Jun 22 17

Picking Up an Abandoned Project

 
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Last Fall, I created several blocks like the ones above for the center of a quilt.  I finished them up  and here’s what they looked like when I laid them out on the floor:
 
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I added a small triangle at each of the corners of each block, and here’s how they look all pieced together:
 
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I finally got back to it recently and started working on the first appliqued border.  Here you can see one of the borders in process:
 
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I am lucky and can embroider more than one border at once; here is a shot that shows 2 borders being worked on simultaneously:
 
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…and here are all 4 borders laid out on the floor:
 
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This has been an odd month.  I spent the first part of the month traveling and teaching, so there was no time to sew outside of doing class demos.  We drove to NC last week and I was really looking forward to a few weeks of intense sewing/quilting.  When we opened our garage door, we found that a leak from the kitchen had waterlogged the ceiling in the garage (suspended ceiling of ceiling tiles) and the tiles had all broken into wet pieces and fallen down.  The insulation was soaked as well.  The floor was covered with smelly water and a “paste-like” mess from degrading ceiling tiles.  Lovely!  We went upstairs and found that about a quarter of the wood floor in the dining room was soaked, as was about a quarter of the kitchen tiles.  The culprit that caused all this was a tiny, pin-hole sized crack in the plastic tubing that carries water to the ice maker in the refrigerator.  (We have since learned this is a common problem and can be avoided by replacing that tubing with a small piece of braided steel tubing that costs between $12-$25.)  We ended up calling one of those disaster recovery teams and they rigged up this interesting system to dry things out.  Here’s a shot that gives you an idea of what things looked like from upstairs:
 
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This was a drying/de-humidifcation process that went on for several days.  From the garage below, a small “room” was walled off and heated/dehumidified to help dry the wood and tiles that were above.  Here are 2 shots of the garage set-up:
 
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…and here’s a shot of what was in the room:
 
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These machines all worked for 24 hours/day and it was like being on a tarmac for many days because of all the noise.  The people who helped us were WONDERFUL (1-800-water damage)  and we are happy to say that everything really did dry out and we didn’t have to rip up the wood floors or the tiles!  It is so nice to be back to a normal routine with silence again and I am looking forward to some productive time in my sewing room!!
 
 

3 Comments

  1. Julie Hertel Says:

    Your work is beautiful! So sorry to see you have to cope with that water damage. Amazing how damage can be done in so short a period. Hang in there.

  2. Robbi Imhoff Says:

    What a mess. Sorry that you came home to this, but lad it is all better now.

  3. Claudia Wade Says:

    Happy to hear that your water damage was able to be taken care of without major reconstruction. We had a hidden dishwasher leak for months or years that ended up making us have to replace a large area of ceramic tile and some drywall. Those disaster recovery companies are great, aren’t they? I know what you mean about the noise. We had big fans etc going full blast for days.