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

Cowltopus Finished

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well. We're getting ready for winter here. I'm sure it will show up some time soon! Our temperatures have been a bit cooler, but still pretty warm for this time of year. And it's been dry!! But we're supposed to have a cold front come through on Tuesday night to drop a little snow for us. We really need it! 

I was able to finish my Cowltopus designed by Laura Nelkin. This project was a Mystery Knit-Along (MKAL) so we didn't know what we were knitting until the final clue came out. I've finished the last two clues, finishing the cowl, since my last post. In the third clue we joined the bottom of the hood into a circle and started to knit the base of the cowl:

Cowltopus - Clue 3

And, as you probably guessed, we finished up the base cowl with the 4th clue:

Cowltopus - Clue 4 Front View

Cowltopus - Clue 4 Side View

The knitting in clues 3 and 4 use a technique called "brioche" which creates a really fun squishy fabric. I think this cowl will be wonderful on cold winter dog walks!

I also spent a couple of days this week putting the binding on my Baby Elephant quilt from Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones written by Laura Bevin:

Baby Elephant

I didn't have enough of the purple fabric from the quilt top to use for the binding, but I was able to find another fabric in my stash that matches the shade of purple perfectly! I like to hand-sew my bindings so it takes a while. The hand sewing is tedious, but I really love how a perfect, full binding looks and feels. The entire time I'm stitching, I'm bitching in my head about how long it takes and how sore my finger gets (I have never been able to use a thimble), but at the same time I'm feeling this intense satisfaction and joy at how wonderful the finished edge looks and feels, and I keep going back and touching the finished edges. Crazy, I know! Now I just need to do the quilting on the elephant and on the background of the quilt. I'm going to be doing simple stippling in the background, so that will be quick. I'm planning to do Angela Walters' meandering flower design in the elephant, to thematically match the roses in the cornerstones. I'll make another ByAnnie bag so I can practice the meandering flowers before I stitch them on the quilt.

Finally, I started working on my Millefiori quilt. I'm making La Passacaglia designed by Willyne Hammerstein using Tula Pink fabrics. This week I finished the first two rounds of the first unit:

La Passacaglia

I have a long way to go, but I'm liking it so far!

Finally, I thought I'd share a picture of our latest visitor:

Visiting Moose

This guy spent the day last Tuesday relaxing in the neighbor's yard, about 15 feet from my fence. Grace was really good! She ran over to him (on her side of the fence) and gave a few barks when she first saw him, but then she just ignored him for the rest of the day. He is so beautiful!!

Nancy

Happy Birthday, Grace!

 Hi all -

It's hard to believe it, but today is Grace's 2nd birthday. Where does the time go! Can I still call her a puppy? I know I can say that she has turned into a very sweet and well behaved dog!

Grace

It's been a very productive week for me. I've had a couple of finishes this week. First, I finished the two smaller Ditty Bags from the ByAnnie pattern to go with the larger one that I made earlier:

Ditty Bags from ByAnnie

I had fun using the same fabrics for all of the bags, but using different quilting and embellishments! The middle-sized. bag has meandering feathers quilting and some cute buttons on it:

Ditty Bag - Medium Size

The small bag has stipple quilting and a cute ribbon embellishment:

Ditty Bag - Small Size

And I remembered to include the lining fabric in the quilted sandwich so the inside is lined!

Ditty Bag - Lining

These bags were fun to make (although the binding in the inside of the smallest bag was pretty fiddly!) and I was able to use them for practicing my rusty quilting and for picking quilting designs for other projects.

My second finish is my Comfort Fade Cardi designed by Andrea Mowry (the colors are brighter than they appear in the photos):

Comfort Fade Cardi - Front

Comfort Fade Cardi - Back

I had started this several years ago, but put it aside before picking up the stitches for the button band/collar. Picking up stitches, especially when there are lots of stitches as in this case, has always been confusing for me. Patterns always seem to give you the number of stitches to pick up, but there are also prescribed ratios of stitches to pick up when picking up along the sides of the knitting (knitting stitches are taller than they are wide so it's not 1 to 1). The problem with this is that you knit a sweater to the length that works for you so you rarely have the same number of rows as the designer had so the number of stitches given in the pattern is different that what you would get using the prescribed ratio. After watching blogs and stuff, I think I understand how this works now. The pattern gives you the number of stitches the designer used, but you should instead pick up stitches using the prescribed ratio (many say to pick up two stitches for every three rows, for example). Then, for a pattern like this one, you have to do some math because this pattern uses what are called "short rows" to build up the collar. To do the short rows, you are told to knit a given number of stitches, then you turn your work and knit in the other direction. And you do that several times to build up the collar. But if you pick up a different number of stitches than the designer, then you have to knit a different number of stitches to start with and you have to figure that out for yourself. But once you understand how it works, it's not difficult. And now I have another fun sweater to wear as the weather cools down!

Another project I did a little work on this was was my "Baby Elephant" quilt from Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones by Laura Bevin. One of the things I've been wrestling with was what background quilting to use in the cornerstones (and, to be consistent, behind the elephant). I used the ditty bags above to help me make that decision. I felt like meandering feathers would be a good background because they would represent food for the elephant, but I was afraid that that design would be too thready and would make the quilt a bit stiff. So I used that quilting for my medium ditty bag and I agree with my instinct. Even though the bag doesn't feel stiff, it does feel to thready for my baby quilt. So I decided to use simple stippling and used the small ditty bag to practice my stitching. Here's how the cornerstones turned out:

Baby Elephant - Cornerstone

I generally second-guess myself with stippling because it is so common from past days that it almost seems cliche or something, but I think it ended up working well here and will work well behind the elephant, too. And, as an added benefit, it's very fast at this scale. It only took me about 10 minutes to finish all four cornerstones! Here's what the quilt looks like so far:

Baby Elephant

This afternoon I'll start working on the binding, then I'll finish the rest of the quilting. I still have to figure out how to quilt the elephant itself. My first inclination is to try to do some "realistic" quilting on the elephant where I put some horizontalish lines on the trunk, whorls on the knees and some rounding around the belly, but I would have to figure out something to quilt on the elephant's side so there is enough quilting to hold the quilt together. But I'm afraid any realistic type quilting in this area will just make the elephant look wrinkled and old. So I might just use some general quiltinng pattern that isn't elephant-specific. I have time to think about this as I work on the binding and background quilting.....

Finally, I also went to my first meeting for another small group from my quilt guild on Monday. This group is for working on block of the month quilts or mystery quilts. I have several of those that I've started in the past and would like to finish some day! So I pulled out my Ruffled Roses quilt designed by Sue Garmen. This was the 2011 Block of the Month quilt from The Quilt Show and I started it that year. This is a very detailed, time-consuming quilt, but it is so gorgeous! I just had the first couple of months finished so far:

Ruffled Roses - Front

This quilt is fancy enough that it even includes trapunto:

Ruffled Roses - Back

If I went in order, I would continue working on the applique swag border. But this is hand applique and I'm using different thread for every piece and then I'll have to add trapunto to this border, so I decided I didn't want to continue working on this border at home and move on to the next border in the group meeting. The next border is small four-patch blocks (2.25" finished) on point, which is easier to do away from home than the applique. So I started working on this border:

Ruffled Roses - Strip Sets

It doesn't look like I accomplished much, but there is a lot of pressing and cutting that has to be done before you can do any sewing and we only meet for four hours. That's the difficulty with scrap quilts. But I love the variety that results! It was really nice to see this quilt again, but I won't be working on it outside of the monthly group meeting until I get the elephant quilt and another quilt done that have to be finished for Christmas. After that, I hope to put more time into this one! (Although you never know what might turn my head next...)

Well, that's it for now. I hope everyone is doing well!!

Nancy

Cowltopus Mystery KAL Clues 1 & 2

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! It's hard to believe that we are in mid-October. We are still having warm, dry days. We haven't had any precipitation since our first "snow" a couple of weeks ago. We are so lucky that we haven't had a fire yet! And my well has been stressed for the last couple of weeks so I have to be really careful with my water usage. But it sure does feel good!

Last week was my busy one. I've been joining more of the small groups with my quilt guilds and they all seem to meet around the same time. Last week I had the Longmont guild meeting on Tuesday, then the class from the Longmont speaker on Wednesday. I'll show what I did in class below. Thursday was the Quilts of Valor (QOV) small group, where we spend a day at the church sewing quilts for the QOV organization. Friday was the English Paper Piecing small group where we work on our own EPP projects. In this group, I just continued to work on my hexagon charm quilt. All of these were a lot of fun and Grace got to play with the other dogs at daycare so we were both tired at the end of the day.

Besides the quilt activities, I've spend most of my time since my last post working on Laura Nelkin's Cowltopus Mystery Knit-Along (MKAL) project. Laura likes to celebrate Cowltober with a new cowl pattern and has had a MKAL the last couple of years. This year's pattern is octopus-themed. Even though I have more than enough yarn in my stash, I bought this year's kit because I wanted the extras:

Cowltopus Kit Extras

I hope you can see in the picture that we got two stitch markers (a Sculpey octopus and a metal tentacle) and cute octopus end stoppers. The kit also came with a couple of cute stickers, but I really don't have anywhere to put stickers so I'll probably end up throwing them away. Laura loves to plan here MKALs with weird constructions so we really can't tell what the final project will look like. This year's is no disappointment! The first clue, which came out on October 4, had us use Judy's Magic Cast-on to create a two-sided piece, then we knit back and forth around it in a U-shape to make this:

Cowltopus Clue 1

I don't know if you can tell in the phots, but the bottom edge is a finished edge and the live stitches are in the U around the sides and top. From this angle it looks like we are knitting a jellyfish! The shaping looks like the top of a hood.

Cowltopus Clue 1

It's really had to show this shape in a picture! We got the second clue last Thursday and it continued the hood element:

Cowltopus Clue 2

In this photo, the live stitches are on the bottom and the finished edge is on the right side. Here it is standing up:

Cowltopus Clue 2

It's possible that this is really a snood, but I have a feeling that we are going to fold this in some strange manner and end up with cool-shaped cowl. We only have two clues left so we'll know soon!

As I mentioned above, I also attended the class offered by our quilt guild speaker. This class was on piecing circles using the Cut A Round ruler. If I was in the class to actually learn something, I would have been very disappointed because we basically just had a demonstration of the ruler and then spent the rest of the day (it was a full day class) piecing circles for a table runner. But I was really in the class to be more social so I was okay with that. We started out piecing a practice circle:

Circles Class Practice Circle

Then we worked on the table runner. The table runner was designed as three blocks with circles and then a border around it. But I don't use table runners and don't have any space for another wallhanging so I decided that I will end up making a lap or bed quilt instead and just concentrated on making blocks:

Pieced Circles Quilt Blocks

Since I love scrappy and Kaffe Fassett fabrics, I'll just keep making these blocks until I reach a size where I want to stop, then I'll sew them together and quilt it. I might do some hand embroidery in the solid fabric. I'll decide that later. This project will be set aside for a while since I have other things I need to work on right now, but should be quick to finish when I get back to it since the blocks are 14" square. And I'll probably piece the practice square into the quilt back to keep everything together.

Nancy

A Bunch of Bags

 Hi all -

Wow! Time is flying by! I can't believe it's October already! Looking at the trees, it's obviously October. But you would never know it by the weather. It's been sunny, warm and dry since that little snow storm I mentioned last time. I'm loving it! It's going to be a real shock when the weather turns!

Since my last post, I've taken a break from quilting and have been making bags instead. I started with the "Hands Free Diaper Bag" by Missouri Star:

Hands Free Diaper Bag

This is a small diaper bag designed to be warn cross body.. It has a large main pocket for diapers and supplies and a pocket on the front for the baby wipes that has a flap giving you direct, easy access to the opening in the package:

Hands Free Diaper Bag Opening for Wipes

As you probably guessed, this is for my nephew's baby girl who is due in November. I think it will be useful for those short trips where you don't want to carry a big diaper bag but still need to be prepared for emergencies. Of course I decided to use a directional fabric for the bag so I had to pay close attention to what I was doing to get the print right-side up. And I made a lot of mistakes along the way and had to redo several parts. But I love how it turned out! 

I love to make bags and hadn't made any for a while, so this bag really whet my appetite! I really wanted to make a ByAnnie bag so I looked through my patterns and picked something, but then realized that I didn't have enough Soft & Stable (the stabilizer ByAnnie bags are designed to use) to make the bag. But I was going to Quilt A-Fair last Friday so I decided to look for some there. Quilt A-Fair is the Colorado Quilt Council's annual show. It's kind of a weird show because there are a bunch of vendors on the floor and the quilts are displayed in the rafters. It's really hard to see the quilts and there aren't a lot of them, so I actually didn't even realize it was a quilt show for the first couple of years that I went. I thought it was just a vendor's market. But now I know to look up for the quilts so I can enjoy them as well as the vendors! Anyway, I was able to get some Soft & Stable and I also found a kit to make a couple of ByAnnie bags that I liked and the sale benefitted the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum. So I switched directions and made the bags from the kit:

Renaissance Ribbons Bags

It is a wonderful kit with fun Tula Pink fabrics and ribbons. The pattern is "Renaissance Ribbons Bags" by ByAnnie. I made the big bag first to get a feel for the pattern:

Renaissance Ribbons Bags - Larger Bag

The larger bag is generally the better one to test the instructions with because it's usually less fiddly than the smaller bags. For this one, I originally put the zipper on upside-down and had to take it off and redo it. In this case, it would have been better to have made that mistake on the smaller bag instead since it was tightly stitched and took some effort to remove! But I got the big bag nicely finished and then was able to make the smaller bag with no problems:

Renaissance Ribbons Bags - Smaller Bag

I think these turned out cute and I love the lining fabric as well:

Renaissance Ribbons Bags - Lining Fabric

These are really easy to make and I can see making some more in the future.

Then I went back to the ByAnnie pattern I had picked out before the quilt show. I had picked out all of the fabrics before the show so now I just had to put it all together. I had chosen the "Ditty Bags" pattern (the link is for the 2.0 version of the pattern which looks a little different from the original version that I have) and again started with the largest bag:

Ditty Bag - Largest Version

It's hard to tell, but my main fabric (which is one of my favorite all-time fabrics) is, of course, directional so I had to play with the instructions to get everything in thge right direction. The pattern has you cut a large piece of the main fabric, quilt it and then cut out the needed pieces. And the pattern uses a single large piece for the main body of the bag, which wraps around from one side to the other which would make the pattern upside-down on the back side. Instead, I cut out my main fabric pieces first, cutting the main piece in half (and adding seam allowance) and then piecing it back together to get everything in the right direction. Then I arranged the main piece and the side pieces on the Soft & Stable and quilted everything as directed. Well, almost as directed. I didn't read the directions carefully and the other bags I had just made had the lining sewn separate from the outside of the bag so you quilted the outside fabric without the lining for those. Of course, this bag is made by quilting all three layers (lining, stabilizer and main fabric) into a single piece and then the seams inside the bag are covered with binding. I didn't do that and didn't realize I had done that wrong until I was too far along to fix it, so this bag has the Soft & Stable as the lining. Luckily, that will work just fine and just not be as nice has also having a lining fabric:

Ditty Bag - Lining

I do plan on making matching bags in the smaller sizes, but I'll do those correctly so they will have the lining fabric on the inside! I'm really enjoying the bag making so you'll probably see more scattered in with my other crafts in the future!

I really need to get back to the Baby Elephant quilt. I need to finish it by Christmas. Then I have to get back to a log cabin quilt that I started a couple of years ago that I've decided to finish for my brother-in-law for Christmas this year. Our family is doing Secret Santa this year and I chose his name so that's the only Christmas gift I have to make this year. Then I'll be free to flit between all of my projects and crafts again.....

Nancy

Border Quilting on Baby Elephant

 Hi all -

Fall is definitely here. We had our first snow Sunday morning. It rained all night then turned to snow in the morning. It stuck on the roof, but melted on the grass. And then it was all gone by noon. Now we're back to some pretty beautiful warm weather for the next week. What a wonderful time of year!  Here are some pictures of the aspen trees turning in my yard:

Aspen Turning in My Yard

More Aspen in My Yard

Isn't it beautiful??? I wish I could get the glow in my pictures! It's so much more beautiful in person!!

I've been spending time quilting the border of my "Baby Elephant" quilt from Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones by Laura Bevan. I'd already done the stitch-in-the-ditch quilting so now everything is stabilized and I can quilt wherever I want. I started with the big blue border blocks. I decided to quilt a chevron in those areas:

Chevron Border Quilting

The chevron is nice because it brings the eye into the center of the quilt. It''s nice to quilt because I can use my walking foot, but it's tedious because I had to bury the thread at the end of each line. I could have secured the stitches by stitching backwards at the end of each line. That would have been quicker, but I don't like the look of the heavy double thread at the end of each line. Another option would have been to stitch in from the outside edge, then stitch along the edge of the narrow purple border and then stitch the next line out to the edge of the quilt. This is what I would have done if the quilting along the sides of the narrow inner border was done in the blue thread used for the chevron. But I quilted the sides of the narrow purple border using purple thread so those extra little segments would have shown up on the back of the quilt. I'm weird, but I really want the quilting on the back of the quilt to look cool. Here's what the chevrons look like on the back:

Chevron Border Quilting on Back

I just find that so cool looking! For the orange corner stones, I found a rose quilting stencil in my stash that fit in the corners perfectly. I was looking for a rose to quilt in the cornerstones because I just found out that the baby's name is Adeline Rose. Isn't that beautiful? I quilted the roses in purple thread to make them stand out in the corners:

Rose Quilting in Cornerstones

I flipped and rotated the rose stencil so that in each corner the rose has the same two leaves pointing toward the borders and the third leave pointing towards the corner so the rose motifs kind of make a rectangle around the quilt. I hope that makes sense! Here are pictures of the entire quilt so far:

Baby Elephant With Borders Quilted

Baby Elephant Back

Now I need to pick a background filler for the cornerstones. I need something that will flatten the puffy areas around the roses, but isn't too heavy so it doesn't make a stiff place in the quilt. I want something curvy to contrast with the chevron quilting. Pebbles are one of my go-to curvy background fillers, but I tend to do a lot of backtracking when I do pebbling which can make it heavy. Another thought is to do a meandering feather filler. That has less backtracking and looks beautiful so it's a possibility. Another possibility would be to do some Nemeshing, which is a combination of feathers and pebbles. I did this on a wallhanging a long time ago and it looks wonderful, but I'm not sure if there's enough space around the roses to do it justice. I plan to use whatever filler I use around the roses also in the cream background area around the elephant to add cohesiveness to the quilting. The Nemeshing could really shine in that area, if I can pull it off with my current rusty quilting muscles. I'll ponder this some more and come to a final decision soon. Once I get the background quilting finished around the roses, I'll be able to put the binding on the quilt. I like to get the binding on as early as possible so I don't have to deal with the fluff that comes off of the batting while I quilt.

In the time when I'm not quilting, I've continued to work on my English Paper Piecing (EPP) hexagon charm quilt. I'm plugging away at adding hexagons to my hexagon-shaped units, making them rectangular. I've completed another three rectangles:

EPP Hexagon Charm Quilt Units

I'm having fun making progress on this quilt! But I'm also finding myself wanting to start a "La Passacaglia" quilt from Willyne Hammerstein's first Millefiori Quilts book. I've wanted to make one of these quilts since there was an exhibit of these quilts in Houston several years ago. I've been collecting Tula Pink fabrics for this quilt and I'm feeling the pull to start working on this one! So don't be surprised if you see me switch EPP gears soon....

Last week I took Grace to doggy daycare and they were having a ball pit day. This daycare offers "enhancements" where you can pay an extra $15 for some special personal time with your dog sometime in the day and they send you pictures of the activity. Every day the offer personal time where they will do puzzles with your dog or play ball with them, but every once in a while they will have a special enhancement. That's what ball pit day was. Since Grace LOVES balls, I couldn't pass this up! Here's Grace in the ball pit:

Grace in the Ball Pit

They filled the pool with balls and also treats for her to find. Grace loves to catch treats and they got this great picture of her just about the catch the treat:

Grace Catching a Treat

She really loved this activity!!

Well, that's about it for me. I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the change of seasons!!

Nancy