Another Move

Hey ho, Orooni the Crafter here.  I'm moving crafting spaces again, and that process always takes longer than I expect.  This has meant that I've had to focus on little handwork pieces, rather than anything that takes lots of cutting or space, so I've been utterly crushing my handwork goals recently.  See this shocking development:

This is 25 flowers all sewn up.  I'd stalled in the middle of the 8th one, and then whammo, they're done.  I wish I had more.  The next step is to deal with the big piece of linen that will make up both the background of the quilt top and the middle of each flower.  I have to cut out a bunch of middles, and then, instead of embroidering flowers on them, I plan to embroider the name of a virtue, with some little picture to go along with it.  I'm excited about this, but the amount of energy and focus it will take to get that started is just not happening right now.  

 

I'm also unsure about the directions for putting the flowers together - it says to applique the center of the flower to the petals before taking the papers out of the petals, which sounds like it would be both difficult to do and difficult to make look good.  So I'm thinking about appliqueing them after the flowers are appliqued to the background.  

Next up is the Monkey See, Monkey Applique quilt, and I have either reached or come very, very close to reaching the point where I do not have any other medium/dark fabrics that I haven't already used.  I'm repeating light backgrounds but trying not to repeat the medium/darks.  I need them all spread out to check on the other possible fabrics to use, and my design wall hasn't been moved yet, sooo...

One virtue of my new space is that there is actual sunlight sometimes:

At this moment of the move, I have basic sewing tools and a clear desk, so I jumped at the chance to make my ironing board cover, which recently has been a nice twill piece of fabric haphazardly draped over three layers of batting and the frame.  It is now this:

Pretty and functional!  My last cover literally crumbled into singed dust, so this is a great improvement. 

I'm planning a gnome quilt, which is also very exciting and will take a lot of cutting and planning, which I haven't been up for.  In the meantime, I pulled out a pack of tiny hexagon papers and the enormous stack of scraps and have started basting:

I don't know exactly what this will be, but there are at least two possible plans.  

Happy crafting!

all the things

I am doing a lot of stuff right now.  It involves glue, paint, embroidery thread, Bottom Line thread, Liberty fabrics, hunks of wood, thrifted objects, and lots and lots of sockyarn.  

Folk Flowers

Here is one thing!  Almost done, working on the last motif.  Got a dowel yesterday, need wooden beads for the ends of the dowel, as well as some nice gray cord.   

 

Ruby May Quilt

Here is another thing!  After plowing straight through 300 petals, then organizing them into little petal piles, I plowed through seven flowers and then stalled in the middle of the 8th. 

 

Art!  Or something.

Now I'm using all the little tiny offcuts of the petals to create built-up... paper/media/fabric-but-not-because-of-all-of-the-glue.  Then I'm cutting words out of that.  

Man, my light is so bad.  

So, woo, I like that, but now I need places to put them.  So I got some little canvases and thrifted some frames and a round bamboo coaster thing and this thing: 

which is actually made out of paper glued onto particle board of some sort.  It's pretty awful.  I'd like to find a source for offcut bits of wood that I could use, keeping on the scrap/upcycling theme, but it seems stupid to order $60 worth of wood from across the country.  I'm hoping that paint and glue will be enough to turn this thing into something someone would like to display. 

Here's one little one that's almost finished.  One kid is operating a pop-up braided items shop in our living room occasionally, so I've acquired some long braids of embroidery thread that will be incorporated somehow. 

This one is just a little block of wood that I'll attach a sawtooth hanger to the back of.  

Because I don't need more than about three items with "hope" written on them, I'm planning to open the etsy shop back up.  That will be a good outlet for the flood of finished socks in all the same colorways:

Oh yes, and it was mitten time, so I've started some mittens.  

 

These are Shetland Peerie Mittens, and I'm brazenly stealing the color scheme from another Raveler.  It took the mitten a lot of convincing to get me to realize that I'd neglected to do the increases after the cuff, but I finally got the message and am moving again.  The next round is supposed to be blue and green, but the colors look so close that I'm hesitating to use them together and am therefore a little stuck.  

Happy crafting!

Yammering into the void

Fogski

I finished some mittens!

My friend, who is a Frozen North native, wears big-gauge huge honkin mittens, so I figured I'd give some a shot, too.  These are Fogski, a Knitty pattern.  I used Malabrigo in Mecha and a lightweight merino/acrylic rather than the very beautiful and very, very expensive yarns called for in the pattern.  They're too big, but still soft and warm.  

Folk Flowers

The embroidery is coming along:

I ripped out and re-did the green part of the left flower with red petals because one of my stitches didn't cross all the way and it bugged me and bugged me.  I could have attempted a fix, but redoing was easier.  I usually work so that I don't have to put my hoop over stitches I've already done, but because this one is long and narrow, it's impossible not to.  So I loosen my hoop a lot and then place it and tighten - is that how you're supposed to do it?  I dunno.  Seems to be working.  Haven't made any mistakes that have made me cry yet, that's good.  

Ruby May

Merry Christmas to me!  (Awhile ago.)  I got a quilt kit for the Ruby May quilt and have been working my fingers to the bone covering petal papers.  There are 300 of them, and 50 teeny scraps of Liberty fabric to make them with.  

 

Not wanting my learning curve to show, I traced 6 petals onto some other cardstock and made one flower to see how it would go.  I thought I did a good job of gluing that curve, but it was hard to get the curve to stick around when appliqueing.  

So I make 300 of these petals and am planning a super-fun plan-o-rama where I line up all the pretty little piles and sort them into different flowers and that may end up being the most fun part of this whole thing.  

 

 

Also, I found that I have completely forgotten how to applique.  I mean, this flower isn't going anywhere, but the process for that happening was not clean.  Also, I seem to have started a mini quilt and should probably make a plan for how to finish it.  

The scraps of Liberty are too pretty to throw away, so I'm also hatching a plan for glueing them all down and then cutting out words or something to make some paper art.  

 

Underrainbow

I made a cowl.  If you see any mistakes, please do not tell me.  This is the sort of pattern that makes my brain go "that looks wrong," but then I can't put my finger on how.  It is made from Bare Hare and Felici in Firefighter (both from Knitpicks.  

 

Norby, but a Cowl

I also made another cowl! This matches the Norby hat made for Kid 1 and uses up the rest of that Persephone from Frabjous Fibers 3-ply handspun.

Argh, I don't think I took a picture.  

I'm also working on another Norby, but a Cowl in another handspun for another kid.  Was making great progress, but then it fell under my desk and I kind of forgot it existed until right now typing this but there's still plenty of time before the birthday.  

Fabric Fast

For 2021, I'm participating in the Rav quilting group's fabric fast.  There's a quarterly buying day where you can make purchases, but I haven't used mine yet and am hoping not to, at least this quarter.  (I unilaterally decided that ordering filter fabric for masks doesn't count, because that's not for quilting.)  And given that I'm still at the glueing stage, I sincerely doubt I'll be needing backing fabric for Ruby May anytime soon.  

 

Happy crafting!

FO: The Lion

For a Christmas present, I made my youngest brother The Lion. It was my first English Paper Piecing project.  I replaced the pink with shades of bright blue and stuck with the basic color scheme for the yellows, though I don't think I hit each Kona shade exactly.  

I got a fabric glue stick especially for the purpose and it worked well. I only thread baste under extreme duress. 

The pattern was a birthday present, and I probably got started with the cutting and gluing in August.  By mid-September, the top was complete, though I let it sit for a long time before taking the papers out. 

I did echoing lines over the face and ears and mane-ish loops and spirals in the mane section.  I used yellow thread on the face and it took me awhile to decide to use clear thread in the mane - couldn't find any color that I liked over the very wide range of shades.  

With more (wonky, asymmetrical, please don't look too closely) echo quilting in the gray, it was on its way, and the binding was a snap to hand-finish.  The back is a simple print in a dark teal.  

I like Violet Craft's patterns a lot.  If she ever does a raccoon, I will be all over it.  I also love EPP just as much as I feared I would, and am planning 17 EPP quilts, each of which will take hundreds of hours to complete.