If I'm going to overcome my problem, I have to admit I have one.
A quick baby coin quilt. Will finish top this weekend.
A baby quilt. Needs the binding stitched down, then a label. If I start something new before finishing these, please punch me in the neck.
Had a bit of an ordeal with my sewing machine. It was skipping stitches and making an alarming CRUNK noise, so I took it in for repair. The repairman here is about eighty, crotchety, and has several mangled fingers — really — that give me pause every time I see him. It sort of makes me wonder how adept a repairman he can be if his fingers keep getting eaten. But he's pretty much the only game in town, so in I went with my machine.
He couldn't find anything wrong, he said, but gave the machine a good cleaning. Home I went and started to sew. And heard almost immediately, CRUNK.
Because I hate confrontation, it took me a week to work up the nerve to take the machine back in to good Mr. Manglethumb. I diffidently presented the machine with a sheepish look and several "of course I know nothing about fixing sewing machines, but I think..."s. He set it up and sewed a few stitches. CRUNK, it said on the very first stitch...and then purred like a kitten. A threaded kitten, one that made perfectly balanced stitches. He stared at me and said, "I don't hear anything. You hear anything?"
Damn it. I looked like such an idiot.
But an idiot with a working machine, at least, I thought as I took it home. Set it up, took a few stitches, aaaand...CRUNK.
But it only CRUNKs every so often, and it does appear to be working, so for now I am using it and watching it like a hawk. Like a hawk watches a kitten. Know what I mean? Hungrily.
Or I was. Because then the light bulb burned out. First time in a decade of owning the machine and using it almost daily. Unfortunately, the bulb is a funny kind and the only place in my state that sells and services these machines is owned by...Mr. Manglethumb. Rather than go back there for the third time in a month, I ordered a bulb online. And so I waited. And waited. And still am waiting now.
I've managed to sew a few things with the help of an Ott Lite precariously balanced. This is a block for a bee I'm in, the Stash Busting Bee. The recipient sent the turquoise floral print and asked that we make an 18" block. I loved doing this because it let me pull out a bunch of oranges, which are to me as red is to some quilters; I try to work it into every quilt. I also enjoyed the huuuuge block size, as it was like making a mini quilt.
I've also made a few more nine-patches, although my machine's hypochondria put me way, way, way off schedule on the One-a-Day Quiltalong, and I've made about a million 5" half-square triangles for a value quilt inspired by Metrosupial's. Oh, and I repaired Charlie's blanket, which had grown stringy and disreputable around the corner. (He was stricken when he realized I was going to have to amputate. I explained about gangrene, though, and he eventually progressed to acceptance.)
Also in the works is a design wall for my quilting studio — hahahahaha, I love to laugh. Studio, my ass — and a couple of swaps. (Sheridan, if you're reading this, start watching your mailbox!)
So I'm finishing up a quilt, one I made while I wait impatiently for my Spoonflower shipment, and I'm trying something new with this one. I'm using Minkee for a backing.
It's got a bit of stretch to it, so I was careful to load it onto my frame with the selvages running perpendicular to the rollers. It was warm enough with only the Minkee, but I wanted it to have some body, too, so I also used a very lightweight bamboo batting. And since I know that the cut edges can cause all sorts of mayhem, shedding fibers and rolling like a...er, a great rolling thing...I waited to trim the edges until after I'd gotten the binding sewn to the front.
Very clever, and it all worked fine. Except that I completely butchered the binding when I went to trim the edges. Sliced right through one of my neatly mitered corners that was hanging juuuust a bit past the edge of my ruler.
I include the picture because I depart here a bit from conventional craft blogging. I wish bloggers would talk more about mistakes or bad decisions or frustrations they encounter in their work. On the objective side, doing so could help readers avoid the same mistakes. On the subjective side, knowing that even meticulous crafters make the occasional error would sure make me feel slightly less stupid.
Because, man, was this a stupid mistake. Irreparable without replacing the binding. So now I'll spend part of the morning removing the edging from that corner, grafting in a bit of virgin fabric, and hoping the fix won't show. And wishing I hadn't been feeling quite so smug, because, as the Bible says, if I remember it correctly and translated it properly from the original Esperanto, smug goeth before a fall.
A batch of nine-patches, now, for the One-a-Day quiltalong, these in the color I like to call...mud.
It's a funny color. When I'm doing a spectrum quilt I always try to ease the transition between yellow and green — you can't just jump between those two colors because the yellow is, by default, a light value, and the green is usually at least a medium and often a dark. So I turn to mud to do the job.
It's not a pretty color, but I'm really fond of it — so much so, in fact, that I painted our guest room mud to go with the Kaffe Fassett print I showcased in the bed quilt. Dull and drab and exactly what I wanted for a room that's meant to feel restful, dark, and private.
I think I'm up to 39 blocks. They're so bright that every time I try to count I get a little vertiginous.
My own personal rule for this project is that each nine-patch has to have a significant portion made from scraps — either the five-piece patches or the four-piece ones, but preferably both. This is in part an effort to make sense out of my scrap bag, a small portion of which is seen here in all its horrible horribleness:
...and also an exercise in using the tone-on-tone prints I now find excruciatingly boring, but which now comprise the majority of my stash. Unless I figure out a way to be comfortable mixing them with the splashier prints I now favor, I'll have a lot of fabric that I simply don't use. A lot.
Because I have a lot of scraps of the appropriate size from making this quilt and this one, I'm using them as inspiration. Thanks to those leftover squares and strips, some blocks will be scrappier than others:
Each block should, at a distance, read as one color, mostly, although up close at one position in the block — the four- or the five-piece portions — can be multicolored. Then, if it doesn't end up looking too much like a circus clown ate a rainbow and vomited it into a woodchipper, I'll arrange the blocks in some sort of spectrum progression.
Or, anyway, that is the plan.
(Psst. It's not actually pieced on the slant. It's straight. I just wanted you to think it's interesting. That's some A-1 top-flight craft blog photography right there, hah? Hah?)
I have an idea for the back, but because I'm lazy I'm not especially good at appliqué, I'm going to let Spoonflower do the work. More on that when my custom-printed fat quarter arrives.
In progress, an improvised baby quilt.
The inspiration is a piece of Alexander Henry's 2D Zoo in sage. The animals are in various pastels, including several in a soft and pretty shade of pink. I think I'm probably supposed to care that there's pink in a quilt I'm making for a boy...buuuuuutIdon't.
A set of picnic napkins made from Heather Ross's Mendocino collection. I like the look of napkins that go together but are all different, and these prints just cried out to be enjoyed with one of the al fresco seaside dinners Vermont is known for.
Yeah. Anyway...
Unclear on how well the fine poplin will hold up when subjected to repeated food-related abuse, but I decided it was stupid to hoard the fabric when we could be admiring it all summer.
I used this tutorial to make the nifty mitered corners. And, sure, I suppose I could have titled this post "Mendocino Monday," but...look, I like mayonnaise, okay?
This is a medium-sized tote bag made using Erin Michael's Uptown collection. It was out a few years ago and I bought lots of it. Lots of it. I'm finally getting to the point in my fabric collecting where I look at my stash and feel appalled instead of energized, so I'm making a real effort to use some of my favorites.
My feelings about this bag are mixed. I sort of wish I hadn't combined the birds with the strippy panels, as I think it may all be too busy. And I already have two pink homemade handbags. (I still carry the second; the first, a prototype, has been relegated to the "What was I thinking?" shelf.)
But I did a pretty nice job on the construction, and I'm happy to have used some of the birds in something I'll see frequently, instead of in a quilt I'd give away and never see again, and I learned something new by trying a new technique for the strap. So we'll call it a qualified success, and move hastily on to the next thing.
(If you want to make a strippy handbag of your own, I wrote up a tutorial about a thousand years ago and just moved it over to TypePad. Please forgive the formatting; I haven't updated it to comply with the Web standards of the 19th century, much less the 21st.)
I made it to go in my living room, but I'm not entirely happy having it in there. Oh, I like the quilt — it has all the right colors and I'm pretty pleased with its non-traditional look. The problem is that it makes me want to redecorate the rest of the room. I wonder if I can arrange to have the rug stolen by very selective thieves in the dark of night.
Interested ninjas may apply via e-mail.
