Bobbing Along*

I feel like I’ve not achieved that much with my crafty stuff, but when I have time to put it down here I feel a little better as it does seem like I’m making some sort of progress, even if it’s slow!

Meet Dipley Veg, as he’s been christened:

Jim turned 10 last week (I know, 10, I’m still wondering where 10 years of my life went, maybe I should read back on the blog as I started it when he was 15 months old!) and I made him the dinosaur that I bought the booklet and yarn for at the Knitting and Stitching Show. He’s a Diplodocus and turned out to be a pretty large chap.

He has the sweetest feet though.

The pattern is from Patons booklet 3847 and uses Fab DK. It was easy to follow the pattern but very lacking in detail when it came to construction, ‘attach legs’ doesn’t really tell you a lot does it?  It took me a while day to sew him together and get him stuffed. The pattern suggests wrapping florists wire with pipe cleaners and inserting them into the neck, tail and legs. Personally I know my boys well enough to understand that at some point this Diplodocus will become a weapon with which to attempt to inflict harm on each other so wire of any sort no matter what it’s wrapped with was out of the question. I just stuffed it really firmly and it seems fine, the neck and tail can be bent into different positions and it stands up well on its own. I’m now working on a Triceratops for Piggle’s birthday in June, it has many more pieces to knit and eventually attach so I intend to make sure I get on with it so I’m not attaching horns at midnight the night before!

I haven’t done much sewing recently. I had an accident with my rotary cutter a fortnight ago and ended up in the Minor Injuries Unit. I’m still not sure whether it was good or bad that I’d changed the blade the week before, I guess at least it was a clean cut… Anyway, I need to cut the sashing for my Chicopee quilt but I’ve been a little worried about cutting (injury was down to pure clumsiness, caught the edge of the ruler and went off at a random angle rather than managing to run the blade down the side of it), plus I’m worried that I did my quilt math wrongly and I won’t have enough fabric. I just need to woman-up and get on with it really.

I did manage to get started on the summer pyjamas though which made Piggle very happy as he’s been asking about these since the fabric landed here almost a year ago!

The bottoms are Kwik Sew 1556 and the t-shirt is Kwik Sew Sewing for Children, Piggle is officially too big for the Toddler’s book now, sob… I had to go up a size again as he’s growing like a weed. I’ve got another 2 pairs planned for him and 2 pairs for Jim who hasn’t grown quite as much as his brother and can still wear a few pairs from last year.  Looking at my fabric I’ve hardly got any flannel for next winter, but I do have a ton of knits so I’m thinking it will be a knit year to stash bust some of that.

And finally, some socks. I finished of last year really well with getting everything off the needles and the promptly cast on for everything in sight right afterwards… I am now trying to get the number of projects down again and finishing these off is at least one thing less.

These are Nemesis from Knitty and I used Yarntopia Treasures Bamboo Cotton in Lemons and Limes on 2.5mm needles. This pattern was lovely, so easy to follow, and I love a sock pattern with a long chart, only 3.5 repeats of it and the socks are done, fabulous! The pattern looks a lot more complicated than it is which is always nice. I love the colours of this yarn so these were a joy to make and took just over a month.

Next up to get off the WIP list is a jumper for Piggle which will be the fastest thing to get done as he’s so small. I’m 2/3 of the way down the body and then I just have to knit the sleeves in the round and it’s done. I found some buttons for it today so hopefully it should be done within a couple of weeks.

Back as soon as I have something to show you!

*Hopefully I now have everyone of my generation channelling Angela Lansbury and singing the song from Bedknobs and Broomsticks…

Working the List Again

I keep my list of projects in a small notebook in my sewing room now that gets updated when I get all the bits for a project and then re-written when I change my mind, ripped out and started again periodically and generally changed almost constantly!  However, it at least gives me an idea of what I want to do and what I have ready to be made. I was going to work on another quilt which I’ve finished the blocks for and just need to sash next but it turns out that the batting is back ordered and won’t be here for 1-2 weeks so I decided to get some of the smaller projects off the list in the meantime.

First up was a camera case for me like the one I made my Mum for Christmas using the rest of the Liberty squares I had.

I did stripes for mine rather than the 1 inch patchwork like I’d done for hers. I used Essex Linen in natural and two layers of batting as I’m rather clumsy and have a habit of knocking my camera into things…  I bought a stitch in the ditch foot a few months back and I have to say it is terrible. I gave up with it on this and eyeballed the ditch instead. I am wondering if maybe I can try to bend the foot a bit so it actually lines up with the needle, I will have to have a play with it sometime and see.

The inside of the case is just three of the squares sewn together.

I wish I’d had thinner elastic and used a slightly shorter piece but there you go. Jim picked the button, not quite what I’d have gone for but I can live with it and I’m happy to have a pretty case for my camera rather than the boring black one I had been using!

Next up was the bag I bought the pattern and fabric for at the Knitting and Stitching Show last year. The company is called Monkey Buttons and they are online too I think. They have a lovely selection of Japanese fabrics along with patterns and some kits for the patterns. The fabric kit I bought wasn’t actually for the pattern I bought but there was enough in it to make this bag with an added half metre of plain fabric.

I didn’t make the bag as written (that’d be too easy!). I liked the shaped bottom of the smaller version of the bag so I adapted the pattern piece to fit my patchwork. I also added a strip of linen to the bottom of the bag so the patchwork was framed. Rather than quilting through the lining and then binding the side seam and leaving the base seam uncovered as the pattern suggested I ironed some medium weight interfacing onto my batting (and a second layer onto the fabric too for the bottom piece) and then made a separate lose lining for the bag which is impossible to photograph and isn’t a hellish mess like the photo suggests.

I attached the lining under the binding and I’m much happier with this method than the way the pattern wanted me to do it.

The lining is Oakshot cotton, I had the label with the name of this colour on my desk the whole time I was making the bag and it disappeared right before I finished it, but it’s a lovely combination of blue and green and is so pretty, I used it on the outside of the bag too in the patchwork.

The quilting was done with Aurifil 40wt in the light grey that I seem to be using for everything at the moment. It worked with the linen as well as the fabrics. I copied the straight line quilting that I liked from the version of the small bag I’d seen at the show and is also photographed on the pattern.

Sometimes patterns call for odd things and this one had me in the hardware shop buying television cable to put inside the handles. It does make them nice and round but they feel a little funny to me, I’m sure I’ll get used to them though!

This bag is big enough for a weekend away or to haul my laptop and books to the library. I do like a nice large sized bag even though it means that I tend to end up carrying far too much.

I managed to finish this month’s Woodland Sampler block today too. The boys go back to school tomorrow and I’ll need to hit the books again hard after taking two weeks off so I wanted to finish up as much as I could while I had the time off. This is the block.

and this is how the whole thing looks so far

I’m presuming I’ll be safe to iron out the hoop creases when I’m done with it. I really enjoy working on this but I’m glad that I can get back to the other cross stitch that I started whilst waiting for this month’s block to arrive in my inbox, hopefully I will be able to finish that off before May’s block arrives!

I also am almost done making another two blocks for the the Scrap Vomit quilt, I hadn’t worked on it in ages and Jim wanted to help me in my sewing room so I got him to pick out the fabrics for two blocks, it took him forever but we got there in the end and that will be a few more stashed away, I think I have a row and a half of it done so far!

Of course there were about another 15 things on the list that I would have liked to have finished up during this Easter break but there you go, catching a horrible cold from the boys didn’t help and slowed me down quite a bit. I’ve done quite well crossing things off and I still have a few evenings and a weekend without the boys where I can work on things before the batting arrives and I get into finishing the next quilt which looks like this at present (there will be sashing between the blocks, that’s on the list to do soon!).

I will hopefully also have some knitting to show soon as I am making something for Jim’s Birthday which is in two weeks time so I need to get on with it! I’m also halfway through a pair of socks which I’m really enjoying so hopefully those will be done soon too.

Back to work we go, with less illnesses this term if you don’t mind!

Zig Zag Rail Fence Quilt (and some stars)

I finished off the Zig Zag Rail Fence Quilt on Saturday. The pattern is from Red Pepper Quilts and is really easy to follow with very clear instructions even though it’s a pretty simple design.  It’s a lap size quilt which I find quite an odd size, I tend to think of quilts as being for beds so I make them bigger than this.  The finished quilt is just longer than a 9 year old boy is tall!

The coloured fabrics are mainly from The Surly Sheep (Ebay and their own store where you can pick your own bundles) in either fat eights or fat sixteenths so that I could make it as scrappy as possible. There are also a few fabrics from my scraps in there and other scrap packs I picked up here and there. The light grey is Kona in Iron, the pattern calls for white fabric but white in my house just won’t float, 2 young boys and a very clumsy me would mean it’d have coffee and juice stains all over it within minutes so I decided that grey would suit us better!

The blocks for this are very simple, just 2 rows of coloured fabric and one of grey, but making over 200 of them did get a little old, even with chain piecing them. I had to trim my blocks 1/8 of an inch smaller than they should have been due to my not yet perfect cutting and piecing skills but I’m getting better as before I’ve been 1/4 of an inch or more out on blocks!

The backing is Moda Basic Grey Grunge which I adore. Maybe it’s the former Goth in me but the worn look of the fabric is lovely. It also has wonderful hand to it and, this will probably sound very odd, it smells really nice! I’m very sensitive to smell and some fabric dyes can really be horrible but this has a really fresh cotton smell to it which made it a joy to work with. I pieced the quilt using Aurifil 50wt in grey and then did the grid quilting with Aurifil 40wt in the same shade. I don’t know who the binding fabric is by as I didn’t have any printing on my selvedge for it, right up until I cut the binding I was going to use a mainly black fabric for it but I then decided to go with something more colourful and I’m glad I did as I really like the way it looks against the grey background. The batting is Quilter’s Dream Select which is my go to batting now as it’s slightly thicker than the others I’ve tried and I prefer my quilts to have some body rather than being totally flat.

I had a calamity during the quilting of this, my sewing machine gave up on me, all of a sudden the feed dogs stopped feeding the fabric through, they move up and down but not back and forth. I took apart what I could and cleaned it out but it just wouldn’t work. I was 3/4 of the way through the quilting and panicked for about 3 minutes over not having a sewing machine before remembering that my Mum bought exactly the same machine a few years back as I love mine so much so I went right over and borrowed hers and carried on with the quilt. A repairman came to look at my machine today (found one in the Yellow Pages that does house calls as the nearest places are 1 hours drive each way) and has taken it away to see if he can fix it but he’s not sure it will be repairable which is a huge worry as I really can’t afford a new machine right now. I guess I will just have to wait and see what he says and keep my fingers crossed.

This weekend I also caught up with my Lucky Stars blocks. I do still have this month’s to do but I have the fabric picked out for it and needed a little break after sewing 4 in a row. I do love how these come together, especially the little ones which are just so damn cute, totally worth the fiddly piecing on them.

Ninja Star

Exploding Star

I’m really glad that I’m not so far behind on these and am happy with the fabric combinations and finished look of these.

I also tidied my sewing room the other night (making myself about an hour late going to bed, as you do when you get going on something like that!) and organised what I want to get done next so I will hopefully have a few more bits to show you soon as long as this cold my boys have passed onto me doesn’t develop any further that is…

No Mojo March?

March feels like it was a bad month for sewing, in fact it’s probably the worst I can remember for a long while now. I keep track of how much fabric I use and buy each month so I can try and achieve my constant goal to sew more than I buy (some years I get there, others I fail totally, it all balances out in the end I think!) and last month the total fabric used for completed projects was half a yard/metre. That’s right, half…  The only sewing project I finished was the hot water bottle cover.

However, what you haven’t seen yet (because none of it’s done yet!) is the 2 quilts worth of blocks I made and the owl cushion that I’m halfway through. You should see the first of the quilts next week depending on how fast it dries once I finish it today and how much light there is when it’s time to photograph it, then I can get onto sashing the second quilt which is what stopped me from getting further with it, I had to wait for the sashing fabric to arrive from the States.

I did have one final finish in March, a plain pair of stripey socks made over 72 stitches using Wendy Happy in the Leo colourway.

With hardly any trying these became matching socks. I messed up my stitch count on the feet of these, reducing down the gusset to the number of stitches needed for 64 stitch socks. It totally threw me the first sock when I came to do the toe but it looks ok. I did it on purpose the second time around to try and keep the stripes matching and just started reducing on the top before the bottom. I was still one stitch off though, I haven’t found a dropped stitch anywhere yet so maybe I knit two together somewhere along the way by mistake, anyway, it all turned out ok in the end! My brain wanted a bright simple project I think and these were perfect. I’m now working on another pair of socks having ripped out the pair that had been sitting there for ages and weren’t doing much for me. This pair are mega bright and quite fun to knit so they shouldn’t take too long I don’t think.

I’m still working on my cross stitch too and enjoying it. I am half way through one which I’ve paused on to go back to the Woodland Sampler for this month’s block. I’ve just got the animal and some random raindrops left of that so I should be able to show it soon and get back to the other one. I also signed up for the Spring Sampler but I won’t be trying to keep up with it as it’s 5 blocks a week for all of April, I’ll just fit it in once I’ve done the other bits I have planned. I got an order of a huge bag of embroidery threads and Aida in the post the other day (I order from Sew and Sew who charge £1.99 postage and seem to have good prices on everything, a huge range and they post fast which is always important to my impatient self) so I’m set now for 5 cross stitch projects including the ones I’m working on, yep find something I like and got totally OTT on it… I keep looking on Etsy for patterns and sticking them in my basket for later, no idea where I’m going to hang all these things when they’re done, especially considering I already have a stack of prints I’ve bought over the years waiting for me to find frames for them…

Somewhere in my brain I think I’m contemplating making some clothes again soon too. I need to get going on summer pyjamas so they’re ready for if we ever get a warmer night (plus Piggle keeps asking when he gets his Toy Story pyjamas and the answer ‘soon’ won’t hold him off for long). I also bought some Sew Liberated patterns and two dress patterns from Deer and Doe (the dress that starts with S and the new dress that’s just been released, so you don’t have to guess Roo!) so after I clear out some of the quilting stuff that I want to finish off I will pull those out and have a go, I’m still searching for the perfect dress.

So, although I feel like March was a no mojo month it seems like I did get quite a bit done, but not a lot finished. Hopefully that means that April will be a never ending parade of FOs, or not!

A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

I have finally managed to find my sewing mojo, but it’s come back in a very scatter-shot way.  Instead of my usual start to finish on one project I’m doing a bit on one thing and then starting something else then finishing something then finding something new to work on. I’m not going to argue with it though, at least I’m sewing and making progress and I actually have a few things to show you!

First up is my Woodland Sampler which I’ve finally gotten up to date with thanks to the boys having chicken pox, I sat on the sofa and worked on this each afternoon.

I actually enjoyed doing February the best, a solid block of stitching seems easier for my brain to understand than having to move here there and everywhere. There are few mistakes in this, and some mango chutney near the deer’s feet that needs to be cleaned off (don’t eat bread sticks with chutney over your cross stitch even if you think you’re being careful…) but I’m happy with what I’ve done so far and looking forward to next month’s pattern arriving.

In fact I’ve been enjoying doing the cross stitch so much that I have started another one while I’m waiting for the next instalment of the sampler. It’s a pretty simple one so it shouldn’t take too long and I’m liking the way it looks so far. I seem to definitely have the cross stitch bug now and find myself spending ages on Etsy looking at different patterns…

I also managed to finish off another knitting project, this is the Bramblewood Vest

I used Patons Cotton Twist Aran which I got from Kemps for 99p a ball (they still have some and I went back yesterday and bought more for 2 small projects…). It was a little splitty but really nice to knit with and i like the way it’s come out. I added a ball of yarn’s worth of length to it because by the time it stretched widthwise it was shorter than I wanted it to be. Besides that it’s exactly to the pattern and was a pretty simple knit.

The only thing I don’t like is the difference in my knitting between when I knit back and forth and knit in the round, purling really messes up my work which is annoying. I’m hoping that when I get around to blocking it it’ll even up a bit. I do love the applied i-cord edging on this though, it makes it so neat and tidy.

I have been casting on a bit randomly with my knitting too. I realised that I want to give Jim the dinosaur I bought the kit for at the Knitting and Stitching Show for his Birthday which is in just over a month so I probably should get on with it. I’ve been working on it in the evenings so it remains a surprise. I also have been working on his Weasley Sweater and have finished the back and am working slowly up the front as he wants his initial on it and I don’t like doing colour work at all. I also cast on for Nori from the newest Knitty and a pair of plain socks using some Wendy Happy that’s stripey and pink (one sock down almost halfway through the second).  Hopefully none of these will stay on the needles too long, I seem to have projects everywhere!

Finally, a sewing project. My cat Lavinina set a live mouse lose in the kitchen a while back and it made itself a nice bed in the cupboard under the kitchen sink by eating the hot water bottle cover I had knit myself… I’d seen a tutorial for sewing a cover but hadn’t found any heat proof batting (although thinking of it regular batting would probably work just as well…) , I bought some to make oven gloves with at some point and also for this and it’s been sitting there a couple of months now. Yesterday I was printing off a few tutorials when I came across the one for the cover so I dug through the fabric, got cutting and came up with this.

My quilting isn’t always that brilliant and it’s a little tight for my hot water bottle but the Koka cord is SO SOFT and I love the pink and grey combination and the fabric’s together (Madrona Road Haystack inside). It’s quilted with Aurifil 50wt in grey, I feel like I’m trying to see how many projects I can work on without changing the tread in my machine, I’m now on number 3 and thinking that I might start number 4 using the same colour later…

Anyway, I’m very happy with it and hopefully no mouse will eat it, I’m going to go and find that bit of thread in bottom right of the 3rd picture now and remove it…

Hopefully will have more to show soon if I can settle long enough to finish anything!

Goodbye February (and don’t let the door hit you on the way out)

I hate February, no exaggeration, it’s just one month too much of winter, the weather is always horrible and I just want it to be done so we can get on with some more light and warmer days. Add to that my coming down with some virus that made me feel like hell for a week and then both boys coming down with chicken pox (Piggle went back to school today, Jim will be home for a few more days yet) and due to that us missing meeting the baby Cousin and my Grandma’s 100th Birthday party (to be fair, she missed it too as she’s in hospital at the moment…) I have not been in the best of moods lately and tired is an understatement…

I’ve also not felt like sewing and haven’t been in the sewing room, except to glue baste some more hexagons for the Hexy MF quilt, in over a week. I was working on the dress pattern that I’m testing when I ran out of sewing enthusiasm. It’s not a bad pattern at all and it was coming along nicely, then I stuck the bodice on the dressform and saw it has that odd underarm sticking out issue that I seem to come across all the time (I guess it’s something to do with the way patterns are graded up, larger women need the space at the front, not under the arms, either that or I’m deformed in some way I’m not aware of) and I ran out of steam. I will get back to it but it’s going to be a few days yet as I’m now terribly behind on the University work I wanted to get done and I’m writing next week which means I will be knackered in the evenings…

Anyway, I did finish off some things before my mojo left the building. First up is the quilt I made for Siblings Together (button on the sidebar if you want to learn more about this charity). I used the Scrappy Tripalong tutorial that was doing the rounds on the internet around Christmas time.

(just noticed the cat looking to jump on the quilt in the bottom photo, my cats are big fans of quilts)

I used up all the leftover fabric from Jim, Piggle and baby Cousin’s quilts and threw in about 5 fat quarters from the stash to make 30 blocks in total. I realised half way through that using almost all directional prints was probably a mistake but I made sure I rotated the blocks the same way to get the diamonds to work and I think it came out ok in the end, although the pattern shows a lot more in pictures than it does in real life.

It’s kind of an ‘I spy’ quilt as there is tons going on in it. There are a lot of elephants and camping prints in there and hopefully lots for a little boy to look at and enjoy. The binding is a grey and white polka dot stripe that I had in my stash, in fact all I had to order in for this quilt was the backing, the batting and some Aurifil 40wt white and green thread for the quilting.

I got the backing from The Fat Quarter Shop on sale at $5 something a yard. I bought 4 yards but I could have done with an extra half to match up the print a little better and to not make it so nail bitingly close to the edges while I was quilting it.

The quilting is done every other row. I started off using my new stitch in the ditch foot but found that it was runching the quilt (even though it says on the package it’s a quilting foot) and wasn’t really working with the many seams so I swapped back to my walking foot which means that it’s not in the ditch all the time but it seems to look ok. It made a nice grid pattern on the back too and there’s enough quilting to allow for the fort building and throwing on the floor that this quilt will no doubt encounter in its life!

I pieced with Aurifil 50wt and, as I said, it’s quilted with 40wt Aurifil. The batting is Quilters Choice, the thinner of the two (they have such stupid names, I can never remember if it’s Request or Select that’s thicker). I actually prefer the thicker batting for my own quilts but I didn’t want this quilt to be too heavy (quilts are weightier than you think) so I chose the thinner one for this.

So, that’s that one out of the way. I’ve not decided which quilt to work on next, I keep changing my mind but I need to finish off the smaller projects I have sitting about before I can get to it anyway so I’ve got time to make up my mind. I didn’t manage to get my Lucky Stars BOM done last month so I have two to work on this month. I also still haven’t started the quilt using the Simply Solids Stash Club fabric so I’ve got three months worth of that to do now too!

I did make yet another Open Wide Zippered Pouch though, again cutting a 14″ square for a tall bag.

This is for cross stitch storage again, but not mine this time, Jim’s. He did some cross stitch at school and enjoyed it so I gave him my box of threads to play with and then we bought him the above robot sampler. It’s probably a little bit complicated for him but he’s working on it slowly and it is a grown up enough design that he shouldn’t think it’s babyish before he finishes it. It also has glow in the dark thread and he can put his initial on it which he’s excited about. My Mum says I’m bag mad but I just like things to have a place and his thread was going all over the living room and we were constantly hunting for his needle, now he can stick it in the bag and it’s safe and neat.

My final finish for February was the first knit FO of the year, my Peasy cardigan.

I needed a red cardigan to replace my Sitcom Chic that I made about 8 years ago and is thus looking rather ratty now. This pattern, like all Heidi’s patterns (I’ve made enough of her patterns now that I think we can be on first name terms!), was simple but interesting to make and I’m sure I’ll use it again at some point. The yarn is Patons Linen Touch which I got from Kemps for about 99p a ball (it’s discontinued like all nice yarns I like). I have some stashed in navy blue for another cardigan so at least I get to knit with it again. It evened out nicely after a good soak and I’m pleased about that as my purling wasn’t great with the cold weather effecting my hands. Now it’s a bit warmer my hands are co-operating a bit more and I’m finding knitting less painful so I’m hoping to have another FO in the next week or so.

The only change I made to the pattern was to re-jig the buttonholes so there were five rather than six so I could use these buttons I’ve had in my button box for ages (sorry they’re blurry). I really like this cardigan and I think it will be in regular rotation once it’s warm enough to wear a 3/4 length sleeve cotton cardigan.

So, those are the February makes. Hopefully I’ll have something else to show you soon if life lets me get anything done!

Well Then

I seem to have lost most of this month, it’s flown by and I’ve been busy trying to keep my head down doing my research which has meant that I’m usually shattered by the evening and don’t manage to post anything. Then when I do find myself with some time I would rather be sewing or knitting rather than writing about it! But, here I am with the final post about the things I made last month just as I’m trying to mentally figure what I want to get finished before the end of this month! Anyway…

I kept the night dress that I had made for Piggle and gave it to my sister for her son. Once I’d explained what it was and how he should wear it she and her husband both really liked it and found it much easier to have ties in the middle of the night than poppers so I whipped them up a few more using bits of knit from my scraps basket.

The appliqués are from a basketful that I bought years back, not quite sure why I thought I needed so many but I am chipping away at them here and there.

The dark blue one is a bit of a mess, I mistakenly put the appliqué on the back rather than the front as the first step of making it and didn’t realise until the almost final step of putting the buttonholes in for the ribbon. The entire garment is made backwards and the ribbon ties on the back instead of the front. There was no way I was picking out dark blue thread on dark blue knit though so I left it and it seems to be working OK despite my basic error. The pattern for these is McCalls 8574 and I made the Newborn size.

I also made another of the zippered pouches, this one using a 14×14″ square to have it big enough to fit my embroidery hoop and threads box for the Woodland Sampler that I’m woefully behind on (I’ve done about 1/3 of January’s block so far…).

The inside is Moda Basic Grey which is a bit like Grunge I think. I bought this fabric with no idea what I was going to do with it as I’m not into flags but I do like the mopeds. I think it looks nice as a bag and it’s preventing my cross stitch from being trampled. The bag does stand up well even though it’s a lot taller than the pattern versions. I did the bottom corners a bit shallower than the pattern said for a bag this size too as I didn’t need it to be wider than the threads box.

Right, so that was last month. This month I have finished another quilt that I will show you when it’s light enough to take pictures of it. I am going to test the Gather dress pattern in the next few days that other Bloggers have mentioned and then I want to try and get my Star BOM done and make a start on the Simply Solids Stash Club fabric that I’ve got sitting there. I was supposed to be doing monthly blocks for that quilt but I now have 3 lots of fabric here waiting so I had better make a start really!

I have been knitting but the projects I’ve been working on are in one piece which makes progress feel a little slower but actually things are going well. I would like to have one done by the end of the month if I can and the second shouldn’t be too far behind I’d hope. I’ve been finding the knitting hard with it being so cold recently, my hands are pretty stiff and some evenings it’s hurt too much to knit much at all. I find purling particularly hard on my right hand and you can see on the top down cardigan I’m working on the difference between knit and purl rows. I’m hoping that blocking it will even it out a little bit, if not I can just say I was going for the textured look.

Anyway, the boys are away and I’m actually supposed to be reading for my research rather than blogging, but I am glad I’ve documented these things finally!

Lucky Stars BOM Beginnings

You may remember (or not) from my post on my long-term projects that I joined the Lucky Stars Block of the Month club run by Don’t Call Me Betsy. There’s a button on the right sidebar if you want to have a look at the info about it.

I have been itching to get started on these, I actually began the practice block a few weeks back but had to stop to work on the Bungle Jungle quilt and I messed up one of the pieces and had to re-make it anyway. With the Bungle(d) quilt out of the way and a few other projects I’ve still yet to show you these paper pieced blocks were high up in the pile of stuff that I want to get done.

As you can see from this very neatly constructed plan I am a whiz at technical drawing and designing quilts! This is what I intend to do with the blocks once they are all made. In total there will be thirteen 12″ and  thirteen 6″ finished blocks so the one I like the least or mess up completely can be left out (and thus the numbers 12 and 6 all over the drawing).  I am using Free Spirit Designer Solids in Manatee as the background colour for all the blocks and also for the sashing so that the blocks really pop out of it, or at least that’s what I hope they’ll do, I’ve never made up a quilt before so what I see in my brain could be very far from what I come out with.

If you’ve not done paper piecing before (I hadn’t and still mess it up with frustrating regularity) basically the pattern is printed on paper and you add one piece of fabric at a time sewing through the paper and when they’re all on you trim the block to the right size (hopefully not discovering that you’ve not got a seam allowance on a large patch like I did with the second piece I made..) and then rip off the paper and sew the pieces together to make the block. The lining up and making sure the fabric is the right way up still flummoxed me but it’s good fun and always nice to try something new. Rather than cutting fabric specifically for the smaller blocks I have been using the leftover bits I cut off the large blocks, it’s worked so far so I will try to keep doing it if I can as it saves on fabric.

So, the first block was the practice block. I won a fat quarter bundle of Flock from Andover for having Piggle’s bunny quilt featured on their blog so as it was out I grabbed it and got cutting. These blocks are made up of 8 sections.

I was pretty pleased with these as a first attempt! The little blocks are so tiddly and cute!

I was determined to get January’s block done IN January, especially as I’ve failed totally to get anywhere near done with the January bit of the year-long Woodland Sampler cross stitch-along I also joined. Turns out that cross stitching on linen with very little sunlight in January is very hard on the eyes and actually finding time in daylight to work on it even harder…

Anyway, I pulled out some green fabric from my stash as I have rather a lot of green as it’s my favourite colour. I was really uncertain if these prints went together or not right up until the blocks were being pieced but I’m happy with how this one turned out. It was actually a simpler block than the practice one, made up of only 4 sections.

So, tomorrow I will get an email with February’s block in it. I won’t get onto that right away as now I’ve cleared a few small projects from my sewing area I have picked up a quilt that I started accidentally when I should have been working on the Bungle one. Hopefully it will be done soonish as I have other projects taking up brain space that I should probably be using for something other than sewing and fabric. Luckily I’m feeling motivated at the moment and have been making time to do some sewing each day which has been lovely, hopefully I can keep it up!

On The Fence Bungle Jungle Quilt Finished!

I finally finished this damn quilt.  This is the first time I’ve had issues making a quilt and I seemed to get a ton of them (along with lack of time to work on it) so rather than getting it to my sister before she had her son it arrived with them two weeks after he was born.

This is the best full length picture I could get as my quilt holding assistant has short arms and had to stand on the sofa to hold it up! The pattern is this one, I can’t remember where I bought it from now. It’s a pretty simple pattern really and should have been quick to make as it’s only throw size.

My first issue was with the fabric. It is Bungle Jungle and when I went to cut it every colour of two of the prints were seriously off grain. I have never had fabric so wonky before and as I was cutting strips it was pretty noticeable. I contacted the manufacturer about the issue and they replaced two yards for me of one of the prints I was having issues with as they were running low on stock. The other off grain print was the elephants so I cut had to cut them off grain so they appear straight in the quilt. I don’t think you can notice it too much in the finished quilt unless you look really really hard but it wasted a lot of time what with waiting for new fabric to arrive from the States and having to take extra time with the cutting. The plaid is also totally off grain but it’s so bright I chose to ignore that fact and hopefully it looks ok!

Once I got going with it I discovered that at some point my sewing machine had decided that tension wasn’t something it needed to worry about and some of the stitching was coming loose.  I re-stitched what I found as I went which took extra time and some bits I actually had to hand stitch together as I didn’t notice them until it was too late to re-stitch, total headache and very annoying to say the least. I’m hoping it won’t totally fall apart and end up in pieces before the nephew is done using it but I think it may need repairs at some point…

I somehow managed to have a few minutes of totally not paying attention and sewed one of the rows together wrongly, I was trying to alternate the way the blocks faced and that row doesn’t work right. Then when I was sewing the end pieces on I blanked out again and sewed them onto the sides rather than what I had planned as the top and bottom… Luckily the middle piece is a square and when I looked at it I actually liked the way it made the middle look more random so I left it, plus by that point I was reaching high frustration levels with this quilt and just wanted to get it done!

I attached the binding by machine but this time I flipped it over to the back and sewed it down whereas every other quilt I’ve done I sewed it down on the front. I like the way it looks sewn down on the back so I think I will carry on using this method from now on. I wanted quite a narrow binding as there is already a lot going on in the quilt so I cut it two inches wide which I think works for such a small quilt.

 

 

The pattern calls for 8 yards of backing fabric for a throw sized quilt. I contacted the designer to ask about it (her email was on the pattern saying you could contact her if you had questions, I didn’t hunt her down and pester her!) and she said she uses industry standard yardage for her quilt back requirements. As I’d picked a non-directional print for the back I managed to do it with 3 yards (I had worked it out before buying the fabric so I didn’t buy more than I needed luckily) with the seam running across the middle of the quilt.

My original plan for the quilting was to do squares diagonally but after I’d finished the first set of rows I decided that it actually was heavily enough quilted with just those and had I done the second set I think it would have made it quite stiff. I pieced with Aurifil 50wt thread and quilted with 40wt using white on the front and cream on the back and did the rows 3cm apart and I’m happy with the way it came out. The batting is Quilters Dream Cotton Natural Select which is the slightly heavier weight for that brand as I like my quilts to be a little bit thicker and poofier rather than totally flat.

So, in the end I am happy with it, my sister says she loves it and hopefully the nephew will get a few years of use from it. I did the throw size as it’s the right size for the toddler bed which he will inherit when he needs it, plus I gave them all my Grobags anyway so he won’t need a cot quilt!

It feels like a dam has been moved out of the way of my sewing now this is finished and I have a few more things to show you and have been making progress on other projects so I’ll be back soonish to show you what else I’ve been up to!

Trying

It’s two steps forward one and a half back here at the moment. Over Christmas both the boys had a virus of some sort, then they went to their Dad’s for a week and I got the virus so I didn’t get anything done at all.

Back to school after the Christmas break that felt like it went on forever and after the first week Piggle got a stomach bug, then it started to snow, then Jim got the stomach bug, it snowed some more and I got the stomach bug…  Add to that the fact that our central heating broke on Friday evening and only got fixed yesterday evening stress levels have been rather high.  I managed to write an essay I had due at University with both kids home from school (and then had to post it special delivery as I couldn’t get to University to hand it in!). I’ve since realised that I was coming down with the bug at the time and can’t get up the nerve to check whether I was actually writing in English or babbling oddly…

Jim and I built a snow pig, people have taken pictures of it which makes him very proud.  Apparently today we’re going to dig him out of the fresh snow and built the rest of the Peppa Pig family, the joy…

We’ve now been in the house for 8 days except for walks down to the local shops and it’s getting a little tiring. The hill by our house is possibly just passable if you have a car that isn’t as low as mine is, it’s too far for Piggle to walk to school as it’s down a big hill and then up a huge hill which is no fun in the snow.  The school is actually open today but I couldn’t figure out how to get them there this morning, I was just too tired.

I’ve not even managed much sewing which has been frustrating. I just have the binding for the baby cousin’s quilt, he arrived safely just over a week ago and our parents are going to visit him next week so I need to finish that and some other bits to send down with them, should be doable I hope. I feel behind on everything sewing related, I’ve not done my rainbow blocks, I’ve not done my star blocks, I’ve not finished the frame on the Woodland Sampler for this month (why did I decide I needed another project and why did I decide to use linen, I’m already going blind…) let alone what goes inside it.  I’m hoping once I get this quilt out the door I will feel better and can make some progress, it’s been a pain in so many ways and I just want it done now!

Knitting has even been slow as with the cold my hands have been hurting.  I have finished one sleeve of the Peasy cardigan and started on the second and the Bramblewood Vest is now connected in the round so should make some progress if I pick it up again!

Something I decided to do was to have a good clear out this year. I want to move in the summer (even more so after the central heating issues, that’s every winter we’ve lived here) and I don’t need to take all the stuff I have with me. I decided that if I’ve not used it or looked at it since we moved here it can go and thus I took a whole car boot full of things to the charity shop and have given away loads of my fabric scraps that I’ve been holding onto but not using (they went to a local school) and the bag of yarn left over from the Granny Blanket.  It’s felt nice to get rid of things I’ve been keeping just because I’ve always kept them.

The other day I got an idea in my head that I had too many sewing patterns (this decluttering thing is contagious, you start with one chest of drawers and the next thing you know you’re emptying kitchen cupboards).  My chest of drawers is stuffed, and that really doesn’t help the poor drawer that’s falling apart.  I devised a criteria for what to keep and what not to keep which went along these lines; if I’ve made it did I like it and did I wear it? Is this something I would wear? Does this fit the style I want to have/how I want to dress? Is it the right size for me? A couple of things I did keep just because I like them even though I know I won’t use them but after I’d finished throwing patterns over my shoulder onto the table and floor behind me this is what I had

Those bags are jammed pretty full with patterns…  I am thinking that I will try to set up an Etsy shop because there are some lovely vintage patterns in there as well as most of the vintage reprints (unopened and uncut) that have been issued in the last 8 years or so, as much as I like to look at them I’m never going to wear a dress with a fitted bodice and a circle skirt and I’m far too short and wide for 40′s fashion… There are some that will end up at the charity shop and I will perhaps do a give away or two on here. Once I get them all listed and sorted I will let you know and post a discount code of some sort for blog readers but don’t hold your breath as I’ve still got a stack of cookbooks beside my chair to list on Amazon that have been there for 2 weeks since I cleared out over 50 from my collection!

Hopefully I’ll be back soon and things will be back to some sort of normality!