Three More

I have been finishing projects lately.  Starting them too but I'll focus on finishing for the moment.  I have been trying to organize my yarn stash and using the Ravelry stash tracking function to get an inventory.  This has had a nice side effect - a lot of motivation to knit.

First up was the Poet Society tam which I bought yarn for at the now closed Stash in Campbellville.  I bought enough to make the Honey Cowl (which I made) and this hat.  Since I've been in a hat knitting mood lately and pretty much one of the first stash yarns I pulled out was the Madelinetosh Vintage that went with this pattern, I cast on.  I really love the finished project.  It is going to be a hat for me since tams aren't really my thing.  Some would say hats aren't my best look either but I live in Canada so don't have a heck of a lot of choice in the matter some mornings.

Then I found an almost finished pair of French Press slippers.  All of the knitting had been done.  All that was left was sewing up and felting.  I bought yarn for these intending to make four pairs for Christmas one year.  I realized pretty quickly that I find these an irritating little project.  I made one pair which I gave as a gift before I reminded myself that I don't like the seaming and I don't like felting so these languished in the cupboard for at least two years.  But now they are done.  I think they need one more trip through the washing machine - they are a very little bit too big.  So I'll do that this weekend and will hopefully be totally finished.  They are quite comfortable despite the fact that they weren't my favourite project.

My last project was a flannel quilt I made for my nephew for his high school graduation/going to college gift.  I've had the fabric forever and decided to make the quilt for my nephew in April or May but it took forever due to lack of excitement for the project.  Lucky for me, this one had a deadline.  I needed to get it done for his graduation party so made it work.  He is a blanket kid and seemed to really like it - as his mother said he would.

Now I'm going to go finish some fingerless mitts. I think I have enough of that Madelinetosh left to make them.  Fingers crossed.

Still Keeping the Promise

I have managed to continue my goal of not buying anymore yarn and am completing projects.  First up, I finished by Brown Sheep yarn, finally. I think this purchase at some sale 10 years ago has made about 6 different projects.  Nice yarn, but enough already.  These booties are the best.  They are Ruth's "Perfect" Baby Booties and are made without breaking the yarn like most patterns I've used before.  This is very appealing to me.  Two fewer ends to sew in per bootie.  I guess the i-cord tie more than offsets the time savings from sewing in four fewer ends but who said these things had to make sense?

And I finished the Amy Butler quilt.  Stippled on my machine.  Down to the wire as my thank you gift for our camping out at the in-laws during our recent reno.  We could not have lived in the house through that disaster (the rip-out part) and were lucky enough to have a place to crash that was dust free and meant we could live on something other than pizza every night.

Scrappy Happiness

I've decided, yet again, that I really, really, really need to make some space for myself in my craft room.  As I was sorting through things, I realized that I have a ton of Amy Butler left over from three quilts, some pyjama bottoms, a skirt, a bag or two and just general collection.  I found some other fabrics that have a similar fun theme dumped them out on my cutting board and made a quilt.

I cut 3 1/2" squares and 1 1/2" x 3 1/2" strips.  I sewed the strips together in threes to get more 3 1/2 " squares.  I joined the cut and sewn squares in strips of 4 and then sewed 1 1/4" sashing on each side.  Joining three of these pieces together gave me a block close enough to 12"x12".  I alternated the blocks so the sashing changed between a horizontal and vertical orientation and sewed them all together.  The quilt ended up as 5 squares by 5 squares.  I could have kept going because I still have at least a quilt worth of scraps left but I'll try something else with them.

I'm quite happy with the result.  As usual with Amy Butler and friends, it is very busy but very fun.

Just in time!

This quilt has been in progress since the summer.  So it really shouldn't be a just in time for Christmas thing.  Why the long time to completion?  It just wasn't a project that kept me motivated for some reason.  I absolutely love the colours and the finished product but had to force myself to keep going.  I think it has something to do with the amount of piecing involved to get to final construction.  The pattern, from Kaffe Fasset's Country Garden Quilts, I mostly followed.  And the stripy fabric on the right is his too.

This quilt is for my dad who asked me to make a bed-sized quilt for him.  I found fabric selection to be difficult for this.  There were surprisingly few fabrics on the conservative side that were geared to men.  My local quilt shop had a few but only two or three that appealed to me.  I found a few at Bee Modern Fabrics at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a few in my stash and a few from the previously mentioned LQS Quilter's Garden Patch.

I had some trouble getting the corners perfect but when I took it in to Quilter's Garden Patch to find the border fabric, the girl working there told me to not to spend anymore time trying to fix them.  It was good advice.  Firstly because I never would have finished if I had stopped to take out all of the corners. Secondly, all put together and quilted, these issues are a lot less noticeable.

In the end, I really like this and hope my dad does too.

Book publishers must not understand inspiration

I've been looking at a selection of fabrics for my dad's Christmas quilt for a couple of weeks trying to figure out what I want to make with them.  So this morning, I finally found inspiration in a Kaffe Fassett book.  Perfect.  It fits the fabrics exactly the way I think they should go.  It even looks fairly straightforward although I will have to cut and sew carefully for a change so the joins line up.  So, I have the time, I have the inspiration and the pattern requires blowing the templates up 200%.  Ugh.

When I am inspired, I want to get going.  I don't want to dig into the pockets of all of my jackets to find a bunch of quarters (or loonies probably), drive to the library, photocopy the pattern and come back.  And my local branch isn't open on Saturdays so would have to go to the crazy busy branch a little further away or find a Staples.  By the time that was all done, I would be distracted by some other project or have lost interest in quilting and would put the project aside until next time.  No progress made.

I wish I was one of those organized people who plans things out in advance but I am not.  I like spur of the moment and fancy that this characteristic means I'm somehow a creative type.   There is the other part of my brain, which dominates at least 5 days of the week, that completely understands the financial reasons behind the publisher's approach.  Fortunately the pattern is easy so I'm increasing it the old fashioned way, with paper and pencil.  Except that I am ranting on the blog but will get back to the quilt in a few minutes rather than a few weeks.

On the plus side for today, I rode up to the farmers' market again this morning, watching the clouds the entire time.  As soon as I turned the corner onto my street, the thunder started.  By the time I was inside making myself a latte, the rain was teaming down.  How is that for excellent timing?  Thank you to Mother Nature, not only for the rain, but for waiting until I made it home before opening up the skies!

Rag Blanket

Rag blankets are fun to make.  This one is going to Project Linus and if I get this written quickly, I might have time to drop it off at Spun before they close.

I had leftover flannel from some baby blankets I made for the babies of 2 cousins so pulled it out, figured out the largest sized square that would let me make the maximum number of squares.  That size was 3 1/2 x 4 1/2".  The batting pieces were cut 1 1/2 x 2 1/2" and I sewed a corner-to-corner cross in chocolate brown across each fabric/batting sandwich.   Then I sewed them together with a 1/2" seam allowance (next time I would use 3/4" - it gives more room for sewing machine slippage - I had to fix a couple of spots that came apart in the washing machine).  

The best craft item I think I have ever purchased are the special scissors for snipping these blankets.  They seemed a frivolous purchase at the time but they are more comfortable in the hand and the blades are short enough that cutting through the seams is harder to do by accident.

I just love these blankets.  They are quick, easy and cozy.

I feel inspiration coming on

I had a pile of batik fat quarters that I bought on sale at my local quilt shop sometime in the fall, I think.  They have been sitting on a shelf in my craft room, looking pretty but not going anywhere towards a project.  Then I bought some French General fabric on my trip to Stitch in Jordan and they have been inspiring me to create a new quilt.  Since I always wash my fabric - the first quilt I made can never be washed because, despite pre washing the fabrics about 10 times, they still run.  So the quilt hangs on the wall where I hope it will only get dusty. Otherwise, it will have to be dry cleaned or something because as soon as I wash it, I will have to kiss it goodbye.

Anyway, I always prewash my fabric.  And to make a decent load, needed more than just the red French General for the washing machine.  So, I looked around to see what other non-washed fabrics were on hand and spotted the batiks.  Their cheerfulness as I hung them out and the way they looked on the line (not washed out as in this really sunny picture) has now pushed the French General out of my thoughts and the batiks are now sitting in a freshly ironed pile waiting for a project.  I'm thinking I might make something with the curvy templates I bought last time I was in my local quilt shop buying thread and trying not to buy more fabric.

Despite steady project completion ...

 ... I really don't feel like I'm making a dent on the craft room.  But just keep putting one foot in front of the other and it will get better, shelf space will be discovered, clutter will be reduced.

I finished this quilt top several months ago and as with many, it sat on the shelf waiting to be quilted.  Now it is done, done, done!  And I love it.  I especially love the little flowers in each of the squares - close-up below.  These resemble the doodles I am constantly doing on powerpoint presentations in endless meetings so I now feel like the doodles are actually serving a creative purpose.

Crafting has been a bit slow in March mainly due to curling.  Curling has been going very well lately.  My teams are doing really well in league play and I am going to another event in a few weeks after qualifying last weekend.  The nice thing about these out-of-club events - the travel time helps me get some knitting done.  And sock knitting is the perfect between-game past time.

It is easy ...

... to make a resolution to finish one project a month when one is almost finished.  We'll see how it goes for the rest of the year.

This was one of the quilt tops I have had completed for several months.  I quilted it about a month ago but just finished the binding yesterday.

It is a Buggy Barn pattern that was pretty interesting to make.  You pile up the fabrics for the blocks, put a template over top and cut where the template lines are.  Then move the fabrics around in each pile, sew them together and it looks like a complicated construction when really it is quite easy.

The second photo is of the back of the quilt, using up some scraps and other fabric I had in my stash.

I love the way the whole quilt turned out but I did run into a problem I haven't before - my back wasn't completely wrinkle-free when I pinned the layers together so there are a couple of places with wrinkles in the back.  I'm usually quite fanatical about ensuring the layers are flat so am disappointed with that but love it anyway and will probably be the only one who notices.  Or cares.

Out of the 100 half-completed projects littering my life ...

... finally a completed quilt top.  This one has been in progress for a couple of months but first it was too hot to quilt and then it was too nice outside not to be doing something out there.  Since this weekend has balanced the positives of last weekend by being relatively miserable, I have been able to work on some projects.

This quilt is Lucky Stars, another Atkinson Designs quilt.  As usual with their patterns, this one is extremely easy to follow and I really love the results.  The fabrics are random fat quarters picked up at various places.  Some from my local quilt shop, some from the Royal Botanical Gardens quilt show, some from who knows where but they all look great, I think.

Now onto piecing a back together for another quilt I completed last winter.  I've got to see these quilt tops through to completion.

And the Lentil Galettes (see previous post) were beyond fabulous.  Definitely a cookbook worth the price.

A Summer Quilt

This quilt is called Modern Rose Garden which seems an appropriate name for a summer project.  I bought this as a kit from Mad About Patchwork at the Creative Sewing festival last fall.  I think it is quite pretty.  I was a bit worried that my general inability to sew a straight line would show up more in this quilt than in others but I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

The diamond quilt is done

Several months ago, I posted the completed diamond quilt top.  This morning, put the last stitch through the binding and it is done!

I had been debating about getting a professional quilter to quilt it for me but really prefer to finish them myself if I think I can on my little machine.  I have a Pfaff that I won on a radio call in contest in Sudbury when I was in university and it is very sturdy but small.  It has few bells and whistles and does not have a big window between the main control panel and the presser foot.  So I always have to try to keep the quilt on the left side of the presser foot as much as possible.  I discovered that the quilting method I chose for this quilt made that a little difficult but I managed and only have a few areas that are a bit less than perfectly straight.   I used the walking foot to sew down both the inside and the outside of each diagonal row of diamonds further reinforcing the diamond shape.

In deciding my quilting method, I picked up the Kaffe Fassett book the design came from and examined his quilts.  All of his diamond quilts, I think I found 3 of them, were finished in the same way.  So I thought, if a guy who clearly knows what he is doing in this area has finished all of his diamond quilts in the same way, I probably can't go wrong in matching his approach.  So I did.  And I think it looks great.

Pink Chalk Studio

A thank you to Kathy from Pink Chalk Studio!  I won a $10 gift certificate in her 50 yards of fabric contest.  I've been looking at the site for a while this morning trying to decide what to buy.  So many choices!

Inspired by City Park

 I have been admiring a quilt called City Park for a while now.  It is made up of solids and big blocks with a navy or dark blue as the main centre piece.  I picked up the pattern and didn't find it terribly helpful so drew up my own version with the pattern as inspiration.

I used mainly Amy Butler's Soul Blossoms, with a few Love and possibly earlier lines thrown in too, and am really happy with how it turned out.  The solid blue is from Amy too.

I think the secret to a quilt using Amy Butler fabric is to include a solid or a relatively tame pattern to offset the craziness of the Amy Butlers.  I find this new one and the one below make sense because they have a solid as a kind of anchor point.  It helps your eye take in the patterns by giving it a break from the busy-ness.

I have no idea if what I'm talking about makes sense to anyone with artist training but it makes sense to me.

Comparing these to the third quilt which was all crazy patterns put together, I think this theory seems reasonable.  Since I'm still very much addicted to these fabrics, I'll probably have further opportunities to test out this hypothesis!

In the meantime, Quilter's Garden Patch is having a 24% off sale until Friday and I need some backing fabric for the new quilt.  Looks like I'll have to go buy some - and at 24% off, why not Amy Butler?


I also wanted to say Happy Birthday to Judy!  Hope your day is fabulous and includes some quilting!

Baby Shower Gifts Done!

My cousins, who are sisters, are having babies around the same time and the shower is this weekend.  Despite knowing about these babies well in advance, the need for a gift kind of snuck up on me and when the invitation came a few weeks ago, I knew I had to come up with a quickly executed project idea.  While do-able, I wasn't really all that interested in putting myself through the stress of trying to get 2 sweaters done so I decided on raggedy blankets.

These projects are fun.  The one drawback are all of the little bits of flannel that come off in the dryer.  A few years ago, I made 3 large ones for Christmas gifts and I actually took them to the laundromat.  Not sure if that was totally cool but I thought an industrial strength machine was better equipped to handle the lint.

Anyway, the one on the left was my effort to be fancy.  I didn't quite cut correctly and should have run a diagonal line across the smaller pieces because my batting is bunching after washing in a couple of places.  It isn't really that big of a problem and I still think it looks very cute.  The other was my standard with equal-sized squares.  I cut these 7x7 and went to town.  A couple of years ago, I bought some scissors specially made for cutting the borders.  While any old scissors will do, the blades on these are just long enough to cut the rag borders without as much risk of hitting the line of stitching.  And they don't seem to cause my hand to get a cramp quite as fast as regular scissors.

Anyway, I hope they like them.

Oh my soul ... blossoms!

I've been pretty good at not adding to the fabric stash.  I have only purchased backing fabric (and maybe a couple of fat quarters because I was in the store buying backing fabric and they sort of got picked up by accident).  But Mad About Patchwork, an online store from Ottawa, sent me an email about a little sale.  They send me several emails about sales but this week they had this little fat quarter bundle of Amy Butler's Soul Blossoms and I just couldn't resist hitting the purchase button.  I did actually delete a few other things from the cart so showed a tiny bit (well, actually about $80 worth) of restraint so don't feel too bad.

I am starting to think that A being for April and Austerity might be a coincidence I should take as a sign.  April does only have 30 days after all, it can't be as bad as January.

A little bit country

In a departure from my orange, lime green and pink phase, I pulled out this table runner pattern the other day.  The fabrics come from my favourite quilt store, located in North Bay, called Homestead Stitches.  It is a very lovely store where you won't find Amy Butler or Kaffe Fasset but you will find fabrics like these.  The fabrics are all cozy, country-type fabrics that I normally don't gravitate towards in other quilt shops but I do here.

I love sunflowers and love the mellow browns that just set them off.  The fabric, including the panel and the pattern is from a book called Pumpkins and Spice by Terri Degenkolb.  I did have a little bit of trouble on the corners and do find that my lack of attention to detail results in slightly uneven joins in the little squares but I'm not really bothered by it.  I was glad that it was a table runner and not a big quilt though.  The little squares would have driven me bonkers in a larger project.

Back to the store.  The owner, Annie, is lovely and churns out quilts at blinding speed.  She is in her twenties and always dreamed of owning a quilt shop and now she does.   She was featured in one of those quilt magazines that profiles shops a few years ago.  The only Canadian store in that particular edition.

Last Christmas I used some of the fabrics I bought there to make this Bento Box pattern for my dad.  If I made it again, I would make sure that the light fabrics were more related to each other.  I find the lighter beige and the darker beige don't really work together as well as the dark colours do.

Again, back to the store!  The store has a tin ceiling and dark wood shelves filled with all sorts of gorgeous fabrics and samples of Annie's work.  The flannels here are the nicest I've seen and I absolutely have to go there whenever I visit North Bay.  One thing about the fabrics there is that it is generally easier to put together a quilt for a man.  Obviously, my penchant for orange, lime and pink would not appeal to many of the male population.

It is pretty tangy

This turned out, obviously, very orange.  I quite enjoy orange so like it.  The non-orange strips are the leftovers from a previously posted quilt.  A pretty ingenious pattern from Atkinson Designs.  You get 2 quilts for (almost) the work of one.

I really have to start quilting some of these tops I keep churning out.  That was supposed to start last week.  Maybe this week.

Dinner Helpers

I love to cook but lately I've been working too much and get home later than I'd like to.  The other half will get things started if I'm organized in the morning and leave clear instructions but I am generally not organized in the morning.  So cooking during the week has become a bit of a chore - eating at 8 and going to bed at 9:30 just doesn't work for me.  Or I would get home and we'd order pizza or Thai which is ok once in a while but dangerous to the waistline if done too often.  So I have managed to find a couple of dinner helpers that have made a difference.

A few months ago, my friend Pam turned me on to Supperworks, a meal preparation company that basically does all of the chopping and recipe creation for you.  It felt like an odd concept to me at first until I tried it.  Essentially, I get 12 meals for an hour's work.  Yes, I could do the same things at home, but it would take me several hours on the weekend.  The food is pretty good too.  Most things don't take long to cook and I actually find that I spend more time doing something interesting with vegetables because I don't have to pay attention to the protein part of the meal.

The other find this week was a stir-fry kit from Longos.  We tried a beef stir fry with lime.  It came with noodles and quite a few veggies and was pretty tasty.

On the crafty front, things have been fairly quiet.  I have been working on my sock-of-the-two-months project (like the Yarn Harlot's sock of the month club but Kristen, Natalie and I decided we would do it over two months) and it is a very time consuming but lovely cabled sock.  I get about 2 rounds done per half hour.  I really like it though.

I have included the completely-unrelated-to-the-post quilt pictures to liven things up a bit.  I stayed up too late last night and am not feeling very inspired in the writing department so the pictures are an attempt to make up for that.  The top one was my own pattern and the bottom was Atkinson Designs Yellow Brick Road.  I have done two Atkinson patterns now and find them very well written.  While I guess I can't exactly call myself a novice quilter anymore, I'm still a bit clueless when following sewing directions so need things really well spelled out for me.  Atkinson does that.

I guess I should get the day started.  I'm off to Supperworks for more of those dinner helpers.

And the winner is ...

... the table runner.  It seemed like a good afternoon project and I love the fabric.  Perfect for a table runner and I have enough left to make the oven mitts I was thinking about when I picked up the fabric in the first place.

As I was being crafty on the weekend, I was listening to the Splendid Table podcast and Sally Schneider, who is often on the program, talked about this easy, delicious little treat.  Take 2 chocolate wafers (the kind that chocolate companies sell for lazy people like me who hate chopping chocolate for baking) and in between sandwich some crunchy peanut butter.  For my test drive, I used organic crunchy, my personal favourite, but it would probably be good with any kind.  Use as little or as much as makes you happy.

And in "let this be a lesson" news, I really have to start following the advice to change the batteries in the smoke detector on the spring forward/fall back days.  So then at 3AM on a Monday morning, I won't be awakened by ... beep ... beep .... beep .... etc.  Since it is the machine in the basement, I thought maybe I could ignore it but soon discovered that was not going to happen, got up and changed the batteries.  The only problem I couldn't get back to sleep.   I'm so tired, as soon as I publish this post, I'm going to sleep.