Mereth and I have spent a lot of time in the workroom lately, bringing in a new sturdy sewing table and getting rid of two pieces of furniture that were no longer needed.The simple act of bringing in a new table led to 5 days of shifting, dusting, vacuuming, sorting and purging. Along the way we updated paperwork, made new records, reorganised our tops and batting scraps. There's still work to be done, but at least we can go back to quilting now.

The double 4-patch was available, so it was the first top on the machine, stitching away while we dug into boxes and cupboards.

                                                

You can't see the quilting, but it's done.

I used a pattern of mine called Feather Kisses.

It's designed to fill a hexagon completely, but works just as well as an allover pattern.

It feels good to have one top quilted this early in the year.  I would love to aim for one a month, which is hardly unreasonable.

All the purging and chucking out and binning feels great, but the month started with a salutary lesson. Sometimes it pays to hoard things. Our Statler setup is 15 years old.  One morning Mereth went to start quilting, and the monitor refused to turn on. The computer was going, but the monitor was blank. With a system that old there was no guarantee that it would recognise a new monitor, and as it's still Windows 98, with no virus software because of the Statler software, we were never going to be able to connect it to the internet to install drivers. Lots of head scratching went on.

Then Mereth remembered a monitor from an old system of hers, from 2006, that she'd kept because it still worked when the computer was scrapped. She went home to fetch it, we plugged it in, and problem solved. Is 16 years too long to keep computer equipment?  Apparently not. The whole family teases Mereth about her hoarding, but she's saved the day on more than one occasion.

We need a new computer, and that is on the cards for later on this year, but for now we're keeping our fingers crossed that it all works as it should.