Some Small Christmas Presents

 Hi all -

Time is flying and the holidays are fast approaching! But since we're doing Secret Santa with my family, my holiday gift making has been severely reduced. I have to say, it's really nice to not have all of that pressure! I had finished my "required" gifts in my last post and I had some extra time, so I decided to make a few small gifts for the sister who I stay with when I visit. The full family Christmas celebration isn't until 12/28, so this sister and I will be hanging out together on Christmas day without anyone else around. And she loves to cook so I know she'll be cooking special meals and snacks for me on Christmas day and throughout my visit. It's only right that I should have some fun stuff for her to open on Christmas morning!

The first thing I made for my sister was a silicon trivet. I had picked up the base for the trivet at a local quilt shop last year, intending to make it for my sister, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

Hot Stuff Trivet package

I pulled out the package and started work. First, I picked out my fabric. The fabric shows through the trivet, but is muted, so I wanted a beautiful large-scale print that was bright. I found a perfect flower print in. my stash! I quilted one piece of the fabric for the bottom of the trivet and fussy cut another piece of the fabric to show through the front. Then, following the included instructions, I added a border and binding.

Hot Stuff Trivet - top

Hot Stuff Trivet - bottom

This was really easy and fun to make, and I think it will be really useful. My sister hosts all of our family get-togethers so often has a large table full of hot dishes!

One of the crafts I've been wanting to try for a while is making rope bowls. I had picked up some different rope in the past, but always got busy with other stuff and put it aside. One of the ladies on the quilting forum that I read had shown some bowls that she had made, and that piqued my interest again. So I ordered the book that she suggested (Zigzag Rope Sewing Projects by Katherine Lile) and got some of the rope that she had used for her bowls and started playing. To get the feel for things, I decided to make some trivets. That way I could get the feel for the sewing without having to worry about the shaping. And I could play with the different ropes I had to see how they worked. I started with the rope that the lady on my quilting forum had suggested and made this trivet for my sister:

My Sister's Trivet

To give it color, I grabbed some small scraps from my scrap bin and wrapped them around the rope as shown in the book. I started with a red and a green and then realized that these colors matched the fabric that I had used for my sister's silicon trivet, so I picked through my scraps and added scraps from the trivet fabric and other matching colors to make a trivet that went with the other trivet that I made for her. This rope worked really well. Next I used some cotton clothesline that I had in my stash and made this trivet:

My Neighbor's Trivet

I went monochromatic with this trivet and played with colored thread. I was originally making this one for a friend, but ended up giving it to my neighbor instead because she loves purple. This rope also worked really well. The next trivet was for another friend. This one used another rope that I had in my stash:

My Friend's Trivet

This "rope" was really a cotton piping that is designed to be covered by fabric, but I used it uncovered. It makes a sturdy "fabric" where it is coiled, but the hanging loop isn't as nice as the loops from the other trivets. For this trivet, I did all of the sewing with white cotton thread and then splattered the finished trivet with some bottled inks that I found on my shelf that are designed for stamping. I really liked how the colors look different on the threads that on the cotton base. Finally, since I gave my first friend's trivet to my neighbor, I made another one for my friend. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of this one since I made it the evening before I gave it to her. For this one, I used variegated thread, a narrow zigzag and added matching fabric scraps for a trivet with a lot of color. These were definitely a lot of fun to make and they work up very quickly! I'm moving on to other stuff, so will come back sometime in the future to start learning how to do the shaping for bowls and other objects.

Next, I decided to also make a bag for my sister. I looked through my patterns and decided on the Huntington Hobo bag by Pink Sands Beach Designs. I looked through my fabric stash and found an old Hoffman Challenge fabric that I really liked. Since I like to make bags and I do everything on the spur of the moment, I had a large stash of zippers and other bag-making supplies to go with my fabric stash. Here is the bag I ended up making:

Huntington Hobo Bag - front

Huntington Hobo Bag - back

Huntington Hobo Bag - Inside

I think my sister will like this bag!

I decided that I had made enough gifts so I went back to some of my own projects. Back when I was making the Baby Elephant quilt, I had quilted a panel to use for the largest size of the Project Bags 2.0 pattern from ByAnnie so I decided to finish the bag:

Project Bag - Front

Project Bag - Back

I like this style of project bag for my English Paper Piecing (EPP) projects because it keeps the smaller units flat, so I'll be using this bag for my La Passacaglia quilt.

Speaking of my La Passacaglia quilt, I added another round to my first unit in this quilt:

La Passacaglia - Unit 1

I'm finding that with this quilt what is taking me the longest is deciding what fabrics to use everywhere. This is a very chaotic-looking quilt and I'm not one for doing a lot of planning for my quilts. I do know that I want to use only Tula Pink fabrics for this quilt, so that narrows down the choices. I've been looking at my fabrics and pondering what I want to do, and finally forced myself to just go for it with the black fabric so I could work on this project at our monthly EPP group meeting. There are some other shapes like this in the quilt, so I'll repeat the same black fabric on some or all of the other similar shapes, while varying the colors and designs used for the stars inside the shapes. This should reduce the chaos a bit while keeping the scrapiness. We'll see how it grows!

A couple of months ago, one of my quilt guilds had an on-line auction to raise money. The auction included finished quilts, unquilted tops, kits, collections of fabric and smaller quilted items. I picked up several items from the auction, including a couple of kits. One of the kits is for the Posy Pocket Handbags pattern by Crabapple Hill. This kit was donated by the estate of an obviously highly prolific crafter and included the pattern and fabrics for two bags. I finished the embroidery for the first bag:

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery

The kit didn't include the fabric or thread for the embroidery, so I pulled those from my stash along with the buttons. I'll put this bag together before starting the embroidery for the second bag just in case I want to make any changes to how I make the bag.

I've also been doing some knitting. I've continued to make some progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

As I've said before, I really love working on this shawl! It's just so squishy and wonderful, and the colors take my breath away! But the rows are getting very long (close to 400 stitches per row now), so it'll take a while to finish it.

Finally, I started another knitting project. The Stitchscape Shawl is getting pretty big and the current section has you working with three colors of yarn at once, so this isn't a good project for traveling. I had some yarn that I wanted to play with and I wanted to see how I liked using Addi FlexiFlips needles, so I decided to start working on a Mimizan Hat designed by Tess Young.  So far, I have the ribbing finished:

Mimizan Hat

I learned from the brim of the hat that you definitely need good lighting when knitting with black yarn! The body of the hat will be worked with a green yarn as well as the black yarn, so should be a little easier depending on how difficult the stitch pattern is to figure out.

That's it for now. Sorry for the long post! I didn't get around to posting last week, so the projects added up. I'm not sure if I'll get another post in before I go to Kansas City to visit the family, but I don't tend to do much crafting while visiting so the next post should be of reasonable length no matter when I make it.

Nancy

Oak Leaves Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! I had a quiet holiday at home and was able to finish my quilt for my brother-in-law. It feels so good to have everything done! This year the family decided to do a Secret Santa Christmas, so that's the only gift I have to make. It's been nice not to have the pressure of having to make so many gifts!

As I mentioned, I was able to finish my Oak Leaves quilt this week:

Oak Leaves

I love how it turned out, even though the quilting is far from perfect! If you look closely at the photo, you will see that the quilt has that scrunchy, soft finish. I don't usually wash quilts before gifting them because I love the crisp feel of a new, unwashed quilt and I want the recipient to enjoy that feeling, too. But I used a thick wash-away stabilizer for the applique and I wanted to soak out that stiffness before gifting the quilt. To remove the stabilizer, I soaked the quilt in the tub and periodically agitated it to help the stabilizer dissolve. Then I moved the quilt to the washer and ran it through a light soil cycle. I had put a sheet under the quilt when I put it in the tub so I wouldn't have to worry about the weight of the water distorting the quilt when I moved it to the washer. It all worked really well! For the quilting in the brown squares, I used a ruler to quilt straight lines emphasizing half square triangle nature of the log cabin blocks.

Oak Leaves - Quilting

While this was an easy quilting design, I found that I kept quilting the lines to the wrong end points. When your nose is that close to the quilt, it's really hard to distinguish the vertices! I spent a lot of time removing errant lines, and I made the decision to leave some in that I didn't think anyone would notice but me! Another thing I realized after doing several blocks is that the two possible diagonals of the brown-only squares are not the same and it's hard to see which diagonal is the one that matches the diagonal in the half and half squares. By the end of the quilting, I was doing a lot of marking to keep myself on track! But, like I said, I think it looks good and nobody will notice the problems but me. I used a Quilter's Select ruler to do the straight line quilting:

Quilter's Select Ruler

I purchased this ruler several years ago when they first came out, but had never used it before. It is a really nice ruler! Quilter's Select rulers have a kind of sticky backing designed to reduce slipping. They have this coating on both their rotary cutting rulers and their quilting rulers. I find that this coating works really well! I didn't have any problem with this ruler slipping through all of this quilting, regardless of what awkward position I had things in to do the quilting. These rulers are, however, fairly expensive. But I will still keep my eyes open for sales on these rulers and pick up some other shapes when I have the opportunity.

When the quilt was done, I dug through my collection of Christmas fabrics and I made a gift bag for it:

Oak Leaves - Gift Bag

This is a bigger gift bag, so the cording I've used in the past for smaller gift bags seemed too light for this bag, so I've ordered some 3/4" red ribbon that I will run through the casing and tie in a bow to hold the bag closed. In the past, I've spent a lot of time making very polished gift bags that were lined with a slick lining fabric and had all of the fabrics stabilized. I decided that this gift bag would probably not get much use in the future and I didn't want to spend that much time on the gift bag or make it as heavy, so I simplified my process. I decided not to use any lining and instead used an overlock stitch on my machine to finish the raw edges on the inside of the bag to prevent fraying. I also didn't use any stabilizer. I thought about sewing some handles, like you would have on a tote bag, to make it easier to carry the bag, but decided that would look funny and would be overkill. I made a similar gift bag for the Baby Elephant quilt:

Baby Elephant - Gift Bag

So now I'm completely ready for Christmas!

During my TV time (it's NFL and college basketball season!), I've continued to work on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

I continue to love working on this shawl! It's so squishy and the colors are so beautiful! The first part of this shawl has really gone swiftly, but things are slowing down as the rows get longer and longer. Each row is now over 300 stitches long! Good thing I'm enjoying it!!

I hope everyone is enjoying their winter (although it's not officially winter yet...) and things aren't too stressful getting ready for the holidays!

Nancy

Happy Thanksgiving!!

 Hi all -

Boy, is time flying! I can't believe it's Thanksgiving week already! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!!

I've made great progress on my brother-in-law's quilt. I started working on the quilting. I started by just stitching in the ditch (SID) around the cream areas in the log cabin blocks. At this point, I wasn't sure how I would be quilting the quilt, but I knew that I wanted definition between the cream and brown areas so I started with that. I didn't want to stitch around each separate block in case I did some kind of quilting that flowed from block to block. The SID quilting gave me a good backbone for the quilting so I would now be able to quilt wherever I wanted without worrying about anything shifting. Next, I stitched around the edges of the applique in the top panel and then did a simple meander in the background:

Oak Leaves - Top Panel Quilting

Since I did a meander in the panel background, I decided to continue that in the cream parts of the log cabin squares. This quilting ignored any block boundaries so I was glad that I hadn't done SID between the blocks. With the curvy meander in the cream parts of the blocks, I knew I wanted straight line quilting in the brown areas to provide some contrast. I decided to quilt lines from the corner of each block to the corners in the centers of the blocks. This is hard to describe in words, but here are some pictures to help explain it:

Oak Leaves - Brown Block Quilting Front

Oak Leaves - Brown Block Quilting Back

I hope you can get an idea of how this quilting looks from the pictures. For these areas of the blocks, I'll also be doing SID around all of the edges to define everything I think this will give a cool texture to the quilt! Because of the way the blocks are situated, this means that none of the quilting in the brown parts of the log cabin blocks will touch the edge of the quilt so I could add the binding to the quilt before finishing this part of the quilting. So I moved to the binding after quilting those two sample blocks. I decided to use a scrappy binding to match the scrappiness of the rest of the quilt. Because some of my strips were fairly short, I sewed together enough strips to bind about half of the quilt and shifted things around until I was sure that none of the seams between the strips would land in a corner. Then I sewed that long strip to the quilt leaving a long unsewn tail. With that part secure, I sewed more strips together and positioned them to make sure I wouldn't have any seams in the corners, sewed that strip to the strip already attached to the quilt and then finished attaching the binding to the quilt. This method worked really well for me and I'll definitely use it again when I do another scrappy binding! Now I'm working on hand sewing the binding to the back of the quilt. I make pretty small stitches so this part of the process can take a while for me. I was able to get half of the binding finished yesterday and I'll continue to work on it today. I'm trying to be mindful, also, to not strain my thumb while I do this. When I do a lot of hand stitching, I get some pain in the joint where my thumb attaches to my wrist. I've always just ignored this and powered through, but I'm realizing that I'm getting older and don't want to do any permanent damage to my joints that would preclude me from doing the crafts that I love, so I'm trying to take breaks and also apply some heat to the area. It's not a bit deal now, and I hope it remains that way for a long time to come!

I also went back to my Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott. I wanted to finish it this week and I accomplished that goal.

Olney St. Scarf

It always feels good to finish up a project! This scarf will be nice to wear in the cold winter months! Now I need to decide what other crochet project to work on next. I'm not sure if I want to finish up another project or start something new. We'll see how my whims steer me!

I was also able to make some more progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

The rows are getting long so it's taking longer to finish each section, but this knitting is really enjoyable! I really love the textures I'm getting!

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-Up

Stitchscape Shawl - Another Close-Up

I look forward to spending more concentrated time on this shawl once my brother-in-law's quilt is finished!

Nancy

Started Quilting Oak Leaves

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! I've made good progress on my Oak Leaves quilt. This is the quilt that I'm making for my brother-in-law for Christmas. First, I finished the applique on the top panel of the quilt. I used machine applique for the panel. I used C&T Wash-Away Applique Paper for the leaves. I cut the applique shape, fuse it to the fabric, trim away the excess fabric leaving a scant 1/4" seam allowance, then glue the seam allowance to the back of the shape. This gives me a nice, stiff shape that's easy to place and prevents puckering when you stitch around the shape. I used 3/8" bias tape for the vine. I drew the path for the vine on the panel, then glued the vine in place. I had used a long piece of freezer paper to draw the path for the vine and I drew the leaf shape on the freezer paper in an orientation that looked good to me and drew a short stem to the vine. I then used my lightbox to position each of the leaves in the same orientation and also glued a short piece of 1/4" bias tape to make the stem. Once everything was in place, I sewed the applique pieces in place using smoke-colored invisible thread and a narrow zigzag stitch. I then did some free-motion stitching to create the vines in the leaves.

Oak Leaves - Applique Close-Up

The leaf appliques were stiff enough that I didn't need a stabilizer on the back of the panel for stitching those, but there would have been a lot of puckering from the vines and stems without a stabilizer. I used a wash-away stabilizer from /FilTec for this. This stabilizer was really easy to use because it is very sticky on one side so you just cut it to size, peel off the protective paper and press the stabilizer in place. It's a very heavy stabilizer so the stitching was really easy.

Oak Leaves - Back of Applique Stitching

With the finished applique panel, it was quick work to add a narrow border and the panel to the quilt top.

Oak Leaves - Finished Top

Since I'd already pieced the back, now it was time to sandwich and baste the quilt. This is my least favorite part of making a quilt! This quilt is small enough that it fit on my kitchen floor, so I pin basted it there. It only took a couple of hours, but pin basting on the floor is really hard on this old body! But I did order some knee pads that they use in construction so my knees didn't get as sore, but it's still killer on the back and the hands. But I got it done and was able to start the quilting this morning. I'm not exactly sure about how I want to do the quilting so I'm starting by stitching in the ditch on every seam that is between a brown piece and a cream piece. No matter what I end up doing, I know I want stitching there and that stitching will allow me to remove most of the pins, reducing the weight of the quilt for the rest of the quilting. I'm thinking that I want some sort of straight line quilting on one of the colors and curvy quilting on the other color. The applique panel will have quilting around the edges of all of the applique pieces and then will have some sort of background quilting. While doing the quilting, I'm getting to enjoy all of the diverse fabrics that I used in the quilt. I love to make scrap quilts and generally push the envelope when picking the fabrics to use. You can see in the above picture that you get some sparkle from the variety of fabrics, but the colors look fairly uniform from a distance. When you get in close, like I am while I'm quilting, you can really see the diversity of colors and patterns that make up the fabrics in the quilt.

Oak Leaves - Fabric Close-Up

Oak Leaves - Another Fabric Close-Up

Looking at these pictures, you can see that there are a lot of different shades of brown and a lot of different shades of cream. They really don't go together when you look at them this closely. Especially that fairly deep yellow fabric in the creams. But when you step back a little, I think it looks incredible! This is one of the things about quilting that really makes my heart sing!

I also did a little work on my Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott. 

Olney St. Scarf

I'm getting really close to the end, but am getting tired of the splitty yarn so haven't been motivated to work on it as much as I should. I'll try to get this done by next week.

But I did go ahead and start a new project. I've had the kit for the Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph since last spring. This kit was part of the 2024 Stephen West Yarn-A-Long and I fell in love with it immediately, but didn't have time to start it.

Stitchscape Shawl

The colors just glow and I love that I have this beautiful pink leather project bak (not part of the Yarn-A-Long) to put it in! I love projects like this one with easy shaping, lovely colors and a variety of fun stitch patterns:

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-Up

And the yarn is so soft and bouncy! Since it's getting close to Christmas, I decided to get in the holiday cheer with my Christmas tree needle stoppers:

Stitchscape Shawl - Needle Stoppers

Needle stoppers are used to keep the stitches from sliding off the needles when you put the project in your bag. They are completely necessary, but can save you from a headache and are really fun to boot! This will be my new travel project since I'm to the point with the Olney St. Scarf where I have to periodically weigh the yarn to see if it's time to start knitting the top border.

Nancy

Big Snow!

 Hi all -

I hope you are all doing well! We got a big shot of winter this week. It snowed for most of the week last week, ending up with somewhere around two feet of snow up here. It's hard to tell exactly how much we got because the ground was warm and we had a lot of melting, but there's definitely still a lot of snow out there! I was supposed to go to a daytime quilt retreat last Friday and Saturday, but the roads were too bad to go down there. I went down to town this morning to get groceries and although all of the other roads are completely dry after the sunshine we had yesterday, our neighborhood is still terrible. I even just got a notice from UPS that they weren't able to deliver a package to me this morning. Hopefully they can get in here tomorrow! I'm surprised that the county hasn't plowed our roads yet. In the almost 25 years that I've been up here, the county has always kept our roads cleared, often coming up here several times during a storm. This is surprising since we live in a rural neighborhood up in the mountains and most neighborhoods like that don't get this service. So I'm wondering if some bigwig moved out of our neighborhood recently. Hmmmm. It's supposed to be really warm and sunny this week, except for a small storm that might go through here tomorrow, so the roads should clear up pretty quickly on their own now. Glad we've finally gotten to my appointment tomorrow to get my winter tires put on! Looks like I might really need them now!!

This week I started working on my brother-in-law's Christmas quilt. This is a quilt that I started several years ago so I have a head start. I have the main part of the body pieced. I wanted the quilt to be a little taller, so I had also started working on an applique border to put on the top of the quilt. Here's my current progress:

Oak Leaves

That top panel will have a vine with oak leaves in it and will be separated from the main body by a brown narrow border, probably 1" finished but I'll decide that when the top border is ready. I drew the path of the vine on the top panel and prepared the oak leave appliques:

Oak Leaves - Top panel with leaves

Oak Leaves - Top panel close-up

I plan to have the vine go all the way to the edge of the quilt and end in the binding. I decided that the vine itself should be 3/8" and the little stems that go from the vine to the leaves should be 1/4". Unfortunately, I didn't have a 3/8" bias tape maker so I had to order one (that's what they tried to deliver today) so I have to put this aside until that arrives. But I did get the 1/4" bias tape made so that's ready to go. Since I got stuck on the quilt top, I went ahead and made the backing for this quilt:

Oak Leaves - Backing

Hopefully I can make some quick progress on this quilt when I get my Amazon delivery!

The only other thing I've been working on this week is my Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott:

Olney St. Scarf

I'm getting pretty close to finishing this project. I took a break from working on the body of the scarf to put on the bottom edge:

Olney St. Scarf - Bottom edge

I did this because the bottom edge closely matches the top edge and I wanted to know when to switch from the body to the top edge. The top edge is a continuation of the body, but the bottom edge was added separately. Because of that, I could leave the main yarn ball attached to the body while I worked on the bottom edge. By weighing the yarn before adding the bottom edge and again once the edge was finished, I now have an approximation of how much yarn is needed for the top edge. So now I can crochet the body of the scarf until I have just a little more yarn that what was needed for the bottom edge and I will know that this is the right place to start the top edge. Then I will have the minimum amount of yarn left over after the project is finished. 

Well, that's it for this week. Grace is getting her first day of freedom since she broke her toenail two weeks ago, so she is a bundle of energy and I need to go outside to play with her!

Nancy

Baby Elephant Almost Done

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! Winter arrived here last night. We got 6 or so inches of snow overnight. The snow has been light today, but another wave is supposed to come in tomorrow lasting through to the weekend. Unfortunately I'm still using my summer tires, but the winter tires get put on next Tuesday. I'll drive really carefully until then! 

I had a really eventful day last Monday after making my blog post. First, Grace came running in the house with her paw bleeding. She had broken another toenail. I immediately packed her up and took her to the emergency vet to get it fixed. I do keep her toenails clipped, getting them done once a month at daycare, but she runs around like crazy in the rocky backyard so I think we'll be dealing with this quite often! This time was worse than last time and she had to have all of the remaining toenail pulled out so only the quick was left. The poor girl has been on exercise restrictions and wearing a cone for a week now and has another week to go! While we were at the emergency vet, I got a text that my nephew and his wife had their baby. The doctors had decided to induce on Friday and she hadn't gotten far enough along all weekend, so the decided to do a C-section on Monday. Baby and mom are doing great and they all went home on Thursday! She's a very beautiful baby!

I was able to almost finish my Baby Elephant quilt. This quilt is from Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones by Laura Bevin. I have all of the quilting finished except for the triangles representing the eye and the ear:

Baby Elephant - Front

This will be quick to finish once I figure out what to quilt in those spots, but I wanted to get this blog post out first. For the eye, I was at first thinking about some kind of circle or spiral design, but when I drew that out on paper it gave me an elephant on drugs vibe. But I think a spiral in an almond shape might work. For the ear triangles I'm thinking of repeated squiggles in a "3" shape or something like that. These are very small areas so they aren't really important, but they need something in them or the fabric in those spots will wear more quickly than the rest of the quilt. When quilting, I love to use threads that make the quilting appear on the back of the quilt:

Baby Elephant - Back

It's subtle, but you can see the details of the elephant. In the elephant body, I used Angela Walters' flower meander quilting to go along with the roses that I quilted in the cornerstones:

Baby Elephant - Flower Meander Quilting on Front

Baby Elephant - Flower Meander Quilting on Back

My flower meander is definitely not as pretty and smooth as Angela's, but it really is effective in real life. For the background areas I used stippling, like I did for the background in the cornerstones:

Baby Elephant - Background Quilting on Front

Baby Elephant - Background Quilting on Back

Finally, I did some straight-line quilting in the toes. This matches the straight-line quilting in the border and give a toenail vibe to me:

Baby Elephant - Toe Quilting on Front

Baby Elephant - Toe Quilting on Back

While I marked the straight-line quilting for the border and used the walking foot, I used a ruler for the quilting in the toes. This was a nice small space where I could get back into the swing of using rulers. I'll finish up the quilting on this quilt this week and add a label, but I won't bother posting it again since that quilting is so minor. This will be.a Christmas gift for the baby so it's actually finished in plenty of time! Now I have to work on the quilt for my brother-in-law for Christmas. I'll hopefully have something to show on that one next week!

To practice the flower meandering stitch, I started making a Project Bags 2.0 designed by ByAnnie. Most of her bags require some quilted fabric, so they are good places to practice your quilting!

Quilted Fabric for Project Bag

Close Up of Project Bag Quilting

I chose this fabric to go with a zipper I bought that is dark navy (looks black) with shiny neon pink teeth and pull. I think this is going to be a really fun bag! I'll work on this bag when I need a break from other things I'm doing.

I also started crocheting a new scarf that will be a good travel and TV project. It's the Olney St. Scarf designed by Betsey Sennott:

Olney St. Scarf

Olney St. Scarf - Close Up

This yarn is really splitty so is hard to use, but, luckily, this stitch pattern is easy so the yarn isn't slowing me down too much. I really love the color of this yarn! It's a little bit darker than it appears in the close-up image. It's nice to have some more crochet going!

Finally, I have a new, interesting bag to share. I'm in Laura Nelkin's N Club, which is an annual club where you get a larger knitting project three times a year and there is always a fun knitting or crafty item included with the kit. Our last project for this year included a cool bag that you make from a leather handle and a large square of fabric:

New Bag - Side View

New Bag - Front View

New Bag - Handle View

The bag is based on the Japanese tradition of folding and knotting fabric to make things. In this configuration, I knotted two corners of the cloth square. Then I wound the other two corners of the cloth square into the slots on the handle as instructed in the handle packaging. It's a really cool concept and seems very sturdy.

Nancy