Excited for what’s next

July 10, 2024

Last night hubs and I celebrated my birthday at The Blue Ridge Grille in Buckhead. It’s one of our favorite places to celebrate extra special events. The food and service were superb, as usual. I think the last time we were there was to celebrate hubs retiring from Home Depot. That’s been well over two years ago.

Anyhow, this particular birthday meant I finally achieved the “magic age” for my teacher retirement benefits to kick in. (No more mortgage level health insurance premiums either!) We celebrated what’s ahead as we finally exit the holding pattern we’ve been in the past two years. Retirement officially begins August 1st.

We don’t expect much to change when it comes to our day-to-day activities. We’re just excited to have the funds previously earmarked to pay exorbitant health insurance premiums now available to tackle some minor home improvement projects and put toward a couple more bucket list trips. Sadie is also slated to get a new dogmobile (my SUV) by year end.

We’ve also started thinking seriously about where we’d like to live in retirement. That’s a tough one. We love our location and neighborhood, but are not happy about future plans for our area. I’ll be attending a DOT open house today about the future express lanes coming to the top end of I-285. I’m curious to see how they plan to add toll lanes in each direction with all the multimillion dollar homes along the proposed path between Vinings and Sandy Springs. I’m more interested in how the planned entrance/exit ramp less than 1 mile from our home will impact the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

Dining table decorated for birthday celebration
Cute table decorations that greeted us when celebrating my birthday!

Time to get busy quilting

July 7, 2024
Quilting a quilt using a sewing machine.
Machine quilting my jelly roll race quilt in using an elongated wavy stitch pattern.

It’s hot outside. I can’t think of a better way to keep cool than to spend afternoons in my basement sewing space diligently chipping away at the pile of tops needing to be quilted. The pictured quilt is a version of the Jelly Roll Race 2 quilt using one of three Liberty of London jelly rolls I purchased from Mostly Mutts Marketplace back in April. I have two more tops to quilt made from the remaining jelly rolls. Each quilt top is a different design, but all three will share the same backing and binding fabrics. This one was quilted using my walking foot and the long, curvy stitch 99 on my Janome 8900. The other two will provide me with some much needed FMQ practice. All will be donated to my guild’s community service partners.

At the last community service sew day, one of my bee group members presented me with a floral charm pack and challenged me to see what I could do with it without spending any money. My personal challenge has been to make donation quilts using existing stash, fabrics procured from the free table or given by friends as much as possible. Here’s a disappearing 4 patch based off something I saw on Pinterest. It uses the floral charm pack, along with some batiks and white background from my stash. It’s now also ready for quilting. I didn’t spent any money on the top, but I did buy backing fabric on sale at Hobby Lobby.

Quilt top in a disappearing four patch design
Disappearing four patch quilt design inspired by a photo found on Pinterest!

Personally, I’m on a mission to complete the half-done quilt tops and get the stack of completed tops quilted ASAP. Larger quilt tops will be sent to a long armer and I’ll do the rest myself (practicing various FMQ motifs learned in class). At the moment, I have no plans to replace my Janome 8900, as my system of piecing on a FW or small Elna and reserving the 8900 for borders and machine quilting seems to be working well.

New big quilt show coming to East Coast

July 2, 2024

Road to California recently announced it will bring a version of its event to the East Coast next summer. This event will be held at the Richmond Convention Center in Richmond, VA in late June 2025. RTC is a quilt show that offers classes with national instructors and plenty of shopportunity. Attending a Road to California event is on my retirement quilty bucket list; however, the January event date hasn’t worked since retiring two years ago. It will be so awesome to have it close enough to drive with friends rather than having to fly!

Wonder if QuiltCon’s success in Raleigh earlier this year made other event organizers decide to take a look at heading east? Who knows? ICYMI, QuiltCon will be returning to Raleigh, NC in February, 2026. I was so hoping for a beach location! Fortunately, there are other quilting events that usually take place at the beach around the same time. 🙂

My sewing machine is packed and ready to travel!