It has been a while since I did one of these posts, but I figured why not. I’ve made decent progress over the last week in the studio, mostly because I’ve been fairly consistent in getting in there at least every other day during the week.

Last weekend, I spent a fair amount of time in the studio, working on my golf quilt. I won’t lie – sewing around those appliqué pieces over and over and over is sort of tedious, and yet they take a fair amount of time to do. I think I have about 70 of them completed now, with another 50-ish to go. I will say that they aren’t difficult, but I think it would be a little easier if I had the dual feed version of the open toe foot. One of the things I’ve noticed is that as I turn the block to keep the stitch on the appliqué, I have to stop every few stitches to let the fabric return to a relaxed state, or else it bunches up between the needle and the right toe of the foot. I think the dual feed would fix that, but I’m not willing to spend $65 to find out. However, when I get ready to do another appliqué foot, I probably will buy it, because I do think it would save me some time.

I work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays most weeks, so yesterday I woke up around 6:45 am and went to my studio to sew for an hour before I had to “be at work.” I worked on the golf quilt right up until 8 am, but I only got 9 blocks completed in that time. I was hoping for more, and I may be able to do more, but between the early hour and the issue mentioned above, I don’t want to go too fast.

Tuesday during lunch, I started on the Kimberbell Collectible Christmas monthly subscription kits. I haven’t done any of them before now, and they are just in a drawer waiting to be completed. I happened to pick up the first project. These are not quick projects, and I wanted to use the Bernina embroidery unit to do it for reasons I will talk about in a minute. Since I’ve never used this machine for embroidery, it took me a little time to figure out how to set everything up and get going. I did manage to get the back of the Cape Cod cottage done, and tomorrow I plan to try to get the back done. Then I can do the roof, and there is a village Christmas tree in this kit as well.

There are six kits so far, I think, and earlier this week, they posted a free cottage on their website. The little I’ve done has been much easier than I expected, and the instructions are very clear and easy to follow. This is my first Kimberbell project, but it most definitely will not be my last.

Along those lines, I watch Kim’s What’s New Wednesday on YouTube every week, and I finally succumbed to self-induced peer pressure and signed up for a one day event, Treats For My Boo. I’m scheduled to attend a workshop the first weekend of September, which is why I wanted to try out the Bernina for embroidery. It’s the smallest embroidery machine I have, and will be easiest to take along to a class. I can’t wait to go!

What are you working on this week? Let me know in the comments!