Oh yeah, I have a blog!

Seems that recently I only manage to post when I've finished something, which is why you haven't heard from me in a while.  First I decided to knit on a blanket that is a looong-term project:

...

Hm, seems I haven't photographed that one since I picked it back up.  It's pretty, I'll photograph it sometime.  It's Hue Shift in decor.  

Then I needed an emergency Thanks-for-Being-the-Best-Boss-I've-Ever-Had gift, so I forgot all knowledge I have of how long it actually takes to knit things (because dude, look at all the stuff I've knit, it's like millions of stitches), and I ordered me up an enormous amount of fingering weight merino/cashmere/nylon blend yarn, and cast on 452 stitches or whatever and that was in the middle of March.  

I knit the final stitches last night - the bindoff I haven't brought myself to face yet is next.  In the process of knitting this thing, I have watched an UNGODLY amount of Gossip Girl*, and I'm very ready to be done with both.  

Peeking from behind the Blue Scarf of Interminable Gossip Girl is some fabric that got here today (YAAAY!) from Hawthorne Threads.  (They shipped about two hours after I ordered it, because they are awesome).  I'm making Big Girl Quilt #2, and she chose red.  Here are today's new ones:

And here is the whole pull so far:

 
And here is a bunch of fabric I got awhile ago with some fun money that was timed very nicely with a Connecting Threads sale:

The fabric on top there is not CT - I used all of the half-yard I got as part of the backing for the soccer ball quilt, and I like it so much that I tracked down a bit more online.  

Aaaand, that's about it for me.  Hope that soon I will unearth my sewing table and start quilting again. 

Happy crafting! 

xoxo - orooni



*embarrassing aside: if I have to hear Blair telling Chuck that she loves him but can't be with him ONE MORE TIME, I'm going to roll my eyes so hard I fall off the couch and sustain some kind of injury.  YOU know what I'm talking about.  And if you don't, maybe you don't realize how much respect you should be losing for me, but I assure you, it's a lot.  A lot. 

FO: Petal Pillow

When you make small projects, they get done faster! 

I made a template for the two peels on the loving kindness wallhanging, and- well, here's what happened.  I appliqued them, I enjoyed it, and I was bingewatching Nurse Jackie and desperately needed some hand work to look at during the gory parts, so I grabbed some yellow and some blue and made one of these squares.  

Nurse Jackie has seven seasons.  

I decided to try two layers of batting and chose, from my tons of batting scraps, an anonymous 100% cotton.  You can see here the depth it gave to the (minimal) quilting, which I really like. 

Last night I spent a very long time creating the pillow insert out of fabric and batting scraps, as well as some home dec weight fabric that I bought not realizing that it wasn't quilting cotton.  I used that fabric in the Gorilla quilt and it being a different weight doesn't stand out at all, but I probably won't mix it again, so it became the sturdy outside of the pillow form.  

I had a batting bag and rubbermaid bin of scraps.  It contained little actual fabric scraps, ends of threads that are too short to reuse, bits of yarn too short to do anything with, and lots of fabric sandwiches that have been cut away from the edges of a finished quilt.  The fabric sandwiches I sliced to bits using my old partially-retired rotary cutter, because I don't mind the blade dulling from all the batting.  Oh, and there were also those tangles of yarn that you cut from the edges of fabric after you prewash it - those are the best, along with the yarn.  Wool is so springy. 

I used an envelope pillow tutorial from crazymomquilts that worked well.  I grokked the spirit of the deal and then proceeded to wing it, and next time I will definitely have less overlap in the two back panels.  It was way past bedtime last night, and my husband was watching me try to cram the finished pillow form into the cover.  He watched for a while, and then said, "We will never wash it."  Which is, word-for-word, exactly what I was thinking. 

The back is (mostly - the hidden part may have its secrets) this awesome batik I got at the LQS with my birthday gift certificate.  While it looks like it may match the front pretty well, ehh, it really doesn't.  It's not garishly different, but yeah.  Don't look too closely.  

It was deeply satisfying to use up so many scraps, and this thing is dense as a brick and about as heavy.  I could see more scrap-stuffed pillows being on the horizon.  

Linking up with Finish It Up Friday.  Happy crafting!

FO: Loving Kindness Wallhanging

I'm moving into a new and tiny office and am using this chance to make everything look exactly how I want it.  Which, of course, means lots of quilts.  

The design for this one came as I was sitting looking at the couch that's currently in my office and seeing a little pillow laying on the back that looked like a stack of sideways half-square triangles.  I thought it would be nice to make it look slightly plant-like by putting petals at the top.   

The assembly was quite fast, given that I was using a charm pack from the Connecting Threads "Luminescence" line. 

 I sat and embroidered while watching lots and lots of Netflix.  

The words come from a loving kindness meditation I learned in a class about Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which I've used a lot, especially recently. Our little community has had a rough time of it over the last couple of weeks. 

I machine-quilted in the ditches first and then echoing lines in the non-wordy triangles.  The binding is yardage from Luminescence.  

Hoping that I haven't missed the deadline to link up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it up Friday. 

Happy crafting! 

FO: Soccer Ball Quilt

It's finished!  And it's called "The Soccer Ball Quilt," and it was named by my 4-year-old.  These are some of my old soccer shirts.  I struggled mightily with how to design this quilt, given the various sizes of the designs and my utter inability to get squares to come out 18.5".  

I didn't want to use stabilizer on all of the t-shirt parts, and I didn't run into much trouble with the t-shirt fabric.  I made sure that I wasn't ever seaming t-shirt to t-shirt - everything is seamed together with quilting cotton.  Making the big squares went so well that I used some of the excess tie-dye material as colored fabric for the square in the bottom right, and that went just fine, too. 

A shot of the full thing.   It's about 54"x62".  The little blotty square is the back of a t-shirt that has a bunch of signatures on it.  Blotted out what are probably mostly obsolete maiden names by now. 

Ribbon Star

The big patterned squares are a ribbon star, churn dash, and X marks the spot.  These shirts were from 20+ years ago, so I decided to use a very old bit of stash, too, which is the blue heart/leaf batik that I got at Joanns slightly less than 20 years ago.  I had a bunch of fat quarters of it, and used up nearly all of it.  

The back is a recent purchase from a LQS (the black and white flower), more batik, and some Cyber Monday yardage from Connecting Threads (the green).   With the borders, I didn't quite have enough batting without cobbling some together, so the last little bit of January's spending money + a 50%-off coupon got me some Pellon Cotton with scrim off of the big old roll.  I felt like I was taking a gamble, because I'd never used that kind before, but I really love the crinkle that it ended up with.  

The batting was nice and flat, too, which is more than I can say for the kind that comes in bags.   I pin-basted most of the quilt and spray-basted the t-shirt fabric so that it would be less likely to shift around.  I quilted this with an all-over loop, and there was only one big expanse of t-shirt (around the signatures) that got a little bunchy.  I can live with it. 

Quilt Stats
Style: T-shirt quilt without stabilizer
Size: 54"x62"
Batting: Pellon 100% cotton with scrim (off the roll at Joann's)
Thread: Essential Pro (for piecing and quilting)
Binding: Double-fold machine sewn to front and hand-sewn to back


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

New Projects

I hemmed and hawed about which project I should start next - a t-shirt quilt I've been meaning to make for ages, or the next original design I have in mind.  So, I finally started with the t-shirt quilt.  

And I have mad So. Many. Mistakes.  The only one I haven't made yet is the one where I cut a one-of-a-kind, unreplaceable t-shirt too small.  I cannot add up the size of blocks to save my life, I cannot figure out the right amount to add to HSTs to get them to come out the right size, I cannot figure out how to put borders on.  

I'm living on the edge by not using any kind of stabilizer on the t-shirts.  I don't want a quilt full of stabilizer.  So far, I've sewn t-shirt to quilting cotton without any problem whatsoever - I just use tons of pins and put the t-shirt fabric on the bottom.  Perhaps the real problem is when you try to quilt it?  

Because the t-shirt quilt mostly involves putting borders on, with some block-making, I decided I needed a leaders-and-enders project and started the triangle quilt anyway.  

My original vision for this quilt was something way outside my comfort zone - an Anna Maria Horner type of mix of dark but bold colors, rather than the separated, orderly stuff I usually go for.   (Prints with more than one color, WHAT?) 

I want a range from red to blue, with lots of purples in between.  I've been saving up some fabric for this, then added a bit more (including some actual AMH fabric).  It's safe to say that right now, red-purples are way more in than blue-purples.  

I thought the pinks looked garish because of the nighttime lighting, but then I took another picture this morning and it still looks garish.  It doesn't look garish in person.  The pinks do stand out, but not as much as in the pictures.  

As you can see in the lower right-hand corner, I'm trying out a more random layout than the hexagons, and I think I'll finish the hexagons and then mix it up a bit.  Maybe pull out the lightest pink.  There are a couple more fabrics that didn't fit into the blue, blue/purple, and red/purple categories that I made up to make the hexagons, and I can intersperse those a bit, too.  

Once this is ready to start sewing together, I can go back to redesigning the t-shirt quilt after adding borders that made a square way too big to fit into the neat little grid I'd gotten all the other squares to agree to.  

Designing is always interesting.  This one is coming out close to my vision for it, but it turns out my vision doesn't look how I was expecting.  Weird.  

Happy crafting! 

FO: Block O-hio Star Quilt

It's finished!  And wrapped, and given.  Witnesses report that the recipient was happy about it, but I was holding it up and couldn't see the reaction.  The recipient is not a huge quilt person, but is a huge Ohio State person, so maybe that worked. 

I bound it in a black print after realizing that I didn't have nearly enough dark gray to do the job.  Borders just didn't happen, but I did finish this early in the day on Christmas Eve, so that's a win.  I failed to measure it before giving it away, but I had to stand on the glider footstool to get this picture, and I'm 5'4", if that gives you some idea. 

I've mentioned that naptimes recently have been hit or miss, and the last naptime before we got on a plane looked like this:  

That is a child under the fabric that was to become binding. 

Cute and terribly unproductive.  So that night after the kids went to sleep, I got the binding cut and sewn on, then grabbed time as I could sewing it to the backside.  In the car on the way to the airport, late at night instead of sleeping.

For the quarter-square triangles for the Ohio Stars, I used a technique that is kind of strip piecing and kind of chain quilting.  I made half-square triangles by the seat of my pants. 

If I had to do this again (which, please, no), I'd use a more limited range of values in the red, keeping it medium-to-dark. 

I'm very, very proud of the drop shadow, and the range of grays I used to create it. 

Right now I'm enjoying this moment of after-Christmas freedom, thinking about all the wonderful things I can plan for next year. 

Bonus FO: Owl Mittens
These owl mittens were a special request - also in Buckeye colors, perhaps you are sensing a theme - and were given for a mid-December birthday. 

I'll link up to Crazy Mom Quilts on Monday.  

I hope your gift-giving went well, with met deadlines and delighted recipients. 

Happy crafting! 

Drop Shadow, Baby!

Things have been kind of weird lately!  For a while, when I recommitted to exercise and work went crazy, I wasn't quilting at all. Some nights I didn't even knit.  Sad times.  Then, work settled down, but the kids went crazy, and I found myself, a few nights ago, gearing up to exercise at 10:40pm.  Not great!

Then yesterday, we were home for part of the day, and I made significant progress on this quilt while also minding the children.  They are big enough that they can entertain themselves for some stretches of time now.  Before, I might get a seam here or there, but really the only significant progress was during quiet time/nap time, and sometimes even that went by the wayside.  Also sad times.

I read several quilting blogs of people with young children, and I can't fathom how they churn out finished quilts. 

Block O-hio Star Quilt

Above is where we were yesterday, and below is where we are this morning. (I also may have stayed up waaay too late working on it.)  

Drawing this out was pretty easy.  Making the blocks has involved a LOT of thinking with my tongue sticking out.  And seam ripping.  It should probably get a border, just a couple of solids around the outside, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to hack that. 

After Thanksgiving, I'd pretty much given up on getting this done by Christmas, but now it's seeming possible.  If I do little else.  And if work and the kids remain under a certain calmness threshold.

Fabric
In what's becoming a very enjoyable little tradition, I got some super-cheap yardage at the Connecting Threads Black Cyber Sale.  The green big-print will probably be used for backing, and the gray may be used in this Ohio Star quilt or maybe not.  I also got a couple reds for it, but those went straight into the washing machine, then into the quilt.

The green right under the gray was a little Local Fabric Store purchase on my Thanksgiving trip.

Christmas Aaugh
In some ways I'm in good shape for Christmas - finished several things early.  Then I hid some of them very well, so well that I'll spend precious Making Stuff time tearing apart all the places I might've hidden them because I cannot find them.

Breaking News!!1!
I found one!  And now I remember the kiddo "wrapping" it and hiding it there.  While writing this, I spied a box under the table and thought to myself, "ooh, did I order fabric and then forget about it?"  Sadly no, but I will still chalk this up as a win.

Happy crafting, and may you always find your ridiculous hiding places before your gift-giving occasions. 

Little finish

Baby Bear needed a baby quilt:

and I needed to try out the right-angle stipple I wanted to use on the THERE. quilt.  

The reddish purples, the ones on the diagonal across the nine-patch, were all birthday fabric.  I have a quilt in mind for them, but because it was becoming clear that I won't be getting to that one for a while, I took them for a little spin here.  

The backing is birthday fabric, too, and I seriously love it and had no idea what to use it for before this opportunity presented itself.  I get to see it a lot this way, which is a nice bonus.  Baby Bear is getting a lot of covering-up love these days.   

That early-October holiday is a day off for me but not my kids, and I usually quilt my ass off.  This year, I spent the time regaining control of the crafting space/dining room.  It's nice and organized, but I piled a lot of stuff on the table and haven't been able to get up the momentum to get it off again and dig back into my big quilting projects.  I want to, and there are deadlines, but. ...  

So for now I'm knitting - two more friends are having babies (and soon!) and babies need blankets.  (I love it when friends have babies.  Friends, I will speak with you by phone approximately once every two years, and promise to visit sometime and then never do it, but by gum I will make you blankets when you have babies!)

The chevron blanket will be made of leftovers - the parents-to-be are going to find out the sex of their little one at birth, so I'm sticking to very neutral colors.  Not loving the gray and green together, but next will be blue, which may pep it up a bit.  And, depending on the blue I use, make it not-so-neutral any more.  The background wafflely blanket is in KP Swish in Twilight, which is a very nice blue, for a little baby boy #3.  

I've stuck a few things back up in my shop - just some socks and a pink folded-flower quilt.  So if your size-medium-women's feet are cold, or if you can't get enough of pink (or, uh, both?), check it out.  

Happy crafting!

FO: Woodland Baby Blanket

The Woodland Baby Blanket is finished!  Mom-to-be declared it a great match for the woodland-themed nursery (a happy coincidence).  

These are pre-washing pictures.  I used white thread to piece and then quilted with brown thread on the top and white on the bottom.  The complimentary colored squares were all from stash. 

Yes, I'm standing on the couch. 

A tiny bit of yellow showed on the left and not the right of the expander strip.  Good thing I'm not OCD. 

And post-washing, with daylight and small helping hands:
 

I quilted straight lines along the edges of the horizontal brown sashing and then around the other sides of the squares, just lifting the needle up and moving to the next row down.  Then I cut all the connecting threads and buried the ends and there were 19 squares x 4 corners and 12 squares x 2 corners + am I seriously still working on this + am I SERIOUSLY still working on this = maybe I should have just backtracked a couple of times and called it good, but it turns out I can't because maybe I am actually a little tiny bit OCD, despite aforementioned captions to the contrary. 

Anyway, I think the ends-burying took longer than the actual quilting, which was annoying.  I switched to a larger-eye needle after the first evening of ends-burying, which helped a lot.  

Woodland Baby Blanket
Finished Size: 45"ish x 37"ish (forgot to measure)
Batting: Hobbs cotton
Thread: C&C poly


In other news, we hit the Sheep & Wool fest last weekend and I used up some of my precious spending money on some pretty darn plain-looking wool yarn, sheep-colored. 
 

But the possibilities for colorwork that these represent are very exciting indeed.   I've got a bug to knit little colorwork mittens for the little hands in my house with winter coming up, and I was feeling a cold little foot this morning and then got a second bug to knit a parade of little wool socks, too.  If only every day were sit-around-and-make-stuff day.  

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish it Up Friday.  

Happy crafting! 

working with panels

There are three babies on the way whose mamas I'm fond of, so I'm busy working on one quilt and obsessively thinking about how to come up with two more quilts or blankets without spending money or dipping into my precious stash of CotLin in Kohlrabi, when the two people whose color preferences I've asked about have said "green."  Kohlrabi's discontinued!  I wanted a sweater!  Yes I haven't made myself a sweater out of Kohlrabi in the four or so years it's been in my stash but still!  

Now I am trying to distract you from my selfishness with a picture of a quilt top - did it work?  This is my first attempt at a quilt using a panel - this panel, which I got from Hawthorne Threads as part of my Birthday Fabric Extravaganza.  

To my surprise, the little animal squares did not measure any kind of standard measurement, at least not by imperial standards - it did not occur to me until this very second to have tried metric, although that might have worked.  So, to cut out blocks all the same size, I measured a standard amount (7/8", I think) from the edge of the middle square that the animal is in, rather than measuring the whole square or trying to measure out from the acorn or leaf borders.  

This worked pretty well, although there were a few squares where the fabric was pretty biased/distorted/not square, and you can see an example of this in the third row from the bottom, where a deer square loses a tiny bit of its border.  Whoops.  

I was also less than precise when putting the top together about lining up the rows exactly, so sewing the borders on the right and left side was a leeetle touch and go there, but God knows I'm not unpicking anything.  

I wasn't sure about brown as the background fabric - brown?  really?  - but the organic cotton is a kind of natural color and white would just not have worked and I thought about army green but ugh so brown it was.  Had to order more when the half-yard went really fast, but I like this print so much I might order even more. 

Here are some herringbone mittens (take that, Christmas 2015!!) for my SIL, pictured on the backing fabric.  This was taken before blocking, and after blocking they're so flat and even that I kind of want to wrap them up pressed between two pieces of cardboard.  That's probably weird.  

 And finally, in honor of my parents' trip to London, I'm knitting myself mittens with the gift they brought back for me from their last trip to London.  DK mittens go fast! 

Happy crafting! 

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! 

THERE.

GAWD.