Life with a Pickle

 Exciting things have happened!  First, the cutest thing:

We think he's going to be one of those couch potato Australian Shepherds, as he is generally mellow and calm, unless it's midnight and you're trying to sleep.  He's getting better at sleeping through the night, albeit on my head, and is generally interfering with Crafting Time less and less.  

The next exciting thing is that I've now longarmed for the first time!

I attempted "dwirling," although the result was not really identifiable as such.  The free-motion was really all over the place, and I didn't feel good about it as I was doing it, but it's not obviously horrible on the finished quilt.  Plus, I'm going to wash the finished quilt for maximum shrinkage, which should hide the stitching a bit.  I do love how even the stitches are, I loved getting the whole thing quilted in one (long) go, I loved not having to wrestle it through my machine.  And the place I'm using has really, really good rates.  

In the future I should definitely measure both the top and back.  I rarely measure when working with a whole quilt, because I don't really have room to spread out a big quilt flat at home.  I do all measurements relative to the quilt itself, i.e. laying the back down on the bed and laying the top on top of it and seeing if there are at least 4" around the edges. 

Piecing the back was a chore - I sewed together the remaining 4" strips, first in random order, then ripped a bunch of that out and pooled into warms/cools and sewed those together.  I had a lot left over after making the top and bottom borders for the quilt top, so I pieced those into the back in such a way that they wouldn't mostly get cut off.  Will take a picture once the whole thing is bound, but you can see the warm strip in the pic above, which is between two much bigger chunks of fabric on the back.  

For binding, I planned to use more Kona Navy, which is what the triangle squares are on the top.  I'm very low on the Kona Navy I've had on hand forever, so I was glum about ordering some more even though I've used my quarterly buying day for the Fabric Fast I'm doing with the Quilters Knitting group on Rav.  Couldn't find another fabric I'd have enough of to do the whole binding and that looked as good as the Navy would, but then I realized that the super bright rainbow wide backing I'd gotten last year would go well enough with the rainbow-y-ness of the top.  It's not my favorite fabric, but so little of it ends up showing that I decided to go with it, rather than wait.  

 Finally, I've gone back to cross-stitching:

It was a bit accidental - I downloaded some patterns to support Ukrainian designers and then just happened to have some dark blue embroidery fabric on hand and then this kind of started and then kept going.  The pattern is here.  I definitely started it too close to the top, but with careful finishing it should be fine. 

So that's what I'm up to!  Hopefully I'll have a finished quilt to post soon.  

Happy crafting!

Finishes!

 BooPeeDooPeeDoo

The Irish Chain quilt is finished!  And it got delivered today!  

 

I did a big stipple all over, and I like how the batting shrank in its first wash. 

It is very, very scrappy, and I didn't keep the values perfectly lined up between blocks, so it could probably be Irish-Chain-ie-er, but I'm willing to live with it. 

 

The back is a wide-back fabric from Connecting Threads, with a strategically placed very big label that hides a big tuck that got quilted in.  I went with Warm & Natural batting, and it's bound in some wide-backing green that I used on the back of a previous quilt. 

Deck the Halls

Also finished is this very fun little Christmas cross-stitch, yet another by Satsuma Street.  And just in the nick of time, too, as we're free to leave the state again. 

Repairs

I recently noticed that the Penguins and Moonglows quilt had a couple of spots where the seams had broken, so I spent some time closing those up before they could get caught on something and rip even more.  

A before

A different after

Pouches!

And finally, before our big trip, I spent some time one weekend making non-quilt things other than masks for the first time in a very long time, hurrah! 

These are Open Wide pouches, but with altered dimensions to make them taller. 

Making them taller meant I couldn't get two linings out of one fat quarter, which is all I had of the unicorns, so there's pink on one side. 

Work continues on a baby quilt needed by August and two summer quilts.  I need to pick a new cross-stitch soon, too.

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!

In which the knitter attempts the nearly impossible

What is new, you big black shoe?  I have not posted for awhile, so there are projects.  

Blogger would like you to see this one first, so here it is:

This baby blanket is for a little one whose sex I do not know.  I did my traditional agonizing over whether it is potentially masculine enough, and decided yes!  Bunnies in spaaaace are masculine. 

And if not bunnies, blue dots.  Definitely super masculine.  And blue bunnies are almost too masculine. 

Lay off the T, bunny.

Here is a picture of a leetle teeny patch.  I patched this side and the back side.  I did not patch the batting, which was also torn a bit.  Looks like this got pinched somewhere and then pulled out, because the hole went all the way through.  I felt like I enjoyed matching up the pattern, but then on the back I found I actually couldn't not match the pattern, so hmm.  Maybe that's not so voluntary. 

My policy is to patch asap, because a stitch in time saves nine, and also I don't have tons of each fabric available for patching and I'd hate to have to use a patch that doesn't match is it getting woozy in here?  

This is a cowl in the pattern of Underrainbow, with Felici in Firefighter (almost vintage) and some Bare Hare.  It requires a skill I am reaching with all of my being to master, a tricky technique called Counting to 4.  You can see here that it didn't go so well several long rounds back, but I'm happy to report that I've ripped back and am on track again. 

On a whim called I couldn't find size 6s or 7s, I went with 5s, then that seemed smallish, so I ripped and added several repeats of 4 until I ran out of cast-on tail and when I had it off the needles to frog, it seemed big enough.  That's what 20 years of experience has gotten me.  

Oh, we wove a thing!  And by 'we,' I mean we warped our loom (a 10" Ashford Sample-It Loom) and then the kid shoved me out of the way and the next morning there were a million washcloths.  Kid's not so interested in tying knots, though, so these beautiful knots you see are all my own. 

Having very little sportweight yarn, I was forced to order heddles that fit worsted weight and fingering weight yarns, and this weekend there will be some more weaving.  I have rainbow yarn, people.  This is going to get pretty exciting. 

And!  I started this thing, which is Folk Flowers:

It's something like 8 feet long finished and yet I kind of feel like I should be done by now.  Not done with the first motif, though I'm a bit further along than the picture suggests.  There are already two mistakes here, but the lovely thing about symmetry is that if you just make the same mistake on the other side, nobody knows!  

There needs to be significant cowledge, some of which requires counting, so I shouldn't have much to show you soon other than some beautiful finished cowls.  I am CERTAINLY not going to start any massive long-term quilting projects before getting those cowls done.  

Happy crafting!

Mittens and yarn, Zodiac signs

Here is where I say stuff about stuff I did!  

I knit mittens!

Here are the mittens I knit!

I spun yarn!  

 

This is a 3-ply of 8 oz of Superfoot from BMFA in Midnight at the Oasis, the same blue as in the mittens above.  

I also finished two Zodiac signs from Satsuma Street, Aquarius and Pisces:

I really like the colors and these were quite fun to stitch.  I'll probably make two more for the other two people in our little family, but it's unlikely that they'll be done before Christmas or upcoming birthdays. 

These mittens also happened! 

They are Ridgeline Mitts, and they are going to meet up with a very nice hat that doesn't quite exist yet but really should before Christmas.  

This year won't have the traditional dash to Christmas - it had a dash to the UPS store, and though they said that it should be there by the end of this week, everything seems delayed these days.  But now I'm stewing in urgency that comes with the season but without a whole lot to knit or finish.  Most of the gifts are wrapped.  So - what do I do now?  

I'm lining up a couple of big, for-nobody projects for after the new year, plus there are a couple of cowls I should knit for winter birthdays.  I have a baby quilt top finished and no motivation or room to sandwich it.  

Happy Crafting!

Something is done!

The baby raccoon is done!

Before grid was removed

 Tomorrow I'll soak and iron it.  

Woohoo!!

Happy crafting!

Ever closer and further

The urge to finish something burns stronger than ever, and yet I have started more projects.  This one can't be helped, though, because it is Time To Spin, and when it is Time To Spin, you spin.  Simple as that. 

This little beauty is Fiber Romance on merino/baby camel from Allons-y Fibers.  I got it last year, along with another nice one, of which I spun two plies - well, I divided for three plies, quite unevenly in fact, and decided oh, it's cool, I'll just spin one super-thin, one in between, and one super-thick!  Which I realized was probably pretty dumb, and it's time to spin the third chunk, and I deeply suspect that it's not going to turn out well.  But that's no reason to avoid spinning - it's just reason to avoid spinning that particular project. 

Come for the disjointed rambling, stay for the helpful life-hacks and abrupt transitions. 


Raccoon

So, all the colors of the raccoon have been used.  Not completed, which is why there are still what look, depressingly, like hundreds of little spaces that still need thread.  You know how you reach the end of a pregnancy, and you're like, whew, that's over, and then an eighth of a second later you realize that, actually, now you need to parent for the next 18 years?  Finishing the last color was a teeny bit like that. 

With spinning, I can make yarn.  With cross-stitch, I can make the final product look like the picture.  Eventually.  I think there are strategies for this type of intense full-coverage work - I know there are, in fact, have heard tell of them on faraway message boards, and even seen pictures.  Seems that some people do one square at a time, and some people "park" threads and move along a solid line diagonally (-ish) through the picture.  If people do "cross country," that is, doing one color at a time, they have a way of making sure that they're getting every stitch in each box of 100 stitches. 

That skill continues to elude me.  I pick a color and follow a path through that color, and when I can't be bothered to find any more of that color, I pick a new color.  Until now, of course - now I've got 17 needles threaded and am finishing square-by-square. 

This one time, a couple days ago, I shook my craft room like a Boggle game, really got those letters mixed up, looking for the "/" color, which had been an early one and which - shockingly - I had missed a dozen hundred of here and there.  Looked and looked, then gave up and ordered more because surely any day now, that little color will be all I have left. 

Aaand, of course, the next day I found it in with this little project:

Aquarius

which of course does not actually use that color, but it also involves embroidery thread, so. 

This is the Satsuma Street Aquarius stitch, and I love the colors on the black.  The black is harder to work with than white, but it's coming along okay.  The middle water curl on the left is missing a layer, but it doesn't affect the scaling of the rest of the piece, so I'm leaving it. 

I am writing this post now because I need to get this picture off of my camera because the little spy has probably already seen it.  That kid can sniff out a present at 50 paces.

Bag

Every once in awhile, I add some stitches to the bag. 

There is a lot of space to cover.  The bag does not feel pressing, because we are in the After Times, wherein we do not need to leave the house carrying bags.  At some point I suppose that will probably change, so I continue to work on the bag.  It involves lots of decisions, so there are times when I decide to work on the bag, stare at it for 11 minutes, and then decide to work on something else. 


Lion

Progress on the lion is slow and steady.  The lion is looking a little weird to me these days.  Definitely occupying the "what was I thinking, again?" spot in the lineup.  However, it is easy to work on this a tiny bit at a time, so I do at least a little on it most days. 

Bright Birches

...are not even close to being finished, or progressing at all.  My desk is like a beach, and when the tide is in, you can't lay a cutting mat down on the sand and cut stuff.  Well, people, the tide is in.  No telling when it will go out.  Hopefully once one of the darn above things is finished. 

Happy crafting!

Thoughts and feelings about this bag

Hello!  Perhaps you, too, are currently crafting in a sea of uncertainty.  I find myself desperate to finish something, but starting lots of other things as well, which is clearly not helping with the finishing things thing.  

Awhile ago, who knows how long, I saw someone talking about using sashiko to patch or repair fabric that was torn or worn, oh, and I saw a bag someone posted using boro stitching techniques, and it stuck around and I really wanted to make myself a bag.  Not a Japanese knot bag, but a bag approximating the shape of one I got a little over a year ago that seems to be disintegrating.  

I could swear I had busted jeans - piles, even, jeans from myself and others - around here somewhere, but I can't find them.  I have three old pairs of khakis, the kind before those devious manufacturers figured out they could put lycra in the fabric and have it be better in some sense, and a fabric stash to rival... other people's moderately-sized fabric stashes, so I dove in.  

I quickly found that one of the pockets of one of the khakis is a lovely not-denim woven material - that's the upper left.  Bottom right is a thin linen-y fabric I got when I was making my own wedding dress (a project I came close to completing!).  The foundation fabric is from deep stash, unobtrusive but not too wimpy to hold everything together. 

Initial fabric placement

And so now I find myself using a technique for scarcity in a time of abundance.  This doesn't need any more patches (well, okay, there's a spot in the upper blue that was where a button had been sewn on that is a little torn).  Oh, and the bottom left, with the new blue patch, is covering a spot where I was cutting something on top of that and snipped right through the khaki.  Whoops.  Good thing I'm using a patch-based approach. 

I didn't know what to do with the expanse of tan there.  Patching for the sake of patching seems silly, and I don't have a wide variety of other materials to choose from.  Then I thought about adding a pocket.  I didn't need an outside pocket, but one might be useful and it would spare me having to stitch just lots and lots of stitches across there.  

So I found on the internet a picture of a fetching pocket and am going to try my hand at making one.  This should be interesting.  

It would be very easy to add a tiny bit of my beautiful, delightful quilting fabric to the outside, as a patch or a pocket, but I'm resisting the urge, because for anything I choose it will be come the that-thing bag.  If I use yellow flowers, it will be the yellow flowers bag.  But I want it to be the blue and tan patchy bag.  


Baby Raccoon

I am down to two colors remaining on the Baby Raccoon, and then an unknown but not-insubstantial amount of filling in stitches that I missed, probably in every single one of the 16 other colors. 

I've also started an Aquarius cross-stitch (from Satsuma Street), which will be a gift for my kiddo at her next birthday, and which she immediately sniffed out, and which I now have to hide faithfully and only work on at about after 10:30pm.  For SOME reason, it's not done yet.  

I finished the first teeny beech strip quilt and started another.  It doesn't feel like a finish yet, because I'm totally going to wash it, but it's already stuck to the wall, soooo.  

No more masks, because I'm pretending we'll be done with them soon.  

I try to do a bit of the elephant every day, so it is inching forward.  Everything is inching forward.  

Happy crafting!