So Far...

... the progress on the mystery quilt went slower than I expected. I woke up at 4am on Saturday instead of 6. Can you say excited? :) Clue #1 goes by fine, onto clue #2; I'm sewing up a storm and trying to get some "bonus triangles" from the pieces and I managed to sew about 30 pieces with no bobbin thread!! Don't you just hate that? Sewing on and on without a single clue that you're just wasting your time and electricity. Blah! :P After that, things moved a little slower and I crashed and fell asleep before getting to clue #3. Can you believe that I slept for 3.5 hours straight?

I kept on sewing until we needed to head over to in-law's for church that evening. Afterwards we stayed until 10pm to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the new version. I got to my machine at 10:30 and started sewing like crazy. I was still sewing when the new year rolled in - I think that's a great way to start the year, doing what I love! :) Somewhere around 2am I got a huge bird's nest on the bottom. I picked the bad stitches out, rethreaded my machine and said "enough!" and went to bed.

Well, turns out whatever problem I was having with the bobbin area was WAAAAAAAY worse than I thought. On Sunday over and over I was trying to get a plain ol' straight stitch with no luck. Then I knew I was gonna have to get on my knees and get dirty by thoroughly cleaning out the bobbin area. I even took off some bobbin components so I could get behind it to clean it. Wow... the gunk was unbelieveable!! I switched to a less linty thread, and of course my brain said that I wouldn't have as much problems, right? Not that I ever had problems like this before. The good news is with a million q-tips, lots of oil, tweezers and a couple of "ewws!" everything is running smooth again. :)

Back to sewing the mystery... and I got 2 dozen of these today:

What you don't see is that there's gonna be a 9-patch once the sashing and cornerstones are in place. But I haven't gotten that far. I really hope tomorrow? Yet I have big plans tomorrow...

I'm hoping to dye some fabric for the first time ever!!! I got about 10 yards of white muslin ready to go. I went to WalMart and got all the supplies I needed - squeeze bottle, measuring cups and spoons, buckets, rubberbands, funnels and containers. I was all over the store to get what I needed. Did you know that funnels from the car section are cheaper than the kitchen section? Or that buckets are best from the cleaning section? Heck, I don't think I got any of my actual supplies from the craft area! Erg, I did get some fabric! Stuff that starts with B - Backgrounds, Border and Baby. *giggle* ok, Baby isn't really an "authorized" stash-busting fabric. Good thing I haven't signed up for the No-Buy fabric group! ;)

Leah