Top-of-the-Waves Tuesday...

...including the weekend report.

1. Between Thursday and Friday, I purchased 4 candidate spools of thread for machine quilting the commission pieces. I settled on one that matched the backing fabric the best. The other three spools will be used for other projects or for thread plying when I get back to spinning art yarn.
    
2. I spent a good part of the weekend machine quilting the commission pieces. I'm trying to keep my perfectionist tendencies in check, with some success.
    
3. I was down to the last 3 stitch-in-the-ditch sides of the main border when I noticed that one of the border pieces had an area that looked like it had been bleached. Not great when the rest of the border is varying shades of green. I don't know why I hadn't seen it earlier... Sigh.
   
   Fortunately, I always buy more fabric than I need and was able to cut another length. I'll rip out the offending border and sew in the replacement. At least I caught it before I machine quilted that section.
    
4. I'm glad it wasn't as hot this weekend as it was last weekend. The weather allowed me to keep quilting into the afternoon of both days.
    
5. When I wasn't working on the commission pieces, I was either reading or working on the Summer 9-Patch cross stitch project. The cross stitch piece is pretty mindless, to the point where it puts me to sleep!
    
6. The Husband has been doing some work in ancestry.com tracking down his relatives and mine. He found some information about my father's family, which surprised me. Many of my relatives were farmworkers and I didn't think there would be many records of them. We spent some time talking about what the Husband found and what I remembered my mother telling me.
    
7. Getting information about my father's family is always a challenge. When he died in 1961, most of his family drifted away from us and pretty much disappeared after my mother remarried. Only one family stayed close--they lived across the street from us--and my mother still visits with them.
    
8. I called Mom and asked her some questions about my father's family and discovered that I had some of the stories wrong (like I thought my father's mother died young, but it was really her sister who did). In my defense, my mother does tend to use pronouns rather than names so it's easy to mix up the "she"s and "he"s.  I think we'll be picking Mom's brain about the family connections for a while!