Back in balance

I love vacations, I love going away and I love traveling.  That being said, I also love being home.  I have been out and about for the past 3 weeks - three short trips, all of them fabulous.  Before you go, you have to do laundry, arrange for mail and newspaper plus pack.  When you return, there is mail and bills to deal with plus lots of laundry.  There is a new wrinkle in my post trip catching up process - catching up digitally.  I write Yelp reviews for the places I visited, I update my Facebook, upload my pictures, post albums, order photo books and catch up on email. 

In order to really feel totally integrated back into my life I also have to return to the reality of cooking, cleaning up and doing some exercise.  Then I can finally return to sewing which has been getting short shrift the past three weeks.  I literally craved the sewing room and I finally got up there when everything else was all caught up.

I turned on my Longarm and quilted for about an hour, finishing the top.  I ended up with too much batting mushed up in the middle.  Sigh.  Last quilt I had blips of fabric folded up on the back and I really focused on making the back tight and straight.  It is always something!  Aren't I too old to be making dumb mistakes.  Speaking of mistakes, remember the tension problems when I first started this quilt on the Gammill.  Nope, neither did I but it came back to me.  I rolled it back to the beginning and picked out about 6 inches of quilting all the way across.  This took about 2 hours and it was pure pleasure, ha.  The only positive (just call me Pollyanna) is that the mistake was tension so it really did come out fairly easily but left needle marks. I tried to follow them when I redid the quilting which took about ten minutes.  (Yes, 2 hours to take out what I replaced with ten minutes of sewing.  Cool.)

I removed the quilt from the Longarm and trimmed it, wincing at the extra batting but which the machine had smashed down pretty nicely.  I cut the bindings and sewed on the top and bottom.  I now have that quilt in my chair where I will work on it for a night or two and then repeat with the side bindings. 

I loved my trips but I also adore having my life back in balance.  I physically was craving sewing time and I got about 6 hours of it today.  Now that's a great way to end a vacation!