For my next trick...

I'll lose direction and... wash a bunch of fabric.

To be fair, though, a bit of the fabric for each of the 3-4 quilts that are next up just arrived today. Along with a batting for the mondo gigantic quilt that must weigh 10 pounds. And which is also not recommended for lighter fabrics whoops oh well.

Do you demand a picture? Very well:



If you totally heart anything you see here, you might want to run off to Connecting Threads, because almost all of this is going off soon. They're also having a nice sale on batting.

Given this nice little break in project-land, I should probably get back to work on the baby blanket for the baby that's now nearing about 2 weeks old. I guess I've been dreading having to develop yet another crochet skill, and also know on some level that picking up (or whatever you call it in crochet) the same number of stitches on each side is going to at least take several tries, if it's not impossible. But the cute border is what makes the whole thing cute, so I better get on it before kid graduates from college.

Fin de Semana

Finish of the week (end!) Sun and Sky is now hanging proudly in my brand new, huge, slightly-less-bare office.

It sports both premeditated hanging sleeves (a first!) and an actual premeditated label. Neither of which I took pictures of, but hey, those are the boring parts.

Here she is after quilting, which went so much better than Spinning the Stars did:



And here are the final shots after cutting, binding, and washing:



Depth of field! I'm so arty!
This quilt also sports a couple tiny patches of some of the cotton I hand-dyed at a workshop several years ago. The binding is a blue and yellow floral that has been in my stash for years. The backing is a purplish-blue floral that doesn't match the front by any stretch of the imagination. I've had it for a long time and bought it as a remnant for making hanging sleeves and backings out of. I'm almost out of it, so it may soon be on to the red chicken fabric I got at the same time but have never really used. Hrm.

It's about 40" across (??) and, uh, less than that tall. (I didn't measure.) Making this top was really really easy, compared to ones that involve pinwheels or stars or triangles of any kind. Note to self.

I don't know about you, but I often find that there's a sour spot somewhere in the middle of all the projects I do where I get really down on it. I see all the seams that are off, the colors are garish, the iron left a bad stain on one block, this is fugly and I could not possibly display it in public.

That's about where I am now with the Sun and Sky quilt.

Here's how it started:



I soaked the squares in very hot water, then dried them - mostly let them air-dry, but I also hit them with a hair dryer at the beginning in order to speed up the process. This did result in the loss of some yardage, but better now than once they were sewn into a quilt with a bunch of prewashed fabrics.

Then there was lots of arranging and rearranging and adding in more squares from my stash.



I'll spare you all the pictures of that.

At first my plan for this one was to cut all the charms in half, sew each half to an equal-sized white rectangle, and then do something cool with all of those squares, a la Crazy Mom Quilts. But once I started doing the math, I realized that the squares would be very small after squaring the charms, cutting them in half, cutting them down to squares again, then taking a 1/4" seam allowance. So I decided to go with a popular charm pattern (at least according to google image search) that involved making long strips of charms/half-charms and alternating the strips with white.

So I held my breath and chopped a bunch of solid squares into two unequal pieces,




And started rearranging again.




Bleh! Let's try that again.




A bit better, but maybe we should add in what will be the white space, and make the columns a little longer.


Close enough.

Now we're basted and ready to quilt.



And I'm feeling like it's almost too fugly to go on. But of course I will. Sometimes it turns out okay, and even if it doesn't, I'm glad to have the chance to see how my machine does with free-motion now that it's been serviced.

FO: Wood Hollow Vest

Raveled: Here
Pattern: Wood Hollow Vest, by Through the Loops, Here
Yarn: Berocco Ultra Alpaca - Light, in color 4207 (gray)
Size: Second smallest, with major gauge shenanigans


Around June, I was talking with my mom and asked her what she'd like for Christmas. She said, "A finished vest!" At that point I wasn't aware of having started a vest, so my curiosity was piqued.



Further investigation revealed that I needed to start a vest, and also finish it. And it should be cute, and have cables. When we found ourselves in a yarn store, as tends to happen, we picked out some Colrain (a nice and shiny aran weight merino/tencel from WEBS) in periwinkle and a bit of dark blue for the edges. We checked out bazillions of patterns, and I considered just making one up myself, but ended up being glad I didn't.

I'm a big believer in surprises, so having gathered all kinds of data about what was desirable in a vest and what was not, I went off on my own to make the final choice for the pattern. Wood Hollow won, because its main cable was identical to one Mom had liked in a different pattern but it called for the right weight of yarn and looked like something I could finish in the relatively limited amount of time I had.



I don't normally swatch, but I also don't normally make non-sock garments where exact size is important. So I sucked it up and made a swatch, grappling with the ever-present problem of swatching flat for something that will be in the round. (Oh yeah - I was modifying it to knit in the round.) And it's a really, really, really good thing I swatched, because that yarn + that pattern, even using numbers from the smallest size, would have been huge.

The pattern calls for Cascade 220, a light worsted, and Colrain was an aran. Fair enough. I got out some leftover Cascade 220 and swatched again, and my results were much the same. I swatched on smaller needles, which barely made a difference.

At this point I went back to the drawing board and searched around for a pattern that would work well with the Colrain, but didn't come up with anything I liked as much as Wood Hollow, so I started looking for a yarn that was nearby in terms of yarn stores, and that knit up around 6.5 spi. If I could've found a straight merino, I would have gone with that, but the Berocco knit up very nicely and should be pretty warm. It's 50% merino, 50% alpaca.

I made it a bit longer than called for because Mom likes sweaters that way. Probably should have added a bit of waist shaping, but I didn't even think about it until I was seaming the tops.

Someday I'll make another of these for myself. Had to pay close attention to the pattern, but it moved pretty quickly overall.

to combine or not to combine

Precisely how bad is it to mix un-pre-washed and pre-washed fabrics in a quilt project? Will it ruin it totally, can't-even-give-this-to-the-dogs ruin it? Or will it cause people to merely have a profound spiritual experience upon gazing at it, rather than actually moving them to tears?

I ask because in Connecting Threads's Cyber Monday sale, I got two charm packs for 87 cents each, and I would love to start making them into quilts right this second, but have no un-pre-washed white fabric. That situation will be remedied just as soon as the mail starts moving again, thanks to a lovely gift certificate from my aunt. Washing the charms by hand is an option, but probably a terrible one, more trouble than it's worth.

Hrm, I'm also realizing that the stash fabric I want to add to these quilts has all been washed already. Perhaps I'll just seize the day, then.

Or maybe I could just soak the charms in really hot water, then line dry them over a register. That would probably move my starting time back to tomorrow, but then I could work on the things I really should be working on today, AND look forward to starting that quilt sooner rather than later. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Thanks, this has been really helpful.

Mosaic!

1. 2010 4-17 011, 2. 2010 3-5 003, 3. 2010 6-16 002, 4. 2010 10-3 001, 5. 2010 9-13 001, 6. 2010 10-31 043, 7. 2010 3-13 011, 8. 2010 11-15 008, 9. 2010 1-23 005, 10. DSC09064, 11. 2010 4-24 007, 12. 2010 2-15 012, 13. 2010 6-5 009, 14. 2010 12-11 008, 15. 2010 9-13 011, 16. 2010 2-15 002, 17. 2010 10-31 001, 18. 2010 6-5 004, 19. 2010 10-8 005, 20. Christmas 2010 002

courtesy of big huge labs

Pinwheel and Friendship Star miniquilt

Greetings, dear readers! I hope your various holiday celebrations were untaxing and free of disaster.

Today I will be show-and-telling you about my most recently completed quilt, for which I do not have a catchy name. (Edit: it is now called "Spin the Stars.")



This particular arrangement of pinwheels and friendship stars is my own design. I made it up during a recent spate of, shall we call it, captive free time.


This quilt came about the way most of them do, which is that I piled a bunch of fabric together and put it out of the way, and when I came back, it looked so nice together that I had to make something out of it.



This is my first pieced back, which features most of the leftovers from the front, plus some whoops-wrong-size triangle pinwheels. This is also my first time using corner pockets rather than an hanging pocket or two sewn on after the binding. I'd avoided using them because I was wary of hand sewing through two layers of pocket, two layers of binding fabric, backing fabric, and batting. This time I decided to use a thimble for sewing the binding down, and it worked just fine.



Brown, turquoise, and yellow aren't really my go-to colors, but I like the finished quilt well enough. While stippling it, my machine really started to fritz, so it's going to the shop for some attention. I successfully free-motion quilted a quilt about this same size a couple of years ago, so I'm hoping that the machine will be able to attain its former glory.

FOsplosion

Clogs!


Pre-felting:



Post-felting:




This project stalled for a while because I couldn't find the razor I use to shave felted things. It was with the office supplies, of course. Silly me.


Socks!

These are some cheerful socks that I knit for Mom's birthday. They're delightful.



I finished the mini quilt today, and it's washed and dried and hanging on the wall, but I'm going to save that for another post. For now, it's back to the Christmas conundrum of what to give to three guys who have accumulated a bevy of handknit stuff over the last few years.

Gifts!

At the moment I'm set on Garmin pouch things, like I made awhile ago. I'm set on the fabric for Dad's, but I can't find a good contrast fabric:


Haha, that was a little joke. I've got the perfect stuff to go with this -- it's purple, with butterflies.


Haha, another joke.

These jokes are about how freaking impossible it is to find nice, interesting fabric that's also suitable for guys. And also an exploration of what on earth could've possessed me to buy not one but two lengths of pink kitty fabric when I like neither pink nor kitties. (One's not my style, one I'm allergic to.) I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to grab some more Lotus or maybe some pretty solids.

Hey, fabric designers! Make millions by designing nice, masculine fabrics! Or maybe changing cultural norms of what appears too feminine for men would be better. But probably not as profitable or manageable.

nothing but perserverance

Santa's Little Sweatshop, as my husband lovingly calls it, should be in full swing right now. And it's in partial swing, it is, it's just that I took a little break, that's all.



That picture is of the best part of the quilt so far. If you don't look at that picture full-size, you might be fooled into thinking that I'm marginally competent at this. But good gravy, I suck at free motion quilting.



Skipped stitches, jerky corners, thousands of stitches and no two the same length. I mutter curses, squint, fantasize about shellacking all of my textbooks into a makeshift extension table for my machine, and free motion away. The only thing I'm good at with regard to this is managing to not burn the house down. And I'll go ahead and admit that I'm okay at not burning the house down even when I'm not free motion quilting.

Oh, and so far I haven't sewn either of my quilting gloves to the top of the quilt. Should get bonus points for that.

It does pain me a bit to suck so badly at this. I want to be good at it. I sit there and end up focusing on how badly things are going and how difficult it is.

So this is my post reminding myself and anyone else trying to expand their skills that being terrible at things at first is just part of the process. My first knitting projects were total, utter disasters. The only reason I'm now able to produce garments that I feel comfortable wearing in public is that I kept trying. I didn't let that sad clump of green chenile, full of infuriating mystery holes and literally so tightly knit that it was impossible to get a needle into the next stitch, determine my fate as a knitter. Jimi Hendrix played guitar for 17 hours a day. He had loads of natural talent too, but he worked at it until his fingers bled.

It helps that when I'm not working on this quilt, I want to be. Even though actually working on it is frustrating and disheartening, it's hard to put down.

free motion

I know what you're probably thinking - you're thinking damn, girl, those are one hot mess. And I'm agreeing with you, and then I'm all like, or maybe even just a mess. Is the "hot" in "hot mess" supposed to be a good thing? Like, you're a mess, but you're still hot? Or is it just an intensifier of the concept "mess..." and then I realize that you're just waiting for me to stop talking, so I say, in agreement, for shizzle. I am suppressing a Snoop Dog joke right now, you can tell.

Against your better judgment, you say, "why are we talking like we're hosting TMZ?" And I say, I don't know, probably because quilting is even more grandmotherly than knitting, so we're trying to jazz it up a bit. And you say, and probably also because you've been listening to that radio station. And I am kind of embarrassed, because you're right, so I just say yeah, instead of for shizzle.



Anyway, the free motion advice is always practice, practice, practice, practice. But all the posts I see feature beautiful, accomplished, close to perfect quilting, so I'm sharing my first-try in several years squares. I made a zillion of these sandwich squares for the free-motion quilting class I took awhile ago and then didn't use up. I'm planning to stipple this little 30x30 quilt in progress, so I started with that on the black square. Then, after about ten seconds, I got bored, as you can see. Tried square-ish stippling, then hey, flower!, then circles. The circles seemed to go pretty well, so after the vine and leaves, I tried some more of those, then threw in some olives, which I just made up.

It's kind of coming back to me, and I plan to keep this mini quilt, so should probably just have at it. It's all basted (safety-pinned) and ready to go. Will probably bite the bullet tonight. On the up side, I've learned that things tend to look better on the internet than in person, so that should help my confidence.

Tree Quilt, a.k.a. Chinese Democracy

A long, long time ago, there was a me who could take fantastic weeklong art classes virtually free. That me took classes on Hawaiian Quilting and then on some something involving Guatemalan fabric and something else, who remembers.

That Guatemalan instructor sold us many strips of woven Guatemalan fabric and said "do this and this and this and then cut it like this." We students went off and did all that stuff, and the next time I looked up, all the other students had quilt tops that looked like the instructor's, and I had one that looked like this:



"Hrm," the instructor said. "Aren't trees supposed to be brown?"

"Hrmph," I said. "I am very creative." And also I don't have any brown fabric in my stash, apparently.

This quilt was conceived during a time when I was very interested in art quilting, which involves embellishment that also serves the function of quilting all three (or however many) layers together, as well as not caring what the back of the quilt looks like. (This was also very appealing.)

Once I tore myself away from the wonder of having a seven-foot work table all to myself, the quilt was packed up and worked on sporadically over the next five or so years.



I did lots of embroidery, most of which didn't make the final cut. I beaded the edges of the tree in carefully color-coordinated beads, and then learned the incredibly important lesson that any beading should be done last. Possibly even after binding. I hand-quilted the entire top, using three strands of embroidery thread and a gigantic needle, after seeing and liking an article about "big stitching" in a quilting magazine. This quilt was a staple at the Art Days I participated in over the last two years, which involved a bunch of artists in various media packing into my friend's awesome dining room and working for several hours at a clip every couple of weekends.

One of my favorite features of this quilt is that the tip of the rightmost tree branch is woven fabric rescued from a hippie-type wallet that I used until it fell apart.

This quilt has what appears to be an extra corner, does not lie "flat" in any sense of the word, the back is a horror show, and the pink stripes in the border on the bottom right bled onto the blue background fabric, but I love it. It's cheery, colorful, and weird, and other than the dog's nose, it's the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. I'm so glad it's done and hanging up.

Hamamelis, more!

Uh. So, I finished the quilt top. It's hugely big gigantic. Husband stood on a chair and held it up to the ceiling and the bottom dragged on the floor. I made a quilt taller than the kitchen. O..kay. Hm. It's a bit like adopting a gorilla. You're like yay, a gorilla! This will be awesome! And then the gorilla arrives and you're like, oh, hey, gorilla. Here are some bananas. ... Shit.

So, no progress has been made on the backing for the quilt. Instead, for some reason, I have devised plans for 2-3 mini (and by "mini" I mean "crib-sized or slightly bigger" (you know, the cotton-top tamarins in our quilting:primates analogy (why am I talking about gorillas and monkeys? why?!))) on which I will be able to practice my free-motion quilting skillz and which I may someday be able to finish, unlike that gorilla.

The lesson: the number 94 fits easily onto a page, but in inches it's actually kind of a lot. Write that down.

I did take a picture of the quilt top, and if I ever figure out how to baste the thing without moving all of the furniture out of the bedroom or banning everyone from the kitchen for 8 hours, y'all'll be the first to know.

In other news, news less embarrassingly revealing of my utter lack of spatial ability, I finished Hamamelis! Yayyyy!



I heart this pattern, truly. It was fun, and garter-stitchy, and I love garter stitch, and I could actually read the lace, and I like the straight edge. Scallop-y points just really don't do it for me, which I hadn't really realized until I saw this pattern.

That yarn is Fleece Artist Merino 2/6 in the Peridot colorway, with a wee bit of Louet Gems Pearl for the edging. I think that the variegation is more obvious in the pictures than it is in real life.

I'm still open to suggestions on how to back this sucker.

Anyone?

Beuller?

Quilt big or go home

The huge quilt project I'm now immersed in is a checkerboard quilt that I've been planning for years, ever since I bought a "Double +"-sized Quilter's Dream Cotton batting years ago at my LQS.
Fabric is mostly stash fabrics, from JoAnn's and various LQSes, plus a few prints from Hawthorne Threads, ConnectingThreads, and the Fabric Shack.



Don't those piles look all neat and organized, stacked and labeled so? It's just trickery. Getting a billion 4x4 squares sewn into one big piece has nearly killed me, and I'm not even done yet. The up side is that my seam ripper is in no danger of an existential crisis anytime soon.

I do have part of the top finished, and it's a) huge and b) looking a bit stark.

The top might be finished by tomorrow, if I can find the will to go on with it. Then we have the question of what to do with the back. I got a big, big chunk of Kona Cotton in Natural, which I initially planned to make the plain checkerboard pieces out of, but when I put it next to my color fabrics, it didn't really work as well as white would. So I got some muslin from JoAnn's for the white on the front, and am now considering using the Natural for the backing. I also got a bit of Kona Cotton in Teal for the binding, before realizing that it doesn't match a single shade on the front of the quilt.

I'd like to do a pieced backing like many of the quilts at Oh, Franson! have, but I'm at a loss for what would look good. Have more white, have a chunk of Natural, have fabric from most, but not all, of the prints on the front left over. Any suggestions?

Hamamelis!

I've been knitting for close to seven years, and many of those projects have involved reading knitting charts, which I thought I was proficient at. Then a few days ago, I realized that I'd been reading them wrong for as long as I've been reading them, but it never messed up my knitting because every chart I've ever used was mirrored.

Apparently you're supposed to read right-to-left and then once you get to the left, go up one row and read that one left-to-right. Which really does make sense in terms of the piece of fabric you're creating. I had been reading every row right-to-left, which works when you're reading a chart that only shows the right-side rows, assuming that the wrong-side rows are resting rows.


The little beauty that taught me this lesson is the Hamamelis Shawl, which, because it involves some garter stitch, has patterning on both sides.

A couple months ago, I started knitting this, then put it down for a bit to work on other stuff. When I came back to it, I hadn't even entered it on Ravelry, which meant that I probably didn't have any notes on where I'd left off. It was still pretty small, so I assumed (stupidly, of course) that I was at the end of the first chart.

I was wrong, but right enough. I needed to start the second chart, only it was the second repeat of the second chart. This, on top of my sudden inability to distinguish the concept "six" from the concept "seven," made for several hours of ripping and reknitting the first rows of chart 2, as well as the last couple of rows that I'd done months ago.

This ripping and reknitting also led to the realization that I'd been reading charts wrong, but then that led to the realization that it didn't matter how I was reading the charts because they're mirrored, and the real problem was that 6 != 7.

Ta-da! Please tune in next week when I run out of yarn because I've neglected to check gauge.

Dog Blanket

Mr. Stink Dog and his partner in crime are not used to wood floors. He's a talker anyway, but Husband believes that when he grunts as he sits down on these hard floors, it means that his hips are hurting him.

Awhile ago, I used a bunch of fabric from a dead comforter cover to make a little blanket for the dogs. There was still a bunch of fabric left over, taking up room in one of my sewing bins, so I set about making another, one that would be thicker and warmer. One 50% off JoAnns coupon later, I was armed with crib-sized high-loft polyester batting and a crazy plan.



This quilt could be bigger than the last, based on the size of the batting, which was 45" x 60". I found the biggest intact piece of fabric that I could, and was surprised to be able to get a whole side out of it.



The second side had to be pieced, which was difficult to do with such big pieces. As before, I wanted to patch up some little holes or weak spots (proto-holes) in the fabric, but sewing patches through all three layers of quilt seemed more difficult this time, because of the high-loft batting. This was also an opportunity to add a bit more padding, as well as to use up bits of batting I've been squirreling away for years.



I covered pieces of batting (or in one case, thick felt) with pieces of fabric cut about 1/2" bigger all around, folded the edges under, and used a zigzag stitch along the edge to attach them to the quilt top and bottom in the right places.





I really liked the way this came out, all zigzaggy and patchy patchy.



Then it was time to rassle with the batting. I was excited about the batting, because it was going to produce a comfy, super-warm quilt. Getting it out of the package and unrolled was about when I started realizing that high-loft polyester batting is evil.

I set everything up in order (bottom layer face-up, top layer face-down, then the batting), trimmed the last edge of the pieced side along with the batting, and things started to seem to go off the rails at this point.



Eventually the three layers were pinned together.


High-loft batting probably is easier to work with when it's sandwiched between a couple layers of fabric as in a traditional bound quilt. The envelope construction was probably faster than binding would have been, but it was painful. Unless I pushed all the fibers down under the foot, the edges of the foot would catch on the top bit and pull the batting apart. And the pins basically disappeared into it. Bleh.

Left a turning hole, turned it right-side out (also easier said than done), and hand-sewed the opening closed.



Then I machine-sewed around the edges, about half an inch in, which was not the most successful maneuver because the main seam isn't anywhere near centered, but at least the edges were tacked down. It was at this point that I started aiming a bit lower for the project, because the unpleasantness of accepting a less-than-perfect-looking edge seemed a better alternative than ripping it out and doing it again.

Then. Oh, then.

The first quilt I'd quilted by sewing patches through, quilting random squares over the plaid pattern here and there, and then quilting a couple straight lines from one edge of the quilt to the other. The name of this game, I thought, was getting the quilting done quickly because the floors are getting pretty cold and Mr. Stink Dog shouldn't have to endure hip pain all the time. So I started to just quilt a straight line from one end to the other, and quickly learned why tying is recommended for high-loft batting quilts.

This stuff slides all over the place. Even with a walking foot and pins everywhere, this stuff shifts.

So I ripped that out and regrouped. Decided to quilt small squares in the plaid pattern. Pinned appropriately, then fought with the first five or so squares because getting to the outer edge of the quilt required having the rest of it bunched up between the machine and needle.





Then I took a break to price middy-arm sewing machines and dream about a mythical sewing machine that's not on a frame, but is just a bit wider. Got smarter and started quilting half a square at a time, so that I could always be working on the outer edge. (This did leave me with four thread ends to deal with instead of two, but the effects of that were less immediate than the unpleasantness of trying to jam the quilt into the machine to do all four sides in one go.)

After doing a bunch more squares, I quit for the night. The next night I did a bunch more, and quit again, baffled and enraged that I wasn't done with the damn squares yet.

Then the next night (that I worked on it... I may have taken an angry break), I finished the damn squares. Held it up triumphantly and immediately saw that it wouldn't be a sufficient amount of quilting.

That's when I decided that regular tying, rather than the modified tying I'd made up (quilting independent little islands) would be the way to get this finished and quilted sufficiently to maybe keep its shape for a while. So, with three strands of embroidery thread and over the course of many, many episodes of House, I put ties at most of the intersections of the plaid that hadn't been quilted around and other random places that seemed to not have enough quilting near them. I alternated tying and securing/burying the ends of the quilting that were just everywhere. I probably could have tied several more points on the quilt, but I'd been feeling done with the project for a while, so I called it quits.



Usually when I finish a project, I'm pretty excited to have this new thing and proud to put it to use. When I finished this one, I was just gleeful to not have to work on it anymore.


It was gratifying, though, when both dogs, given the opportunity, laid down on it immediately. Stink was disappointed that it did not come with a turkey dinner, including stuffing, cranberry sauce, three vegetable sides, and home-baked rolls, but he'll get over it eventually.

The worst part of this story is that while I spent hours watching House and tying it, I realized how warm and delightful this blanket is. And I kind of want to make one for the humans. Maybe if I just start with the plan to tie it, the unpleasantness won't be a surprising unpleasantness.