaning, one room a day so the house will be much tidier and we don't have to spend time doing it at the weekends.