Guest Room: Done

As I said in my last post my in-laws are coming for a visit. I have one full weekend left to prepare for their arrival, but as of right now they could show up tomorrow and I would feel okay. I am super excited for them to get here; even more so now that the guest room actually resembles something habitable. After years of tiny apartments, I'm kind of blown away that I even have a guest room. Last night I finally finished the quilt for the bed, today I made curtains, and my super wonderful husband hung the curtain rod for me.

The curtains were totally easy. I got a three yard piece of fabric, cut it in half, did a narrow hem on one end, folded over the selvedges and then made a channel for the curtain rod at the top. Easy Peasy. I wanted to visually elongate the window by hanging the curtain higher and having it trail down further, but the cut table girl mis-measured. Oh well. She only charged for three and the window is still fully covered.I don't know if you can really tell in the picture (it's super hard to photograph curtains, what with them being in front of windows and all) but the curtains have a white on white pattern to them. So do all of the white fabrics used in the quilt, although the curtains were not one of those fabrics.

Incidentally, the quilt has 36 different fabrics. I had way too much fun picking out fat quarters. It's a basic nine patch pattern, alternating orange/white and blue/white blocks. I really love the chain pattern that it created.

It took ages to lay everything out because I was trying to avoid any repeat fabric combos. None of my 36 squares are the same. Finished, it's a queen size quilt, but laying it out took up a lot more space then the finished quilt. I didn't have a space in my house large enough to actually lay it all out at once.

I was totally and completely thrilled with the pieced top, however, I started loosing steam when I got to the actually quilting. I did learn a lot though. For example, I learned that I hate polyester batting. Cotton is, for lack of a better word "sticky" so all my previous quilts basically stayed where I put them and pin basting was totally enough.

I wanted to try poly batting because it doesn't make for such a stiff finished quilt. Never. Again. Everything shifted and bunched like crazy. The back of my quilt is horrifically ugly. I actually had to piece on extra backing because my back shifted so much I ended up with a naked edge.

In the end, the top of the quilt looks alright, so I'm happy enough with it, and my mother in law is much too polite to say anything about how ugly the back is. But yeah, totally not a polyester fan. The backing fabric was a poly cotton blend and it was noticeably harder to stitch though for the binding too. I had to break out my thimble and everything. Not my favorite.

At the end of the day I think the quilt looks great, and it even looks okay with my bed skirt. You may recognize that bed skirt because it used to be in the master bed-room but Husband and I got an adjustable base for our bed. I adore my robo bed, but it doesn't work with a bed skirt.

And bonus, I hung up this wonderful sea otter cross stitch that my mom made - probably sometime in the mid-nineties because that was peak sea otter obsession for me. After that I moved onto horses. Yep, I was totally that little girl. I only recently got that cross-stitch back from Mom and I was glad I had a place that I think it looks good in. Just ignore my reflection please and thank you.

Cloth Napkins And Anxiety

So, anxiety, it is a weird thing.

I've always been a pretty anxious person, and even when I know that there is no reason to freak out I have a hard time stopping myself. 

For example, in a couple of weeks and for the first time since my husband and I moved into our new house my in-laws are coming to visit. I adore my in-laws. Really, truly, they are wonderful people and we have a good relationship. I know that they are not going to judge me for my housekeeping, my cooking, or my hospitality. But I'm also totally freaked about them coming because I am going to judge me for my housekeeping and hospitality. Not the cooking, I am a bomb cook if I do say so myself. 

But because I'm anxious my brain is hyper focusing on totally inconsequential details. The fact that I still haven't finished the quilt for the guest room because it's been too hot to work on it? Meh, I got plenty of time. The fact that my napkins are artfully mismatched and I only have six of them? Oh my god PANIC!!!

I am literally loosing sleep over cloth napkins because of my stupid brain. 

Solution? In this case, make some cloth napkins and move on. Sometime I choose not to give in to the compulsion because if I reward my brains behavior it will do it again in the future. And yes, I kind of think of my brain as a naughty puppy that I have to train. But sometimes you just have to pick your battles. I had 2 yards of fabric from my grandmother's stash that I had been meaning to make into napkins for a while now. 

So yesterday I cut out 8 18" squares from an adorable red checked lightweight cotton and brought them to Mom's house. Napkins can be 16, 18, 20, or even 22 inch squares. I picked 18 because that is how long the ruler I could find was. If you are doing them on a sewing machine with metered corners you need to cut them larger then you want them to end up, but I wanted to do them as easily as possible. Thus, going to Mom's house. 

See, my mom has a serger. Technically I have one too but I can't actually get it to work. The neat thing about sergers is that they can do a rolled hem stitch. Mom and I learned that to set it up, you should really read the instructions because it wasn't actually as easy as just take out one of the needles and get going. There was some other 1" metal bit whose function I am totally not clear on, but which made the rolled hem totally not work. But once we got it set up right it really was super duper easy. Just line of the fabric and zoom down the edge. No folding, no pressing, no metered corners and no wasted fabric. Love it! I didn't go over there with the intention of having my mom do them for me, but it did work out that way because my mom is super rad and she loves me.

Look how pretty she made my napkins!

Note: At the time that I wrote this the guest room quilt totally wasn't done, but I forgot to actually hit publish on this post when I wrote it a week ago. Now the quilt is done and I will be blogging about it, possibly later today.