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Working on the Weathervane.

Decided to hand quilt it because I hate finishing stuff. 

Fussy cut tree in the center

The back is pieced from a half-yard that I liked a lot better online than in person (top), a FQ from a bundle that I can't stand the color of (middle), and some of the Connecting Threads yardage that I backed the Rainy Quilt with. 

It would be helpful to not have seams to deal with on the back for hand quilting, but I'm glad to use up stash that I don't really like.  The colors look nice together, it's just not to my taste. 

I've also started a quilt for my brother that is my design, and that I'm really excited about.  Once there's something more to look at, I'll post some pictures - right now it's just bits of white and gray fabric. 

Happy crafting!

FO: Hexagon Tetris Land

When I was on maternity leave, I spent a lot of time looking at quilting blogs and collecting tutorials to return to someday.  There are probably enough to keep me busy for years.  When I'm thinking about new quilts, I go through the list, and on the last pass-through, this one caught my eye.  It's from the Festival of Hexagons, a tutorial from acraftyfox. 

By far my favorite part is the label - this little hexagon didn't make the cut for the front, because there wasn't enough contrast between the hexagon and the neutrals - it just looked like a random vine.   But there was just enough room for writing, and I think it's adorable. 

The back is a batik-y thing that I've had for ages.  It has a nice hand and is thick and sturdy, but I confess that I find it terribly ugly.  This used up nearly all of it - go, austerity!  This will be a wallhanging, so I don't expect it to see the light of day much.  

To quilt it, I wanted to have undulating sort of waves that sort of echoed but got distorted along the way.  It didn't come out exactly as I wanted it to, but it's pretty close.  I got my FMQ foot out for the first time in a long time just recently, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed the process of FMQing this, even if I'm out of practice.  

Tomorrow I'll wash it and get it hung up. 

Quilt Facts:

Title: Hexagon Tetris Land
Batting: 100% cotton Hobbs, either organic or not (can't remember which scraps I pulled from)
Thread: C&C 100% polyester, white
Backing: ancient stash batik
Yay!: scrappy neutrals
Doh: herky jerky starts and stops in FMQ
Number of Meta-Hexagon fabric included: 3

Yay, Finish It Up Friday is back!  Linky linky. 

Happy crafting! 

March WIPs

The Carmarthen mittens are done, and they're very pretty, and they're huge. 

 My beloved owl mittens have sprung a leak right in the middle of the pad of the right thumb, so when it was 3 degrees Fahrenheit (that's right) one morning this week, I went ahead and wore the Carmarthen.  They are indeed too big to be practical, which is disappointing.  They might be just the right size for a gift for someone, but I'm not sure yet. 

The Weathervane Quilt is coming along.  As I worked on the blocks, I was convinced that this was going to be the single most beautiful thing I've ever made, but then I got them up onto the design wall and am not as psyched. 

Value strikes again, I guess.  I did some B&W pictures to try to distribute the values better, and sitting here looking at this picture makes me want to make a few more changes before I keep sewing.  Next up is some sashing with cornerstones.  

Finally, there's this weird thing.  

This is based on the hexachevragon tutorial at acraftyfox.net with an asymmetrical border that I'm adding.  I can't decide if the border says, "Interesting attempt to add motion to the design and achieve balance with asymmetry" or "My hexagon ruler can make a bunch of different sizes!"  I've dug deep to not repeat any orange fabrics in the big hexagons, piecing several pieces together from scraps from the orange tumbler quilt, and I'm really enjoying the scrappiness of the neutrals.  

Just have the top border to finish on this one, then it can be basted and quilted.  The design wall here is the batting that will be used in the quilt, and there is a batik-ish reddish orangish bit of fabric I've had forever that is just the right size for the back.  

Happy crafting!

FO: Get Along, Green

Well, it's all over but the sawing. 

Of the dowel rod, that is.  

Think I could've done better with the color placement, especially in the blue-to-green range - I let my shapes dictate where each piece went and it ended up not being a terribly smooth color transition.  The green to yellow is dire, but I don't like the colors in that range very much, so it's not surprising there weren't many scraps there. 

Bound the quilt in Kona Jade left over from the Mail-Order Gorilla - squeaked by with just enough, which was nice. 

This was the fastest hanging sleeve ever.  Thank goodness for fugly why-do-I-own-this fabrics - there's no sense in spending $9/yard for a hanging sleeve.  This one was the perfect size selvage to selvage, so I left them on (no folding and sewing down) and didn't sew the sleeve to itself, just stuck it in place as I sewed the binding to the front so it caught on the back.  

I've seen tutorials that call for basting the hanging sleeve about as much as you will need ease for the dowel to go through, but whenever I can avoid basting I do.  My trick is to put the dowel in, pin it into place so that the fabric lies flat against the back of the quilt, and then sew it down binding-style. 

Quilt shows would probably not be impressed, but that's okay.  Have not yet decided where this one will live - it may go with me to my office, or it may spruce up my very bare bedroom.  

Quilt Facts:

Finished Size: 19.25"x43"
Batting: Yes, definitely batting
Thread: White mystery thread, some cotton/cotton, others probably not

And now I will give in to the urge to go through my scrap bin and cut a bunch of white and close-to-white scraps into 2.25"x4.5" strips.  That seems like the kind of urge one would regret jumping on. 

Happy crafting!

Yay for Slidey Ramp

I've written 74% of three different blog posts in my head, and have 11 minutes in which to get it all down, and it doesn't seem like it's going to go well.  Off we go! 

First:

I finished the blanket!  It's snuggly warm, we're still living in a frozen hellscape, and yay.  Decided to do the garter edge when it seemed like I'd have plenty of yarn left over then had about 8" of yarn left over.  Close enough! 

Second: 

Now starts Austerity.  On this wallhanging, I used up a lot of the cotton-covered cotton/mystery white bobbins that are proving unfit for bed quilts that get pulled on a lot.  (By which I mean every night I listen to my quilting on the Mail Order Gorilla quilt popping and gnash my teeth.) 

I pieced the back from several neutral remnants. 

Third: 

Sometimes I wish that Finish it Up Friday were Stick a Fork in it Sunday.  I finished the gradient quilt on Sunday and then didn't want to post about it until Friday, so then I got confused and wandered around and then finished this cowl, of which I had knit all but the bindoff about four years ago:  

It's so pretty, and warm, and I'm not sure why I left that sitting for so long.  

Fourth: 

In working on the green/purple/black jewel box quilt, I discovered that I hadn't made enough purple hsts or b/w 4-patches, now that you mention it, and the idea of making more of those blocks was unappealing.  So I designed three more quilts and then cut the fabric I'd been avoiding, plus fabric for a coordinating wallhanging.  

Fifth: 

Weathervane.  I've worked on this all day - it's Random Day Off Day, and I've squeezed every drop of quilting time out of it.  Couldn't go on.  

Paper plate system shamelessly stolen from Tales of Ineptitude.  Those three little scraps of white in the middle are what remain of my big stash of plain white fabric, soooo.  Austerity's going to be hard.  I've got a bit to spend with which to stock up on stuff, but then it'll be nothing except birthday/Christmas generosity.  

Happy crafting!

Doh

In hopes of finishing the baby's blanket for her birthday, I worked on it for several evenings.  Took it to work and got a lot done on it during a rare hour-and-a-half phone call, then forgot it as I ran out of the office for the evening two nights in a row.  It occurred to me to be worried that I may not finish it before winter ends, but at the rate we're going, there will be plenty of frozen hellscape left in which to enjoy a snuggly new blanket.  Meanwhile, she's turning one and has no concept of a birthday or birthday gift, so it'll get finished soon and I'll give it to her when it's done and that will be fine.  

The purple and green quilt is coming along - three blocks are together and more are laid out. 

I'm working hard to accept that this quilt will be a slow plod - I'm working really hard to match up points and edges, and the third block looks better than the first.  Once I finished the first block, I considered making it bigger by a block in each direction, and then I considered the work it would take to do that and gave right up.  When I realized how slowly this one was going, I went with a whim and started a new quilt. 

And then when I forgot the baby blanket, I spent an evening piecing the back from light-colored remnants, and then I forgot it again and this happened:

This involved lots of spray baste, which you're supposed to use in a well-ventilated space.  I'm pretty sure a cozy little house in the dead of the aforementioned frozen hellscape totally counts.  

I plan to quilt it with close parallel lines running horizontally - not close enough to be matchstick, but maybe 1/4".  After I finish knitting the blanket.  Yeah.  

Happy crafting!

Finish: A Little Pretty

My office does a Secret Admirer swap in February instead of a Secret Santa at Christmas, and the person whose name I drew once said she hoped I'd knit her something someday.  With only a week to get it done, I wasn't sure I could finish a handknit project, so I made a little pincushion/office ornament for her using this tutorial. 

If I'd had more time, I probably would've made a fabric-covered button to match the dark pink background fabric, but was lucky to find a suitable bead/button thingy for the middle in my bead stash. 

I'm making two again, and was happy about how much my folding improved from the first to the second.  

Though I'd intended to put the teal and yellow-green across from each other, I luckily messed it up on the one that wasn't folded as well. 

Bwaaww, little tiny blanket-stitched label!  It's really there to distract from the Frankensteinian whip-stitched turning hole.  Not even invisible thread can help that one, so distraction seemed to be the best way to handle it.  Usually, doing the one I'm keeping first allows me to get all the stupid mistakes out of the way and it's nice to just have a practice run so the second one can be a little better.  Because I didn't have much time left, though, I had to finish this one first, so it could be a bit more polished than it turned out. 

I stuffed this with fabric scraps - piles of thread ends and threads clipped from the edges of fabric after prewashing make the best stuffing.  Leftover wool is really great too, springy and squishy. 

I feel like I'm putting myself out there a bit with this one.  I'm sure the recipient will appear to like it, because my coworkers are almost uniformly lovely, gracious beings, but I hope that she hangs it on her wall and it gives her a little bit of joy to look at every day.  

Linking to Finish it Up Friday at crazymomquilts.  

Happy crafting!

When in doubt, knit.

My favorite part of the whole quilting process, I think, is when it's time to start the laying out of actual fabrics.  

I sewed eight segments together, sewing the wrong edges together on one and then running out of bobbin thread and not noticing on the last three.  Then I swore a lot, fixed it, and walked away for a bit, partly because quilting is supposed to improve my day, not make it worse, and also because the little one is going through a transition right now and it is a loud and time-consuming process, and incompatible with seam matching and correctly orienting anything.  (And sleeping, and thinking straight.) 

(Re-)Enter the baby dots/dot pattern blanket that I started oh, back before she was born.  It is a gigantic pain in the ass to knit, but I like the effect and it's giving me something to focus on.  Kiddo, I can't make you stop crying, but I can knit you this blanket.  

Happy crafting!

FO: Rainy Quilt

Rainy Quilt is finished.  

We got these pictures when it was nicely lit but very windy out - the thing actually does lay flat if put on a flat surface, swear.  

I used the last big hunk of Quilter's Dream Cotton Request (the thinnest one) for the batting, and quilted the whole thing with "organic" vertical lines to kind-of look like raindrops rolling down a window.  Hadn't used my free-motion foot in a long time.  Quilted a few raindrop shapes in as well, on the dark fabrics.  I auditioned white, gray, light blue, and dark blue thread for quilting, and Other liked the dark blue.  

The back is another Connecting Threads print, gotten in astonishing quantity from their Cyber Monday sale.  The finished quilt is noticeably soft, which is a nice surprise.  I bound it with the dark blue mirage that came with the Rainy Day fq pack, as well as some of the tiny white-on-blue polka dot that Other said was his favorite.  

The finished quilt is about 36"x42".  

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday at crazymomquilts. Happy crafting!

Rainy Quilt WIP

I just glanced at my traffic stats, and either my mom is very bored and has become weirdly obsessive about checking my blog, or there are actually some people who aren't my mom looking at this.  Hi, people!  Hi, Mom!

Eager to cleanse my quilting palette from the preceding Fugfest, I started chopping up some fabric for a little quilt for my husband.  Everyone else in our little family has a little quilt (and some even fit all the way under them), so it seemed like time to even things up. 

At Connecting Threads's cyber monday sale I got a FQ set of Rainy Day for a ridiculously small amount of money.  (Also got two large cuts for crazy cheap, which will be mostly quilt backs.)  The fabrics above are the ones that made the cut, plus a fq that I dyed in a class many years ago. 

These didn't make the cut.  The grays surprised me, but I was hoping to pinch a bit of each for a different quilt of much gray, so that worked out well. 

Hand dyed

I go back and forth on this one, but it does match the color scheme really well, so it's going in.  

In other random news, my iron finally turned on me and was spitting water - really, really hot water - at me and everything, and then it gave up the ghost.  Just now I considered saying that I'm surprised it never did significant amounts of damage, but I haven't thrown it out yet, so I'd rather not tempt fate like that.  

Here's the replacement, long may it reign.  

Happy crafting!

Can't Wait to Eat It

I have a finish!  

And I just desperately hate it.  Hated it so much that I considered balling it up and putting it away forever, but the recipients liked it, so I pushed through.  I did not try very hard.  The techniques I used to finish it cannot be found in any quilting encyclopedias, Craftsy classes, or incredibly misinformed blogs.  I crossed the streams, made specific and detailed public statements about Fight Club, and put Baby in a corner on this quilt.  

For this quilt, I used the palette builder at Play Crafts to pick fabrics and then sketched up several different ideas and had the recipients pick which one they liked.  The palette builder worked well - the general concept did not.  I love this picture, and the sunflower itself was pretty cool as well.  Maybe it will grow on me, but I'm not holding my breath.  Hey, self: next time just get a big print of the picture you like.  

Feh.  

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday at crazymomquilts, because a finish is a finish, even if it's fugly. 

Happy crafting! 

A mitten story

For a harrowing and difficult eight days, I couldn't find my right Owl Mitten.  (Pictured below, right)



Worse, the eight days fell during the small window of time during the year that I focus, finally and in a panic, on making gifts for my loved ones.  I was in a sea of I'll-never-be-knitting-anything-but-felted-slippers-again-much-less-quilting-omggg.  

I got through this dark time by carrying mitten yarn with me and winding it into balls while making phone calls at work.  

Turns out I don't spend so much time on the phone at work.

I also asked for some more mitten yarn (Jamieson's Shetland Spindrift) for Christmas.  Then I found the mitten at work. 

Two pairs of felted slippers later (yeah, it was only two pairs, but one pair was team-knit in three days), I dove right into a new pair of mittens with the new Christmas yarn. 

Two rounds into the new pair of mittens, I decided that next Christmas will be the Christmas on which I will give all my loved ones colorwork mittens.  Not this pair, of course, or the ones from the green and black yarn above, because all that yarn was given to me as a gift, so it doesn't feel right to give it away.  I'll just knock out this blue and black pair first, then knock out 5 more pairs, then do the green and black pair.  Never have to worry about not having backup mittens again.  


Oh, and also, the stupid plastic mittens that we bought for the bigger kid are an ordeal to get on and can't be any fun to play in, so she'll need a pair of handknit ones, too.  So that's eight pairs, then.  




And there is now fabric and a rough plan for two more quilts. 

Tune in Christmas, 2015 to see how this glorious Mittens for Everyone! Plan turns out.   


Happy crafting!

WIP - flower quilt

This is a WIP post, where "WIP" stands for "What In the name of all that is holy are you triPping on, and where can I get some, because I, too, wish to make fugly art quilts."  

Behold:

This, above, is what I started with.  It's really my first shot at improv piecing, if you could call it that.  The first solution to this mess that popped into my head was to cut each piece down by half an inch per side, because if it had to be fugly, at least  there could be less of it.  

Instead, I spent my precious last two hours of quilting time for awhile unpicking and redoing to come up with this:

And, wow.  Still so bad.  

If you were to make a ranked list of my intelligence and talents, the ability to remember where I left the chocolate (choco-spatial) intelligence would be easily in the top three, and any other spatial pieces would be way, way down in the 700s or so.  After things like my cooking ability, dexterity with small talk, or facility driving backwards.  

The driving backwards thing may actually be related, though (ahhaha, I have crashed into SO MANY THINGS driving backwards!).  Do you know how many attempts it took me to get one of those pieces lined up so that the yellow-edged triangle was at the angle I wanted?  Four.  Four separate times I added a piece of fabric onto the edge, thinking that once it was attached, I'd be able to cut a 4" square out of it.  And, to ice this Cake of Pathos, there's about 1/16th" that's just going to have to be eaten in the seam allowance.  

I have no idea how I'm going to quilt it.  

Let's move on!  Here's a baby blanket I just completed.  

Pattern is Blake's Baby Blanket, yarn is KnitPicks Swish in Dove Heather.  It's crazy soft and went through the washer and dryer well the first time.  For once I did well estimating how many to cast on given the desire for a blanket taller than it is wide and the amount of yarn I had.  Then it turned out I'd ordered six balls when I thought I'd ordered five, so I could've made it bigger.  Grumble.  

Happy crafting! 

A Mini for Spotted Guy

My last finish for a bit here is this mini quilt made from mini tumblers left over from the back of the twin-sized tumbler quilt.  

The top was a leaders-and-enders project and the back is from a half-yard that I got for the big tumblers but turned out to be more brownish than orangeish. 

It looks orangeish here, but I swear it's brownish. 

I practiced my stitch-in-the-ditch on this, using orange thread on the front and white on the back.  Meant to practice sewing down bias binding on this one, but then I ended up doing the big quilt first.  

Four minis and the twin-sized quilt all got navy binding. After the first night of hand sewing, I got an impressive callous on my right middle finger pad, so I declared myself the Jimi Hendrix of sewing down navy binding.  It is the only thing I ever plan to be the Jimi Hendrix of, so I made sure to enjoy it. 

And an action shot:

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday at crazy mom quilts.

Happy crafting!

If Things Were Different

Pretty soon after I picked quilting back up, I sketched this mini quilt and the quilting pattern out.  

Adding some medium blues to the darks and lights from my stash, I got a gradient that I ended up pretty happy with, although there was a lot of standing as far away as possible and looking through red film and rearranging. 

This is another one-of-two minis - the second will be for my mom (she already has the socks on the same theme), and I plan to finally admit that I need to mark quilting lines if they need to turn out straight. 

This was my first time quilting with perle cotton 8, which turns out nicely, but was really hard to hand quilt with using whatever embroidery needle that was around. 

I'm linking up again to Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  

Happy crafting!

This is not a potholder

I made two mini-quilts - not potholders, oh my, no no - from this tutorial at Moda Bakeshop. 

When I make small things, I usually do more than one - out of a sense of practicality, mostly - if I'm going to spend a lot of time on something, in most cases it won't take twice as long to make two.  The actual sewing and quilting, especially hand quilting, will take twice as long, but cutting and all the setup and takedown that sewing projects take will not.  

The green and purple fabric are from JoAnn's.  This shade of green is my absolute favorite, and it's hard to find because yellowish greens seem to be more popular.  This particular fabric is the sort of fabric people mean to exclude when they say for swaps and bees, "quilt-shop quality only."  It's thin and sheer and not particularly well-printed.  But it's the green that I like!  

The tutorial was really good, but I did put some of my own tweaks in.  For instance, the center of the first one I did turned out pretty badly. 

As you can probably see, the points don't meet.  (I'm noticing that the two top purples aren't the same size, which wasn't as noticeable in person - will go back and see about tweaking that somehow.) 

So, I threaded a needle, came up through the back, and cinched all the points together.  Much better, and better than a bead, which I had also considered, but which (to me) would have just screamed "whoops, that didn't turn out well, better cover it up with a bead."  

I also folded the whole shebang (i.e. made the 2-3 folds on each section), then sewed it all, before going on to the next shebang.  Doesn't seem to be an advantage to doing it one section at a time, and there's a lot of back-and-forth with the sewing machine.  

And here's a lesson that I apparently haven't learned well enough: contrast.  The purple and green are both light.  They look nice together up close, but far away it's hard to make out.  Solution: hanging it in a tiny room, in this case the laundry room, where you can never be too far away from it.   

The second one used quilt-shop quality fabrics.  The greens are from a big fabric order I did of greens-I-like, but these turned out to be more yellowish than I was expecting.  They look really great and Christmassy with the red and white, though. A plain white and/or red would have been better, because those fabrics blend a bit more in the final product than I would've liked. 

If I ever make these again, I'll probably make the folds bigger than 1/4," especially if I'm using prints.  And I'll use a more substantial fabric for the base, like a Kona cotton.  

Having made a truly silly amount of navy bias binding for the orange tumbler quilt, I was able to finish the green one as an octagon rather than a square. Didn't get a picture of that by itself, so here's a group shot with some other finishes I'll be writing about soon. 

Linking up with crazy mom quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  Happy crafting!