Tetris 3

An ETSY customer commissioned me to make a tetris quilt top for her mother-in-law a couple of months ago, which somehow I never posted on here. So this one is Tetris 2. (Tetris 1 being the one I made a year ago for my step-daughter.)

As soon as she saw it, she ordered another one for her husband. Apparently they are hardcore Tetris fans. She is going to quilt both tops herself. So this is Tetris 3. I always rearrange the pieces, so no two Tetris quilts are just alike:

Can you see my mistake? I just this moment, as I was uploading this photo, saw it. Guess I'm not quite done after all...

How in the world did I miss that?

Coincidentally, one of my recent purchases was this seam ripper:

Called Seam Fix. The big white end pulls the thread pieces out of your fabric after you've ripped out a seam. Pretty handy thing.

But back to Tetris, my friend Mandy always says the piece at the top makes her physically nervous because she wants to grab the controller & fix it before it falls:)

And as soon as I get this one fixed, I'll be starting on yet another Tetris commissioned quilt. This one with some slight color changes. I can think of worse ways to be busy. The various piles of laundry in the other room are but one example.

Hope you had a great Easter and are having a wonderful weekend. My daughter and I joined a huge worship service (about 15,000 attended) held in a park downtown. The weather was perfect, the music was wonderful, and I fully enjoyed just spreading out on a quilt, enjoying it all.

After which we had a nice ham dinner & some egg hunts.

Ok, one more picture - one of the items in my daughter's basket was a mask of a cat. Little did I know what perfect timing that gift was since she had just lost her second front tooth:

How adorable is that?

Tidy Tuesday, the one in which I actually have a helpful tip

I haven't posted a Tidy Tuesday in a couple of weeks because, honestly, I haven't been very focused on housework. I've been in a complete sewing zone, which was helped by a few commissioned orders. This weekend, however, I reached my limit with the messy house and tried to play catch up all in one day. That didn't work so well for me:) But it's a great deal better than it was.

And one of the better areas (here comes the tip) is in my drip pans. You all may know this and may wonder how I don't, but it wasn't until this weekend I discovered the tip of using ammonia to clean my drip pans. There are many sites discussing it, but I found it here. Previously, I've tried everything - soaking in scalding water & soap or Pine Sol, running thru the dishwasher, scouring pads, which would just get shredded without budging the dirt. I resigned myself to dirty drip pans most of the year until I finally broke down & bought new ones just so I could have clean ones for a week or so. Before I went to bed Friday night, I sealed each one in a ziplock bag with just a splash of ammonia & Saturday morning, I had this, after a brief wipe:

Not perfect, but you should have seen them! I think I'll do it again this weekend & see if I can't get the rest off.

Since my "clean all the things" rampage Saturday, I've slipped back into my sewing zone, but out of necessity. I've had a plan for my daughter's teacher appreciation gift for several months, but received a phone call from the PTA last Thursday saying that teacher appreciation had been moved up to this week. Thanks for the notice, guys! I guess no one makes hand made gifts anymore? I wasn't going to let my plans get derailed over a bumped up deadline, so I got to work.

This teacher is all about reading, which is probably a good trait in a 1st grade teacher, and I think she'll like it. She has done an amazing job with my daughter, who I feel owes it completely to her that she is probably reading several grade levels ahead. And she now has the courage to try a word. She tries all the words. Every moment we're in the car, she's reading something from a sign somewhere & I'm usually frantically looking around to see what she's reading.

Unfortunately, it was raining yesterday, so I didn't get the best of pictures of it. I echo quilted each book and then hand quilted with some pearl cotton around the word. I wish I had a close up of the word, but for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me yesterday. I did get a close up of that tilting book:

Because with all those irregular angles, I was super proud to have the corners meet so nicely. I was sure I'd either cut one off, or end up with a book "floating" above the shelf. I think I audibly squealed when I peeled back the binding to see that perfect little corner:) As a bonus, each piece, even the white ones, were taken from my scraps. That makes it even more fun for me.