Cattywampus

One block wonder UFO

Back last fall sometime I started a one block wonder quilt.  It's a very funky kind of quilt and you can see some examples of it here.

I had all the little pieces done and just needed a place big enough to put them up and figure out the order they would go on the actual quilt.

This is what they look like - this is from last year when I had just cut them out.

I went over to Jersey saturday and used my stepmother's design wall - it's an entire wall covered in flannel so the fabric sticks and you can see what the quilt will look like before you sew it together - to put up all the blocks for this quilt to arrange them in an eye pleasing sort of way.

This is what I ended up with, sorry it's blurry, it's from the phone and I couldn't tell exactly what I was doing.

I went with a light to dark sort of thing with the golds in the middle and there's some teal over on the right that you can't see b/c of the stellar quality of the picture.  Of course now I have to sew it all together so you can see it for real.  

This pretty much used up my creative energies for the weekend, it took us about 3 hours to do, so I have nothing else to show...

Only two quilts to go

I did start on the skirt, but was thwarted by the darts.  I couldn't find any help anywhere online on how to adjust darts if they weren't working, any advice?

The material was puckering underneath the darts when I put the skirt on, I tried making them longer, no help, shorter, no help, I stopped for sanity's sake.  I will take it to work with me tomorrow and ask the woman in our office who recently graduated with a fashion degree, she should be able to tell me what I'm doing wrong.  

The instructions on how to make a pattern were quite clear, and I had this wrapping paper with 1" grid marks on the back, that was tremendously helpful.  I will refrain my judgement of the overall quality of instruction until I get the dart thing worked out though.  It wouldn't be fair at this point.

So I went back to sewing things that don't have to fit...I finished, finally completely finished, my godson's quilt and it is ready to go in the mail for his birthday in August.  I also finished (to the point that all that has to happen is the handsewn binding) 3 -THREE- quilts, two baby quilts and one that has just been in the queue a long time.

I quilted the boat quilt with a darker blue thread in a diagonal pattern.  I was going to make diamonds on it, but 1. I ran out of the thread and 2. I'm afraid it would obscure the pattern.  I think the thread was a little darker than I should have gone, tho it's hard to tell in this pic.  This stuff is a lot of trial and error at first like everything else, I guess.

And I worked a bit on the next quilt.  I think I mentioned I'm doing a lazy 9-patch block?  Lazy in that the blocks will be 12" blocks and there will be solid blocks in between the 9-patch blocks.  Right now I'm just trying to get this stuff churned out and this one is for a 5 yo boy who loves plaid flannels, so I thought this would suit him and something fancier and more complicated would possibly make it less well liked.

The blocks are all ready to be sewn up the next time I have some time, which probably won't be for a few weeks.

After that, one ONE baby quilt to do and I am DONE.  Until there are more babies of course, but as I will have caught up with all the pregnancies at least I will have some warning and time to make those!

I found a pesto recipe to use with my garlic scapes this weekend.  It was pretty powerful, we had it for lunch and we both felt like we shouldn't get too close to anybody.  But on the bright side, we didn't see any vampires all weekend, so it must have kept them away.

 

YUM!  I think they are probably almost out of season though, I doubt we'll get any more until next year.  

I was off today, leading to a much more productive weekend than I would have otherwise had, I spent most of today sewing and I'm sad to go back to work tomorrow b/c I feel like I"m on a roll.  Oh well.  It must be done.  How else could I afford to buy more fabric?  ;-)

...and I'm back

Well then, work sort of sucked me in over the last few weeks and I'm finally coming up for air.

I have a few things to share - 1. if for some reason you end up with an abundance of garlic scapes, you can make a fab white bean dip.  The CSA is certainly pushing my creativity for yet more things to do with greens, but so far, so good, and I figure I'm probably eating healthier for it so I'm not complaining.  

2.  I finished the Heart to Heart scarf that was part of the lace club for May.  I love the pattern, it's SO pretty.  The color is not up my alley, but this will make a wonderful gift for somebody.

3.  I have been out shopping for key summer wardrobe pieces over the last few weeks and it struck me that a lot of the skirts that are on the racks right now are pencil skirts.  Hmf.  I don't like pencil skirts.  They are uncomfortable to sit at a desk in and sometimes hard to walk in, I'm past the phase in my life where I will suffer for fashion, so I'm not buying them.  This has led to a dearth in fun skirts in my wardrobe this year. 

 

Now then.  I have a sewing machine...I have access to fabric...I (theoretically) can fit my knitwear to my body type...so...why not try to make skirts?

I ordered Sew What! Skirts from Amazon after reading the reviews and I am excited!  I went to our local fabric shop and picked up some fun fabric and bias tape to make a cute little number and I am planning on making an a-line skirt this weekend.  This book has you take your measurements then plot out a pattern on paper using the measurements and make the skirt from there.  Brilliant, no?  It's so logical when you think about it, no trying to make the fashion industry standard measurements fit on your body, no settling for that color when you really wanted THIS color & so on.  

On advice from the book (and again, so logical b/c this is what we do with sweaters) I took a few skirts that I love from my closet to check out the shaping & measurements.  The measurements were spot on with what the book said I should be using, all good, but HORRORS, every single skirt I picked up had DARTS.

Now, the book vaguely explains darts, recommending them for the curvy among us, but it says to put them on the back and front of the skirt.  My skirts only have back darts, which, if you think about it, is logical b/c there's a bit more of a steep angle necessary on the back of one's garment compared to the front.  So I am going to attempt to make two separate pattern pieces, front & back, so I can have darts only where I need them.  

So yeah...wish me luck!  I think it'll be a small miracle if I don't get so frustrated that I want to set the whole mess on fire by the end of the weekend.  (Quilts, what quilts?  I don't remember any quilts that I should be working on...)

Hope you all have a great holiday weekend & I will be back at the end to report my success (or failures)!

Obsession

My obsession with finishing up these baby quilts continues.  This weekend I finished sewing up the top of the little boat quilt and the binding is ready to go on after I quilt it.  I sewed up the binding for the dick & jane quilt so that is ready to go on and sewed up the binding for a sampler quilt I finished eons ago that has just been waiting - it'll be about 7 years in the making by the time I finish it.  On top of all that I started a lazy 9 patch quilt, lazy because the 9 patches will be 12" square and I'm putting in some plain squares as alternate blocks.  

Hopefully next weekend I will finish sewing the top of that one, quilt the boats, and sew all the respective bindings on.  As always, time will tell.  I have two more weekends to get these done and start on the final baby quilt.  When those are done I will be free to sew whatever I want for whomever I want...but realistically I will probably take a decent break and avoid it all b/c I pushed myself so hard to finish these.

____

We started getting a CSA share a few weeks ago, this week we got rhubarb, strawberries, kale, collard greens, bok choy, and eggs.

I haven't ever really used greens like this so I've been using recipes from 'Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone', I make this yummy dish with the kale, spices, and cannelini beans.

I also made a strawberry rhubarb crumble which is quite delish and because dh doesn't eat desserts with cooked fruit in them, it's all mine.  Which is both good and bad...

Today is the first day of summer and I'm supposed to be starting my big, giant lace project and I spent the day quilting...ah well.  Maybe after dinner...

Enough is enough already

I know we had a drought over the last few years, and I know that the water table was down significantly, and I KNOW we needed the rain.  But really.  I am fairly sure that we haven't had sunshine for more than 24 hours at a time since the beginning of april. 

This week, that was about 6 hours on Friday, from about 2 until evening, and then it rained again.  And Saturday, which they had declared universally sunny and rain free, it rained sheets of rain.  Enough.  Is.  Enough.

If I wanted to live in The Land of Cloud Cover I would have stayed in Central New York or moved to Seattle.

When I was in elementary school I read a short story about a girl living on a distant planet on which the sun only came out for one hour every seven years (details recalled thanks to wikipedia) and the girl was from earth and was looking forward to the day so much, and something happened and the other kids locked her in the closet and then forgot about her when the sun came out so she never got to see it.  When I was a child that story traumatized me, it stuck in my head and whenever the weather is like this I start to think about that poor girl.  The story was called All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.

I do love the internets.

Yesterday we went out to NJ to go to the yarn store and spend my birthday gift cert, but as fate would have it, the yarn store had SUMMER HOURS (!!) and was closed when we got there at 3:20.  Hmf.  No yarn for me.  So instead we went to the quilting shop and I picked up some fabric to make placemats,

a skinny jellyroll (apparently these are called 'honey buns)' to make a log cabin quilt for some unknown person at some unknown time,

and a 10" stack (layer cake) of Christmas fabrics - again, just because I liked them, I'll make something with them someday. 

I do blame the woman in front of us.  She was getting a million fabrics cut and I literally had about 45 minutes to kill while waiting for them to finish with her...I kept picking up MORE AND MORE things.  Now to just finish with the baby quilts so I can move onto projects I'm doing 'just because'. 

I made good progress on the Embrace the Lace scarf, the little repeats really are fun to knit. 

 

And a close up to see the color

This week I also started a test knit for Anne in Fearless Fibers cashmere, the Fruit of the Vine scarf, the colorway is Endless Night. (no pics yet)

I am working on the sailboat quilt and have a nice little armada built up.

 

Hopefully next weekend I will be able to finish the top of this quilt and start the quilting.  Then it's on to the next baby quilt.  IF I can finish this one next weekend I will be decently on my way to my goal of finishing the four small baby quilts by the second weekend in July.  I still have 3 weekends at home before we start traveling again - it's theoretically possible.  I would really like to get through these so I can start making whatever strikes my fancy again.  I'm tired of feeling like I can't work on something 'just because' because these baby blankets are on my 'have to' list.  Hence my forced productiveness.

Cuteness.

Little things

Here is the beginning of the scarf from the Embrace the Club kit, I took this pic with my phone, but it was at night with the flash so it's a bit washed out.  It's a pretty color, but it's not my color - it will make somebody a lovely gift.  It is fun to knit, I think I have 8 repeats done now, and it's really pretty.  I might have to make myself one in a color that works for me.  (it's so easy to say that, but then when you finish something the last thing you usually want to do is start another b/c there so many things *SHINY*  *PRETTY*  *NEW* that are ever so much more fun to knit than another one of what you just finished)

I finished quilting the dick & jane quilt over the weekend.  I did a diagonal pattern, I think it worked pretty well, with one exception.

I stitched some buckles into the fabric.  I hope this doesn't have any negative effects on the quilt long term.  There wasn't any way to fix it without trying to rip out multiple lines of quilting stitches and that just wasn't happening in my world.  I'm not entirely sure it would have even been possible!

I'm having fun taking pictures with my phone, aren't these roses gorgeous?  We passed them on the way to dinner last saturday, they were running over the top of somebody's brick wall.

And here's a random flower garden, we are the kind of people who stop and smell the roses, all the roses.  What's better than sniffing random roses when you are out walking the dogs or walking to dinner or walking in general?

Last week the day before my birthday I got an email from Fearless Fibers, she was introducing a new yarn, a silk/merino blend.  Well.  I decided that because it was my birthday the next day OBVIOUSLY it was a sign I should buy some, so I did.  It's a bit pinker than this in real life, a lovely subtle variegated color.

I HAVE to stop buying yarn, but then my dad & stepmom sent me a gift card to a yarn shop in jersey that I've never been to and she and I are going to go this weekend, she wants to go with me to spend it - cuz - y'know, she's cool like that (absolutely no sarcasm there, she really is, she will ooh and ahhh over everything in there).  So I will have yet MORE yarn to show you next week.  Since it's a gift I am thinking maybe something luxurious, something not at all budget friendly.  We shall see.

Another phone pic.  This is where Pixie sits when I am home and her person (DH) is not, right next to his chair in front of his desk.  Cute little thing - except for the devil eyes, those are a little creepy.  But I know she's not a robot dog, so it's all good.

And STILL I have yet to tell you about my trip to the mannings.  I will show you eventually, but dudes, in case I forget - let me just say this - it was worth it, so completely worth it.  If you have been thinking about it you should totally go.

Let me also say that if I usually read your blog and I haven't commented in a while it's b/c I am incredibly behind.  Work has gotten SO busy and while I know of ABSOLUTELY no reason why this would impact my ability to stay caught up with blogs  *AHEM*, I have still managed to get quite behind.  So, sorry, and hope to read you again soon.

Quilt addiction

I finished the next quilt top yesterday.  I love this Dick & Jane themed quilt.  This one will go to a friend's oldest boy b/c he will be learning to read soon & I think he will enjoy reading it.  Also b/c his parents will get a kick out of the fabric.

Newly armed with my quilting book I tried to whip out my batting so I could pin this up and prep it for quilting next weekend - only to find that I have the wrong size.  Hmf.  

Not to be deterred from my quilting path I chose a cute little quilt from a magazine and selected fabrics for it and set to cutting those out.  (the magazine pic, a bit blurry, sorry)

Here are the colors I picked out.

Yet another boy, this is for the brother of the aforementioned boy, the brother still being in utero.  My goal, and laugh if you will, I AM going to try, is to have both quilts done and ready for the birth in August.  I hate to send the baby a quilt without sending his big brother one as well, so hopefully I'll get them both done in time.  

We shall see.

There are two more boys who need quilts.  One who will be 5 this year (I got more than a little behind on that one), so his is a larger throw style - I'm putting that off b/c I know it will take longer - and my Goddaughter's baby brother.  I have ordered fabric for his, I wanted to theme it to match his bedroom b/c that will please his mother to no end.  

So that's what - just 4 more quilts to finish this summer.  Yeah...I guess it just depends on how long my quilting bug lasts.

In knitting news I am just a few rows from being done with Caricia, the lace shawl out of malabrigo sock -pics soon!  And I am also on the downhill side of buttercup, just a few more rows to finish off the body, then the neckline & body.  I should have an FO for that this week as well.  I feel like I have accomplished a great deal during my week off, now if I can just keep up the momentum!

Back in the saddle

Of quilting that is.

I finished this quilt top last August and even though I had the walking foot to get things underway and I had the quilt all pinned up and ready to go it was still sitting in a pile near the sewing table creating a mental and physical block of my sewing energy.

I finally felt brave enough or more accurately felt determined enough to give it a shot.  Determined in a kind of 'this quilt WILL get to this child this summer and no lack of knowledge or instruction will stop me!' way.  No one ever claimed determination was always a good thing.

I know there's the traditional 'stitch in the ditch' method of machine quilting for novices, but I didn't iron all my seams in the right way to make that happen, so I settled on outline quilting instead.  With the cream thread this made for some odd lines in a few places, but like I said, I don't know what I'm doing, so I just went with it.

In case you are wondering I have ordered a book from amazon so I'm not so utterly ignorant the next time.

You can see the pattern on the back and I have to admit I'm generally pleased with the outcome.  There are things I'd do differently next time and there's no fancy stitching anywhere.  In fact I never intend to do fancy stitching...the short turning window in a regular sewing machine inhibits most fancy stitching b/c the maneuvering of the quilt is too difficult.  

On the front it looks 'eh', but the same as with knitting, the people it is going to - especially the adorable little boy who will be a year old in August - will neither care a whit nor will they notice if my stitching has gone astray here & there.  Along the same lines, (haha - lines) I decided to machine stitch down the binding (it's a big no-no, just in case you aren't a quilter and don't know these things).  

I agree that it doesn't look as nice, and you can see the stitching from the front, and due to the nature of binding it's not exactly an even stitch line, but if you get thread that blends in well with the binding & border - who the heck cares?  If it were a throw or a bed quilt I would be more particular about it, but again, it's a baby quilt and will presumably get fairly hard use and frequent washes, secure is more important than pretty for the edging.  

(see that line of cream thread looks funny, cuz it blends everywhere else, but I didn't know what else to do there)

Anyway, I ran out of thread and so only got 1/4 of the way around the quilt.  Figures, something that's been languishing for 9 months and I run out of thread 15 minutes from being done.  Soon tho, soon.  

Having cleared that out of the way, I leapt immediately into another baby quilt - I am 3 behind, so I need to catch up.  As long as I stick with at least one a year (hopefully more) I will catch up eventually, my friends can't keep going at this rate indefinitely!  I am working on the top for the next one, hopefully I will have pics of that to post this coming weekend.

a quickie

I made another one of Keykalou's bags this weekend.  This one is called 'lots of pockets'.

The only alteration I made on this was to make the handles a bit wider.  I think it's super cute and the pockets on the front are very handy.

Pixie got another brushing in the park today while Duke lounged.

Can you believe that this little dog used to look like this?

Talk about a transformation!  She looks like she lost about 10 lbs.  I keep looking at her and doing a double take b/c she looks so funny.  And even funnier to think that we won't even notice as it grows back over the next 6 months until she's a big fuzzball again.

I am taking my first venture into machine quilting with a walking foot this weekend.  I am finally finishing off our godson's baby quilt, I'm hoping to actually give it to him for his first birthday in August...just a little late.  Oops. 

I have been fairly intimidated by the whole idea before even though I've had the walking foot for quite some time.  So far, so good, hopefully I'll be able to show it off by the end of the weekend!

New things are afoot (at the circle K)

Here's the first new thing.

This is the most excting new thing by far, my Goddaughter's baby brother, 4 weeks old as of this picture.  DH and I drove up to meet him this weekend, cute little bug isn't he?  I'm looking forward to the next time we see him in two months - how he will have changed!

My shelridge farm yarn came, I think it's perfect.

 

This is for my EZ yoke sweater, the blue, which is really more like teal, as the main color with the other four as my fair isle colors.  I am thinking maybe I'll do some small patterns on the bottom of the sweater and the cuff of the sleeves as well, since I have so freaking much of the other colors, but we'll see how ambitious I am when I start it.

And their dk weight wool/cotton blend.  

I don't have a pattern lined up for this one yet, but I'm sure one will pop up sooner or later, this is a really soft yarn, I'm looking forward to something fallish in this.

And THAT is the end of my MDSW shopping.

I hopped on a bandwagon and started Buttercup last week.  It is appearing on everyone's rav queues, and for good reason, it's adorable!

I have already made some alterations - I made the neckline higher and did more feather & fan repeats.  It was looking a little low on some of the FOs and I wanted to make sure this was work appropriate, the last thing I need is a summer top I have to wear something under!  

So far, so good, now I just have miles of stockinette before I have an FO, but luckily we are going on a mini-break next week and I will have another 5-6 hour stretch in the car to knit in circles to my heart's content.

BTW anybody know any yarn shops in the Gettysburg/Lancaster area?  I do love my souvenier yarn.

Last week I had a conundrum.  I work at a university, that's pretty clear by now, I think.  Universities have campuses that are quite large, as my current one is, and I am always running off to meetings here, there and everywhere in buildings far afield from the one I work in.  In the winter I stick my various necessities in my jacket pockets, phone, pen, ID, keys, gum, burt's bees, etc, but in the summer, what's a girl *ahem* professional woman to do?  

So I made this cute little wallet-y thing last night.  I love Keykalou's patterns, they are easy to understand, very detailed, and I think my FOs come out looking very professional and not the bad kind of homemade. (which has been my experience with some other bag patterns I've tried in the past)  

Shown with the quarter for size.  I added the wrist strap using another one of her patterns that I bought last summer.

I love contrasting linings.

I haven't sewn much lately, but I've got a bee in my bonnet about it and today I bought a few more patterns from her and ordered some fabric and I hope to have some additional adorable bags in a few weeks.  I mentioned to a friend recently that since I started using these pattern to make bags whenever I started feeling 'ugh' about my current bag selection I have spent WAY less money on random purses.  I can have a new bag for $8-$10 and 3-4 hours of my time.  And because I spend so much time selecting the PERFECT fabric, it ends up NOT being an impulse purchase and I don't get bored with it after a few weeks.  

Win-win, I think.