September is gone by, I feel like I didn’t accomplish much. It seems like I was in a distracted state of mind for most of the month. I had three quilt finishes, Alaska, BOO, and Paper boats. I started knitting and ripped the Peacock shawl SIX times, exasperating. I started and ripped three times the Juneteenth shawl, which is coming along nicely now TYVM.

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I finished the cross stitch florals and started on the outline stitching. This is becoming tedious stitching for me. It really makes the flowers look like flowers, but, so many lengths of thread have been used. It takes me about an hour to out line the larger flowers, like the lilies. The “fluffy” looking flowers (celosia?) in the center are just hell. It’s very difficult to follow the diagram and stitch, there no real rhyme or reason to it. I might try to enlarge the diagram and see if that helps.

I have been working on the SQP (secret quilting project) everyday. I have 28 more blocks to go. I can complete four blocks in about 90 minutes, I have to have this done by the end of this month. I wonder if I can get it done by the end of this week. Challenge (?) yeah, maybe not. Our friends at PG&E have decided that the pole and transformer behind our house needs to be replaced. They kindly sent a note last week informing us that we will be without power for most of the day today. I’m pretty sure that its going to take them longer than a day to do this work. The pole is not easy to access, there is a narrow dirt road-like area around it, but its too small to drive a truck through. I am having trouble imagining them carrying a full size wooden utility pole to and from the area. Plus it’s a major poison oak habitat. Sorry guys. Coincidentally we have a contractor installing a whole house generator at our home this month. The generator isn’t here yet though, so there will be no machine use today. Although, they did say 9am to 5pm, I could go stitch a bit.

I have been sewing on my Singer 404 since last Sunday. I sent my Bernina to Sacramento for repairs. I have a friend who’s mom lives there, and she kindly took it there with her this past weekend. The place is called Meissners Sewing and Vacuum Center they have four stores, but the one in Sacramento has the factory trained and certified techs. You may recall that I had tried to get the 790 fixed earlier this summer, but that just made it less than repaired. I was saddened that the repair guy, the shop owner that I have bought all my machines from, couldn’t fix it. He tried, but, other than sending it to Chicago, he did his best.

In other sewing machine news, I have purchased the new Bernina serger, the L890, it should be here next week. I’m very excited, this machine is so, so, um, awesome. If you’ve ever struggled with a serger, threading, tensions, differential feed, argh, you know the frustration factor. This new model is computerized, threads itself, has tension sensors and onboard step by step tutorials on how to use each stitch (there are 27). It has a free arm which makes shortening sleeve and leg hems so much easier. It also does a coverstitch, my current serger, a Bernina MDC1300 does too. But it takes me about an hour to get it set up for a 30 second seam. Needless to say, I am trading it in for the L890.

I worked for a bit on the Halloween quilt yesterday. Some ruler work and free handing around the motifs and such.

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Linking up with Denise at For The Love of Geese for Put Your Foot Down #70 today.

I just realized that I didn’t write down any goals for October in this post. Tomorrow is another day.

Be kind