Archive for January, 2009

Resistance is futile

January 31, 2009 at 1:55 pm · Filed under Fabric

How do we resist all of the fabric wonderfulness out there these days??

It is very hard.

I am trying to resist Lecien’s Atelier Akiko fabrics at present.

You can get them over at the wonderful Fat Quarter Shop.

And don’t miss The Late Bloomer’s Weekend in Paris Quilt over at Jolly Jabber.

I wonder if it is more a matter of not being able to decide which colorway I like best.

When doing a little search, I found a link to Atelier Akiko. You really need to go take a look at the Colorful, Colorful Days of Life quilt. Be careful, you may die from its cuteness.

Oh, if you would, please don’t buy ALL of the Akiko Atelier fabric…I might not be able to resist.

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This post brought to you by Katy

January 30, 2009 at 9:47 pm · Filed under Fabric, Great Quilt Patterns

I hear that Katy is a bit of a Liberty aficianado. Getting my hands on more of her collection was not my ulterior motive when I joined her Fat Quarter Swap. She’s already been more than generous. Frankly, I don’t know how she can part with it. Anyhoo, you saw the Royal Mail here the other day. I was good and didn’t open it until I had sent to my partners, Anne and Katy. So after bus stop, before coffee, I trotted myself off to the PO. Nothing as glamorous as Royal Mail, I’m sure. In fact, the sidewalks hadn’t been cleared for some time, the floors were streaked with salt stains, there were no forms to be had and I was scolded for not getting the envelopes marked paid when I bought them (?). And then I bought some more and was handed four envelopes that weren’t marked as paid (!).

In 5-100 days, packages should arrive in the UK.

So, I came home and tore open the package from overachiever Katy.

Give me Liberty!

yum-liberty

Perhaps I should always envision Liberty dappled by the sun… And get a load of that pretty bias binding wrapped around that adorable clothespin. Do we have these cute clothespins over here?????? A perfect head shape for a peg doll.

Back to the fabric:

yum2-liberty

oooooh, aaahhhhhh! Don’t you love the knitting fabric? I must formulate a royal plan for this pretty fabric…. Thank you, Katy!!!!

On to more about Katy. She is hosting the Great International Stash Busting Giveaway on February 4.

iagsbg-button

I’m going to be giving away some fabric, so be sure to come over on February 4 and see what’s up for grabs and visit the other participants. No, dear, a truck is not coming to take it all away….

Unrelatedly, I got some of these silicone bobbin thingies:

bobbin

I’ve been having intermittent bobbin thread issues, so I thought I would try these. I’m getting better stitch quality with some of my regular threads, but it did not resolve problems I’m having with another thread. To be continued…I’ll be sure to give a full report after I’ve used them for more than two hours.

The April 2009 issue of American Patchwork & Quilting arrived:

apq409

It is a great issue! There’s a nice long article and great photos from Robyn Pandolph.

I also MUST make these adorable birds:

birds

I have some background picked out and cut out a couple of feathery birds who may need to be tossed for something more bold. Poor feathery birds…

Hope all is well out there!

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Enough with the snow already

January 28, 2009 at 8:00 pm · Filed under Books, Everyday Things, Fabric, Great Quilt Patterns, Quilts

OK, actually, we were spared the worst of the latest batch of snow. But, still, come on. What I don’t get is how the main drag in my fair city is all nice and clear, and you cross the imaginary line into the next suburb half a mile up the road (in the same county, mind you), and you would think they don’t own snow plows there or for the next three suburbs. I am grateful for my own good fortune, yet puzzled. Since I had to be somewhere this morning, I made as many necessary and unnecessary stops as possible.

Man, that driving around in the snow is exhausting.

Enough with the weather report.

Remember when I said how great it is to quilt your applique surface before appliqueing? I forgot to temper that with a “keeping in mind the size of your quilt” warning. I believe that 60″ x 60″ is a little too big for this technique. It is not quilting or applique at that point. It is more like wrestling. And with wrestling there might be a little bit of the swearing. It’s a grand way to get an upper body workout, however.

I was putting some flowers on my Pretty in Pink quilt:
flowerapp

And if you do your layout on top of your down comforter and you’re not careful, expect a pin or two to look like this when you’ve pinned your project to your comforter:

pin

Not the good pins! I really didn’t check to see how the comforter fared.

But, all’s well that ends well and I just need to finish the binding:

pink

This is Pretty in Pink from Heather Mulder Peterson’s Livin’ Large book.

Oh, and I am very happy with how the overall quilting turned out–I was trying to channel Victoria and Jacquie. You may know that I am a big fan of the “cover every available surface” approach to overall quilting. For me, this often results in a less-than-soft quilt. But this wiggly zig-zag quilting? Oh my! The finished product is the softest stuff I’ve ever felt.

Okey dokey, I need to hunker down and get a couple of quilts quilted in the next little while, so I’d better stop the chattering and get busy.

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Is that cinnamon I smell?

January 25, 2009 at 2:31 pm · Filed under Quilts

Have you visited the Moda Bake Shop?

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Calling it a day

January 23, 2009 at 9:27 pm · Filed under Everyday Things, Quilts

I’m not really done for the day. Maybe the day is done with me. It’s that point in the year when there’s an increased number of regularly sporadic days off of school–like today. We decided that going to see Inkheart could be a little too scary, so we did some sewing this morning. Channelling my patient self, we made a drawstring bag. That was enough of that.

Life in pajamas immediately became too boring (how many things are there to do in this house?), so we invited a friend to come over and I made brownies and attempted to channel Victoria and Jacquie:

channel

I’m not as thrilled with my attempt as I am with theirs. 🙂 Maybe because I had fits and starts with my thread (has anyone tried those little silicone washers that go in your bobbin?), and I think this would look better with a bit thicker batting. We live in hope that the overall effect is more than the sum of its current parts. I just love the way Victoria’s and Jacquie’s turned out. Reminds me of a quilted bed jacket–in a good way.

I gave myself something to look forward to:

royalmail2

More thrilling Royal Mail! I’m not going to open it until I have done some additional productive work.

Here’s something for you to go look at. Amy a la Mode has been posting family quilts. I wonder how we can join the family? A while back she showed a stellar Dresden plate/wagon wheel quilt. Go take a look and be sure to check out the other fabulous quilts in her family!

Finally, I have a movie recommendation: I just finished watching Rare Birds, a great funny movie with William Hurt.

All righty then, seems like I was going to tell you something else…. For now there’s a living room that needs to be cleaned up. It’s been turned into a restaurant this afternoon. It is very difficult to get a reservation at La Mopey’s, but you can try.

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We are not to discuss my hair

January 22, 2009 at 7:48 pm · Filed under Fabric, Great Quilt Patterns

So, about my hair. I’m in the midst of a hair issue. On the day of the inauguration, I had a hair appointment (which was kind of bad planning on my part). It was time for the bi-monthly hair highlights appointment. Now, I have very short hair. I have very short hair because dealing with hair drives me crazy and I don’t want it touching my neck (get it OFF me). Otherwise, my hair and I just go our separate ways–you do your thing, I’ll do mine. But, in recent years, I have taken to having it highlighted. This is a bit of a challenge to the hair whisperer. It is usually just too short to get wrapped in its little foil sleeve (mind you, this would be at my hair’s longest point–after precisely four weeks’ growth).

So, the highlighting success has varied greatly in the last year (because I keep getting my hair cut shorter and shorter). I have been ending up with some nice stripes. ::sigh:: We decided that perhaps some all-over color would do the trick. OK, let’s do that. Except that I HATE the new color. Too dark, too red, too obvious, too icky, too…, well, I feel like I’m beginning to channel a slightly middle-aged newscaster whose dye job is just a few shades too dark and a little too perfect to be real (like the local weather man, for instance).

Trying to just deal live with it because it will be cut off soon enough and I will welcome the return of the stripes.  ::sigh:: Like I said, we’re not to discuss my hair.

But, this leads to pretttty colors. I’m still swooning over the color of Michelle Obama’s inauguration outfit. That yellow! Those green shoes and gloves. That outfit! I couldn’t take my eyes off her. What a day, huh? I’ve gone back to read the speech a couple of times. While some say there wasn’t an overarching theme or a catch-phrase, it gave me perspective, among other things. Regardless of politics, we are people who can do this and fix this and change this.

While I was glued to the hoopla on the tube, I appliqued some more yo-yos. I thought it would never end–the applique-ing, that is. Today it ended and we have a tote bag:

shorttriptote

This is from the Short Trip Tote pattern by Lori Allison.

shorttrip

Always love her stuff! I did make a tactical error in the materials department. I used a scrap of poly batting–I would advise cotton next time because there are times when one’s iron may come in contact with one’s batting. I might have melted a little batting. Which just makes my super-effective dying iron that much better. As the kids say, ‘woot!’

Finally, I received the best present a parent waiting for a bus can get in the mail:

hancock

Oh, one more thing–I’m super-dy duper excited about Pink Penguin’s teapot pattern and tutorial!

And when you run into me on the street…don’t mention the hair…please. Gotta go baste a quilt!

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Too cool for school

January 16, 2009 at 9:37 pm · Filed under Everyday Things, Fabric

Yep, I said it. The worst snow day pun ever. Except that it wasn’t a snow day. It was a too-cold for school day. Of course, I was showered and dressed before I discovered that school was cancelled. I gained a day with my child but lost an entire morning in the process. How does this happen? Well, I did go back to bed–fully clothed–for a while and we did make a batch of marshmallows (have you experienced this monumental hazardous clean-up?). And then there was instruction in the fine art of the Clover yo-yo maker. Then yo-yos were made while the Kit Kittredge movie played:

yoyokid

By the way–before I forget–the answer to the yes or no question, “do you want grape tomatoes with lunch?” is not “six.” Some of the morning fell out of my ear just then.

While the Kit movie played, I finally made my way to the sewing room to play with some of this:

birdy

Appropriately named Snow Flower. Sounds better than Frigid Wind Chill Flower. This is a panel, by the way–I didn’t applique this cute thing.

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Circular logic

January 14, 2009 at 8:02 pm · Filed under Books, Fabric, Great Quilt Patterns, Quilts, Tools

I saw a pretty little Ring Toss quilt in the Connecting Threads catalog. I wasn’t in the mood to wait for the mail. So I summoned all of my circle tools–your Creative Grids rotary circles template set, your Olfa circle cutter, your Brandy’s mylar circles, heck, I even tried a 1″ circle punch.

For some reason, it practically took rocket science to figure this out. And then there was some trial and error with the fusible web. Once I got it figured out, I WROTE IT DOWN so I could keep doing the same thing. Sheesh. Next time I’ll wait for the mail to bring me a pattern. Actually, I’d still be pulling out all the various circle tools to make the cutting go faster.

You do own one of these Olfa circle cutters, don’t you?????

circlecutter

If not and you have any predilection for circles, by all means, it’s worth the money. Ask for one at the next major or minor gift giving opportunity.

Anyhoo, here is what hurt my wee brain:

circles

More blocks to make. Some re-arranging to do.  Those are supposed to be light-ish green backgrounds.

Oh, but what did come in the mail? A lovely Japanese patchwork book:

japanesepatchwork

Nanette gave away a copy of this book in her uber-generous blog anniversary giveaway–no, I wasn’t the lucky winner (that clever girl Belinda won it–smart girl, I knew I liked her!)–but Nanette kindly shared the ISBN and I was off to YesAsia to place my order. I’ve never ordered from Amazon Japan, but I have always had great success ordering from YesAsia.

This is a patchwork lesson book with such pretty blocks and projects!

japaneseblocks

lovelyquilt

Pretty, huh?

Aside from the circles, I have been doing my best to pretend that it’s not 9 degrees F outside. That’s a little hard to do. Speaking of which, I’ll be driving to the bus stop very shortly…. Happy stitching!

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The order of things and the ric-rac applique tutorial

January 12, 2009 at 6:52 pm · Filed under Fabric, Great Quilt Patterns, Quilts

I was still in quilting mode after what felt like a marathon quilting of the Twinkle quilt:

twinkleq

And I am ever-grateful that I cut down the blocks because it made the quilt that much smaller. Otherwise, I would have needed to watch another movie after Strangers on a Train. Rather than keep track of the number of hours these things take, I think I’ll begin a tally of the number of movies watched in the process. That would seem like a much more fun number.

Where was I? Oh, yes, still in quilting mode. So, this morning–and this is certainly not an original idea–I quilted a background upon which to applique a wedge circle:

qbkgrd1

I’m going to try to remember to do this more often because it removes the problem of how to quilt the background of a project after something has been appliqued to it. No stopping and starting up against the applique.

And what am I going to applique to this pre-quilted background?

Well, that brings me to a more detailed explanation of ric-rac applique. I know I kind of word-ily described it in the past, but while I was doing it again today, I thought I would take some more pictures along the way.

Basically, I’m using ric-rac to turn under the edge of an applique shape…in this case, a wedge-y circle. This probably works best with simple shapes. I’m using ric-rac that is wide-ish–about 3/4″ between the widest up and down. I have done it with narrower ric-rac, you just have to be more precise.

Leave about 1″ to 1 1/2″ of ric-rac free before you start stitching–you will need this to fold over and finish the stitching. To start, lay the ric-rac on the right side of the circle. What you want is to be able to stitch 1/4″ away from the edge of the circle and right down the center of the ric-rac without falling off either side of the ric-rac:

ric1

Stitch 1/4″ away from the edge and keep adjusting the ric-rac as you sew around the circle:

ric2

When you get near the end, you’ll want to stop sewing about 2″ before the place you started. This is when you will start fiddling with the extra 1″ to 1 1/2″ you left free at the beginning. You will be folding the starting end UP toward yourself (rather than under). You also want to try to get the fold in the middle of one of the ric-rac “humps” that is pointing toward the left, or toward the center of the applique–trim off any excess on the starting end of the ric-rac:

ric3
Next, overlap the end of the ric-rac with the beginning and trim the end:

ric4

Finally, lay the end of the ric-rac OVER the beginning fold and finish stitching (you can pin this if you need to, but that may distort the ric-rac–better to hold everything in place with a seam ripper or other pointy object):

ric5

Now you’ll take the circle to your pressing surface and flip the right edge of the ric-rac under the circle. This will take the raw edge along with it:

ric6

Press well, making sure to pull on the ric-rac that is showing so that you have it nice and even:

ric7

You are ready to edge stitch or top stitch your circle to your background–in this case, I pre-quilted my background:

ric8

After I have edge stitched the circle to the background, I will go back and stitch in the ditch on either side of each wedge to further secure it to the background. After that, I’ll applique the small center circle onto the middle of the larger circle and I may do some quilting right in the middle of the circle. I could even finish the edge of the center circle with some ric-rac!

And there you have a more full explication of the ric-rac applique technique. Feel free to ask questions!

In no particular order, here are some other things I’ve been doing while the snow has been piling up.

We have some Amy Butler solids in a Dresden fan:

abdresden

And I could have pre-quilted the top and borders and THEN added the Dresden fan. I wasn’t thinking that day.

And the yo-yos are all made and are being appliqued to the side of a tote-bag-to-be (really, how did we function before the Clover yo-yo makers??):

yoyoapp

Off to give Twinkle some binding. I hope you’re warm or cool depending on which hemisphere you’re in!

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The secret life of a square

January 7, 2009 at 6:15 pm · Filed under Fabric, Quilts

zigzag

There once was a quilt that was square.
But I just couldn’t let it end there.
Back to the sewing room I did go.
Thirty-two more squares did I sew.

And now my quilt’s a rectangle.

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