WIP Wednesday #4 - Quest for the Holy Grail

This will be my fourth time linking up to Freshly Pieced, which is kind of a quilter's block party.  Since we just recently returned from the Great American Road Trip, there hasn't been too much sewing going on yet.  But I do have three Famer's Wife Quilt blocks to share, one of which I made this week.

Continuing in alphabetical order, we have Box.  It's a simple 9-patch, so each of the individual squares finishes to 2".  The HST's were cut 2 7/8", and the one square was cut 2 1/2".  That's a wacky vintage gray print I used - pretty sure it's not 100% cotton.

This is Broken Dishes, but I think of it as Grandma's Broken Dishes because those were her colors.  The check is some of her fabric, I think, and the flower pattern is from one of my mom's aprons.  This was another one where I drew a grid of 2 3/8" squares to make the HST's.

And the one I made this week: Broken Sugar Bowl.  This is another 9-patch pattern, very similar to Jacob's Ladder.  I used one of my Grandma's old aprons for the sugar bowl fabric.

She must have loved that apron a lot, because it was mended very carefully in several places.  Look how she first sewed a bigger patch on the back, then reverse appliqued the edges of the hole.  And she even matched the pattern a little bit.

Here's what it looked like on the back -- the patch was machine hemmed, but hand sewn on.  It is a really pretty vintage print, but there aren't many usable bits of fabric left unfortunately.  There's even a little bit of fraying on one of the triangles in the sugar bowl that I didn't notice until the block was together.

Now, the Holy Grail for me has nothing to do with quilting; what I'm really in search of is a clean, healthy, well-organized house (with kind, well-behaved, respectful kids, of course).  Not that you'd know it from looking at it or anything.  So when we came back from vacation, I realized that company's coming in less than a week and summer vacation is FLYING by, so I would need to act fast to get the house in even semi-acceptable order before All Hope Is Lost.  The way things go during the school year, I don't do much cleaning.  And of course, summer vacation is supposed to be for fun, right? Well, sometimes I get the nesting impulse and cleaning is actually fun.  A little bit.  A very little bit, and only when you pick a tiny corner of the house where no one else ever goes that you know will stay clean for a day or two.  Like the basement.

I'm always intrigued by little racks and storage things for organizing your house.  But just locating the hammer and 2 nails for hanging this rack was an ordeal.  And yes, those are canning jar lids tacked up onto the wood - I'm not exactly sure why, somebody once said it was so that mice couldn't get through the knotholes.  There are a lot of them, especially on stairs.

Our basement is a scary place.  Here's the site of my unfortunate accident at the beginning of the summer.  That's after I vacuumed up vast quantities of spidery cobwebs from the rafters and swept up the loose dirt and rocks a bit.  Yes, about 10% of our basement walls are bare earth, and that is probably a bit of groundwater seeping up in the corner there and turning the earth damp.  I've been concentrating on cleaning the storage alcove - we call it the "coal cellar" although really the old furnace burned sawdust.  The last time it flooded we lost the particle-board shelving unit along the far wall and I recently bought a metal rack to replace it.  So that's been put together and I'm slowly organizing stuff in there.  I'm spraying the walls with a bleach-water solution to help with the mildewy smell.  But what I really need to do is to clean the parts of the house that will be used by the 19 people that are coming for our family reunion next week - especially the guest room and dining room.  Are they going to care about the coal cellar?  Probably not.  But I actually have a chance of cleaning the whole coal cellar, and there's not a chance in the world of getting the dining room neat before they get here.