Sewing for Good Sunday

I've been so excited for this first Sewing for Good Sunday of 2019. If you've been around my blog for a while, you know sewing for charity has been important to me. I tried to count out exactly how many things I had made over the years but lost count. (Just check out the charity tab at the top of the page. You'll see why I lost count.) I did find that I had 183 blog posts about things I made for charity. 183! Between quilts and pillowcases and turtle pillows for kids and stockings for soldiers I had written about it on the blog 183 different days.

We can now make that 184. While I like the Sewing for Good Sunday title, this post should really be titled Why You Shouldn't Start a Project in the Middle of the Night.

Like I said, I was excited about today. I was up late last night so I decided to wait until midnight rolled around to get started. (Wanted it to officially be Sunday.) I went through my fabrics and pre-cut squares and found some patterns to work with. I arranged and rearranged and swapped out colors and rearranged again and came up with this at 1:06 am.

After that hour-long process I still wasn't happy. I decided it was time to go to bed and start again in the morning. Before I headed to bed I cleaned up my work area and put the fabrics back into the Ziploc bag with the others.

That's when I found these beauties that had been shoved at the bottom of the bag.

My 1:19 am discovery

The excitement of finding blocks I had already stitched together made me want to stay up even later and make a plan. I grabbed my graph paper and got started.

1:37 am

And of course you can't come up with a plan without getting started sewing on the plan. So I found some strips of fabric that would work for part of the quilt. 

1:47 am

I considered going to bed after that. But again, you can't come this far then just stop. So I sewed some scraps together to make a wide blue border.

2:10am

Looking at the time I decided I should call it a night. I neatly piled the fabrics on my workspace and put a light colored spool of thread and bobbin in my sewing machine. I then grabbed the can of compressed air to clean up my sewing machine so it would be all nice and fresh and clean in the morning. (Now I know I'm not supposed to be using compressed air to clean the nooks and crannies and bobbin area, but it was after two in the morning and I was looking to be speedy.)

And that's when my compressed air can started behaving badly. Sometimes when I hold the button down too long the compressed air freezes things. But this compressed air was bubbling on the surfaces. On the outside of the machine. In the bobbin area. And even on the bobbin itself. What the heck was going on with the compressed air?

I then realized what happened. Notice anything interesting about where I store my black and white can of compressed air? Notice what I also store right next to it?

2:13 am mistake

Yep. I had sprayed WD-40 all over my sewing machine at 2:13 am on a Sunday morning. If that wasn't a sign it was time to go to bed I don't know what would have been.

After a WD-40 clean up (my sewing machine is so shiny now!) and a good night's rest I headed back to work. And by one in the afternoon I had this sewn together. Batting is cut and backing is picked out, even.

Time to set it aside until later and start piecing the next one. I'm thinking I'm liking these colors.

I snapped my fingers and now those fabrics have been sewn together into blocks that look like this. (I wish it was that easy!)

But now I feel a nap coming on. I'm not about to get myself so tired that I mix up WD-40 and compressed air again. Check in next Sunday as I figure out what to do with these next blocks.