Good news/bad news on sewing to-do items

I gave up on my awful sewing machine. Well, not totally, but I took it back to the repair guy who will take a look at it.

I bought a cheap Janome from work. It's the next step up from the Sew Mini and is slightly more substantial. I'm hoping DS1 will learn to sew on it. I'm going to have someone else teach him, because I tend to lose my cool.

So the binding is all sewn on the 13 kimonos and I have hemmed the arms and skirt of a few of them. There is a huge difference in height in the girls in the class, so want to take the ones I have finished with and get the tallest and shortest girls to try them on and take a guess at lengths on a few of the others. They can bunch them up at the waist when it comes to wearing them (it will be covered by a wide Obi), but some of these girls are seriously small and others are taller than DS1, who is one of the tallest boys in the class. I made DS1 try one on last night and he was about to jump out of his skin. It's PIIIIIIIINK! Anyway, the 2 or 3 inches I've been hemming them up make it too short on him, so I need a quick head count and approx length for the tall girls. Having been a tall girl myself, I'm a bit sensitive on the issue of running around in highwater one-size-fits-all.

I just got my Xmas quilt that I started last year out. Good news is that I finished the cutting out and ironing on all the appliqué blocks. Bad news is that I have sewed around the pictures on only 8 of them - candy canes are all done and they're the easiest - and there are 25 total. They're all pretty wrinkled, too, but I can deal with that. Not necessarily by ironing, but by working around it (ducks head in shame).