Needle Roll, Sue Spargo Bag and Labadee Cowl Completed

Hi all -

It's been a productive couple of weeks for me. I had several project finishes. It always feels so good to finish something!! My first finish was the Road Runner Needle Keeper. This is a Sue Spargo kit that I picked up in Houston in 2017. I made a few small changes to the pattern. First, I added a small zippered pocket on the outside. This will be perfect for holding a needle threader, needle pullers and a small pair of scissors -- things that are always needed with the needles. The other thing I changed was how the elastic was connected. I sewed the elastic piece right into the binding while Sue had you put it on top of the binding with an additional piece of wool appliqued over it. That construction just didn't make sense to me.

I really love how this turned out!

Finishing the needle roll also inspired me to work on one of my Sue Spargo project bags, since these projects are all stored in the same bag. So I pulled out the Swag Bag Kit and did the embroidery stitches. There were a lot of bullion stitches to do, but by the end I'd gotten pretty good at them and am starting to really love them!

I almost skipped the running stitches in the background because it didn't seem like they would add much, but once I put them in there I was really happy that I did. They really do add a lot to the design! Well, once the embroidery was finished, all I had to do was put the bag together. Since that wouldn't take long, I went ahead and finished it up.

Again, I made a few changes in the construction. First, in addition to using a spray baste to hold the three layers (the outside, batting and lining) together as suggested in the pattern, I also added a line of machine basting around the outside edges of the pieces to hold everything together better. I found that I had to do that with the outside (the wool) on the bottom or it would stretch a lot. I was glad I did that since it really held the pieces in place nicely while I put everything together. The other thing I did was add a small boxing to the bottom corners. I really like boxed corners on my bags and I'm glad I did that! I'm guessing that at some point I'll also open up one of the side seams and add a handle to the bag. I really like handles on my bags, and am guessing this will bother me when I use the bag, but we'll see. My next Lola's Choice knitting project should be arriving in early March, so this bag will have its project pretty soon!

My third finish is the Labadee Cowl:

This was knit as part of a knit-along on Ravelry. I like the pattern, but wasn't happy with the yarn choice. I used the yarn suggested by the designer, a pack of 5 mini-skeins, but I felt that the designer cut it too close on amount of yarn used for some of the colors and that this color pack had too little contrast for this design. Like a lot of people, I ran out of both of the two lightest colors and had to substitute some colors at the end which caused the pattern to be even harder to see than it was with the original colors. But I still love the cowl and will probably make another one at some point with my own color choices. (Note that I haven't blocked the cowl yet so it looks a little bunchy in the picture. It'll block out to a nice flat cowl when I get around to that.)

I've also made progress on some other knitting projects. First there is the Moxie Cowl, which is the Jimmy Beans Wool knit club project for this quarter. We got our second installment last week and I'm enjoying this project so much that I just had to drop everything and do that installment immediately!

It's so much fun working on all the different stitches!

This cowl is really soft and squishy and I'm definitely keeping it for myself!

I also made some progress on the projects I'm doing for the Laura Nelkin  knit-along. For this knit-along, we can work on any projects designed by Laura. There's an extra prize if you do the "Big 4," which is a beaded pattern, a sweater, a pattern for hands or feet and a project for charity. I already have my beaded and charity projects finished, so I'm working on my sweater and appendage projects now. For my sweater project, I'm working on Baby Novus for my step-niece's little boy who is scheduled to arrive this summer:

This looks a lot like the picture of this project that I posted last time, but I really have made progress. This is the fourth time that I've knit the arm, which doubles as a gauge swatch, and I finally am close enough to gauge that I can continue knitting this. For the appendage projects, I'm making Laura's Flip-Top Mittens. This pattern was published in a book that I've had for a couple of years so I'm knitting from that, but Laura also has an updated version of the pattern available on Ravelry.

I'm making these for charity, too, because I heard that the homeless often cut the tops off of the gloves and mittens that are donated to them. So I thought that flip-top mittens would be perfect for them so they could get easy access to their fingers while still being able to cover them when it's cold! The pattern instructions in the book are pretty minimal because of the limited space, so I'll probably go ahead and buy the updated pattern on Ravelry, too, but am waiting until next month when I think it'll go on sale for the knit-along.

And my last project is some actual quilting. I want to get my Tree of Life wallhanging from Jane Sassaman's class finished and on the wall. Since my last post, I've quilted the details inside of each applique. I'm using invisible thread so the quilting itself can't be seen, but it really makes the appliques look more polished. In this picture, the flower on the right hasn't been quilted yet, but the flowers on the left have been. You can see how flat the unquilted flower looks and how finished the quilted flowers look.

I'm not quilting every line in the appliques, only those that I think add dimension. In the example above, I'm not quilting the lines that make the pentagon between the light and dark blue areas because I think that quilting those lines would disrupt the shape of the flowers. After finishing the quilting in the appliques, I decided to quilt the outer border of the quilt with piano keys:

I used a ruler for this quilting, although I wasn't that careful about the spacing. It's approximately 1/4" piano keys, using the presser foot to measure the distance. It's always amazing to me how nicely the quilting flattens things out and makes them look so much better! Here is the quilt so far:

I just have the background quilting left to do, although I might put the binding on before doing that just so I can clean up those edges. For the background quilting, I'm thinking about stippling in the yellow area and putting circles around the edges of the blue circles. I think That'll look pretty cool.

Finally, I got my taxes done and in the mail today. That's a real load off of my mind! I always hate doing my taxes, so it really feels great to have that done and over with for another year.

Nancy