Double There!

I finished some socks.  

I have very little recollection of knitting any of these, except for the one on the far right, which I knit in two days, over the course of 16 hours of training this week.  

In other news, I finished this quilt, which I need a name for.  Maybe I'll just call it "THERE."  That sounds good.  I feel much the same way about finishing the quilt as I do finishing the top.  This took forever, time that I should have been spending on other stuff.  I just can't quit you, THERE Quilt. 

It's in the wash right now, in fact I should go move it to the dryer before the red parts bleed onto other fabrics.  BRB. 

Here's the back.  I used two half-yards of Connecting Threads fabric that I've had in my stash for a long time and that really only match each other.  I like them, but didn't really have a plan for them, and sewn together, they were just the right size for the back.  The label is done on the border fabric, which is a nice "low volume" (back in my day that was just called "light," get off my lawn) I got last year and didn't have any other plans for.   

 Designing this one was interesting, because I don't feel like I have a good design sense - when people talk about making choices for reasons, it strikes me that I have very little sense of direction with this.  So, I did whatever I felt like doing.  Is this a good design?  I dunno.  The gray parts were a huge PITA - it would have been much easier to just float everything in a sea of white.  The border - does it help?  Detract?  No idea.  It's just what I felt like doing.  My instinct was to do a dark gray for the binding, but I'm not sure how much of that I have left, and I went with a scrappy binding of mostly fabrics I hadn't managed to get into the squares for one reason or another. 

I did a squared-off stipple for the quilting, and I do feel that this nicely complements the boxy, right-angularity of the scrap squares.  It was difficult to do and definitely is not perfect.  I'd read a long time ago that it's helpful to kind of pause for a stitch or two before changing direction, and this definitely helped make the changes more square than curved.  


Explorer Bag

I finished attaching the nylon webbing to the explorer bag I started and then let sit for a long time.  

The front flap is a piece of light oranges I'd put together for the background of a scrappy quilt that ended up being too nondistinct from the other orange.  I freaking love it, and it was just the perfect size for this.  

Don't look too closely at the zipper.  

 Happy crafting!