Great start to July

I love having a small sewing group to keep me on task. While my guild is also great, there is nothing like a set of friends to remind me that I quilt for my peace of mind, and that when I'm not quilting, other parts of my life start wearing on me.

So one friend in my group issued a challenge to look for the reason(s) we felt we weren't making better progress on our quilting projects, and tackle one or more for the next 3 weeks. This in response to many of us saying we hadn't even unpacked our machines or projects between the times we gathered to sew together.

So my response was to challenge myself to three tasks before we leave on a July 25 vacation:

1. Finish machine quilting my Dad's t-shirt quilt (about 25% done) as I’d like to take it to Colorado to bind.

2. Finish scanning my father’s collection of slides and get the indexes for the carousels scanned and labeled. This set of his photos from about 1960-1979 will go on DVDs as gifts to my family, and it’s been hanging over my head now for about 4 years. I’d estimate I’ll have about 800-900 slides scanned when this little project is done. After last night, I have 1 more carousel to do; about 90 slides.

3. Make my basement feel like it’s a living space, and not a storage space. This is probably my biggest obstacle to sewing, as I hate facing the junk on my way to my sewing area. To this end, I spent most of the weekend working on this. DH and I bought big storage cabinets with doors and they’ve been filled with the excess household and keepsake items. I’ve tossed another 3 trash bags of stuff, and reorganized all the books, scrapbooks, gift wrap, and my family photo albums and books we love to read and reread onto dedicated book shelves. I’ve freed up two plastic shelves that are going into the furnace room, and they’ll help me when it’s time for that annual space cleaning. I need to move a 4 drawer file cabinet across the room, and then I can consolidate all the paperwork that I think I need to keep in one space. I mostly cleared off my cutting table. I’ll continue to putter in the basement in the evenings, with my goal of having the cleaning done by next Sunday.

I'll take some photos of the spaces and post them soon.