April Showers Bring New Carpet

Hi! How was your week? We were sure busy here at Chez Kizerian. We’ve been talking about starting up some of the home improvements we’ve put off over the last year or more because of Covid. It’s true that we have an eye toward downsizing in the next couple years, but these improvements are things we want now for ourselves even if only for a couple years. Plus we need to maintain the home and put its best foot forward when the time to sell does come.  

When we moved in, most of the house was carpeted in a fairly nice (quality and condition-wise) grayish-green carpet. Think eighties dark seafoam green.  It’s been replaced by hardwood floors upstairs. However, the stairs going down to the basement level, my studio (a former family room), and our office (pic at right) still have the fugly green carpet. The other spare bedroom downstairs was carpeted and painted (and new window and window coverings installed) about 5 years ago. While we love our hardwood upstairs, we really need the insulating qualities of carpet (and a thick pad) in the basement. The old green carpet has seen two basement floods (we have since fixed the drains indoors and outside that caused those issues) and decades of traffic. 

So, on Monday we went to Home Depot and selected new carpet. They came to measure on Wednesday, and we had a quote on Thursday. We went in and paid for it on Thursday and then got a call from the installers that same day wanting to install it next week. Wait, WHAT?!? I’ve got whiplash from the speed! (Two years ago when we ordered new doors for my studio it took them over five months to deliver and install). I pushed back the installation a week until Tuesday the 27th, which will give me time to move all my fabric and sh*stuff into the spare bedroom. The installers will move the furniture out (tables and bookcases and a desk in the office) and put them back. Needless to say, I have had a lot of work (1) decluttering the spare bedroom to make way for things to be temporarily moved in and (2) starting to move books, fabric and all the sewing paraphernalia from the studio into the bedroom.

But for now I’m still sewing away! A week from today is our next Quilts for Kids workshop, and I will have somewhere between 16-18 quilts to take to them, depending on what I can finish up in the next week. Three of the quilts were made and donated by my friend Terri, and the rest are made by me from scraps. 

I finished up some Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks for Blue April and am linking up to the Scrappy Saturday link-up party.  First, 24 “chips” at 4.5” square:

And then, since I still had so many scraps, I decided to start sewing 6.5” string blocks in the RSC color of the month plus white-with-black strings. I made 9 of those. No plan for these yet.

And then I used up a pile of 2.5” squares to sew these 18 4-patch blocks. They’ll go to live in the Parts Department for now until called upon to give themselves in service of a Future Scrappy Quilt. 

But there was more Light Blue nagging me to sew it. This little flimsy got sandwiched up and quilted with curls and loops. Sea Scraps is a little donation quilt for Quilts for Kids that measures 40x45”. 

At that point I decided to change lanes and finish up the four-patch posy quilt whose blocks I showed last month. The blocks are all sewn together with sashing and cornerstones. Then I pieced a backing of mostly the solid lavender fabric with a leftover chunk of the floral to make it wide enough. Now that it’s been sandwiched, I can get to the quilting over the next few days. 

I’ll keep the quilting simple, as I always do for donation quilts. Besides, my Bernina is having some tension issues and I may have to take it in for servicing. I’ve tried adjusting the tension myself and have switched threads and needles sizes, but nothing is correcting the issue. It’s the first time in the almost nine years that I’ve had this machine that I’m going to have to take it in (other than its annual servicing) for a mechanical issue. 

In the meantime, I’m going to start on sewing these Twisted Twin Sisters blocks together. This is about half of the 120 blocks, and I’m just sewing them into pairs for now.

I still can’t decide if I want to make it into one quilt that would finish at 60x72”, or divide the blocks up and add borders or something so I could get 2 donation quilts from them.  Stay tuned.