Inclusion Finished

Hi all -

I hope you're having a wonderful holiday season! I've just returned from my trip home for Christmas. As usual, it was wonderful! I have to say that I am exceedingly lucky to have the family that I have. We all love and respect each other. We have disagreements, but we don't have fights. This is something that I wish everyone could experience! And now we have the joy of starting to see our family grow. Our next generation are starting to find life partners and get married, and soon we will start seeing another generation. It warms my heart!

But on to the crafting.....

My top project, my niece's graduation quilt, was finished just in time. The quilting always takes a lot longer than expected. We also had a lot of trouble with power outages, but luckily I put the binding on the quilt early so those hit mostly when I was hand-stitching the binding to the back of the quilt. Here is the finished quilt, ultimately named Inclusion:

And the finished back:

I used a different quilting fill pattern in each of the different colors of hexagons:

And here's the label I made for the quilt:

The quilt is far from perfect, but I still love how it turned out. And I think my niece really likes it, too. This is my last graduation quilt, at least for this generation. So now I'll be moving on to the wedding quilts. 😃

I also finished up one last Christmas gift since my last post. I made the fourth dish towel for another niece:

This made a nice set and she really liked them. These are made with Dishie cotton yarn from KnitPicks. We've all found this yarn to be wonderful for dishcloths and dish towels. It really soaks up the water well and can be thrown in the washer with no problems (I've even used bleach with my Dishie dishcloth with just a small reduction in color). I've had several requests for more of these so you'll be seeing more of these in the future.

Once the Christmas gifts were finished, I took some time to work on my other projects. I finished the November installment for my Jimmy Beans shawl club project, the Sunshower Shawl by Ambah O'Brien:

Just one more month, and this project will be finished!

I also started working on my 2019 Jimmy Beans Craftvent shawl project. The Craftvent project is packaged as an advent calendar, with a bit of yarn and pattern instructions or a little prize for each day from Dec 1-24. This is a really fun project for the Christmas season! This is my second year of participating. Last year, I was caught up enough with Christmas that I was able to sneak in a little time each day to keep up with the calendar until I left for my trip to see my family. This year, I was too far behind to start on time, but I was able to do a few days and have now finished through the Dec 9 section:

The pattern for this shawl is Spirits of the Season by Amy Gunderson. The shape of the shawl is a long, skinny triangle that I think will be fun to wear as a scarf. Hopefully, this will be finished by my next post.

I've also received some more things in the mail that I need to work on. First, I got the last two installments of the Jimmy Beans knit club Oct-Dec project, Kickshaws by Shanel Wu:

These will be a pair of slippers that I'm looking forward to trying. If I like them, they might be something fun to make for the family.

And I've received the November Lola's Choice project, Umami Mitts by Laura Nelkin:

I love fingerless mitts and these have an interesting stitch pattern on the back, so I'm looking forward to working on this project.

And I'll also be starting on my big project for 2020 soon: my niece's wedding quilt. I've shared the pattern for this quilt in earlier posts. I bought a kit for the quilt at a price that was hard to beat, but I'll be adding some of my own fabrics to the quilt. The kit has floral fabrics and I'll be adding Asian fabrics to fit the Japanese garden theme, since her fiancee popped the question in a Japanese garden at the botanical gardens in Austin, TX. I'll share more about this quilt as I make progress on it. I have until August 28 to finish......

Nancy

Christmas Gift Progress

Hi all -

It's been a while since I've shared what I've been making for Christmas so I thought I should catch up on that. I've been knitting and sewing like a crazy woman! I'll start with the knitting.

I've made several hats for the men in my family. My latest hat is the Whitman Slouchy Hat designed by Danielle Morgan that I made for one of my brothers-in-law:

For a while I've been sharing pictures of the Eiffel Tower mittens I'm making for my sister. I still wasn't completely pleased with how they were going and time was running out, so I decided to put those aside for next year and instead knit the Riverfront Mitts designed by Amber Swim:

I really love how these turned out and I might have to make a pair for myself! I looked through the patterns on Ravelry and found the Mystic River Cowl designed by Tanja Luescher that I thought would be a perfect companion for the mitts:

I think they make a perfect set!

Finally, for my niece who just bought a new house, I'm knitting a set of dish towels using the Dish Towels pattern designed by Kerin Dimeler-Laurence. I've finished three of the towels and have started the last one in the set:

On the sewing side, I made this project bag for my niece:

My niece has a very strong Yoga practice so I searched online for Yoga symbols and found the Lotus image and the Om. I ironed two layers of freezer paper together to make the paper thicker, then traced the images and cut them out using an exacto knife:

I ironed the freezer paper onto some prewashed Duck canvas:

I'm not sure if I needed to prewash the canvas, but did it just to make sure that there weren't any chemicals, like sizing, on the fabric that would keep the paint from adhering. If you've ever prewashed canvas before, you know that it comes out of the dryer as a wrinkled mess. To avoid this, I prewashed the canvas but didn't put it in the dryer. Instead, I took the wet canvas to the pressing table and ironed it with a hot, dry iron to dry the fabric. While using the iron, I would also periodically stretch the canvas in the opposite direction from the folds from the washer. This worked well for me.

Once the freezer paper was adhered to the canvas, I started painting the symbols using Jacquard fabric paint and a medium stencil brush:

I was worried about the paint getting under the edges of the stencil, especially since I had to apply it rather thickly to get good coverage, but the freezer paper adhered to the canvas really well and I didn't have any trouble with leaks. Once the area was covered with paint, I carefully peeled off the freezer paper to reveal the images:

I did the lotus image first and didn't get full coverage because of my fears of messing up the edges, but I still like how it turned out. And the Om symbol turned out almost perfect! I then set the painted images aside to dry overnight (in a room where the cats aren't allowed, for obvious reasons....). The next day I also heat set the paint and sewed the bag without using a pattern. The bottom of the bag and handle are made out of a black micro-suede. I think my niece is going to really love this bag!

That's all of the Christmas crafting so far. I've also made progress on my niece's college graduation quilt. I had been calling the quilt Inclusivity, but that name was bothering me a little. I've changed it to Inclusion, which sounds less awkward to me. I got all of the background quilting finished on this quilt:

I also got the binding sewn on. I do the back of the binding by hand because I'm very picky about the binding on quilts that will be used, so that part alone took several full days of handwork. But now I feel confident that I will have the quilt finished on time since all I have to do now is quilt some fills in the hexagons and add a label. It feels so good to almost have this one off my plate!

I've also done some knitting for myself. I received the October installment of my Jimmy Beans Wool annual shawl project:

I took time out to knit this up:

But then I received the November installment and had to put that on the back burner:

I think I'll have time to knit this before Christmas because my Christmas knitting is going well.

I also received my 2019 Craftvent calendar from Jimmy Beans Wool. They offer a project each year that they divide into 24 pieces that you get to open each day as an advent calendar. Some days you get yarn and instructions for you project; other days you get a little gift. I got the knitting project that came in these cool containers that have magnets so they stick to a metal base that you can put on the wall:

I was able to keep up with the Craftvent project last year, but this year I've only been able to open the canister each day to see what I received. My niece's quilt really put me behind on everything! But I look forward to working on this shawl after Christmas....

That's everything that I've gotten done so far. Christmas is close, but I think I'll make it!

Nancy

Houston 2019 - Purchases

Hi all -

We all like to see what gems our friends pick up at the quilt shows so I thought I'd share my purchases. I'll start with the free stuff since we all like the freebies!

HandiQuilter gives out bags every year. They are a good size and I have several, but I can always use another one! This year another company was giving out these nice water bottles. The bottom screws off so you can put fruit in there and have fruit-infused water. I thought that was pretty cool!

And I always get some fabric, but I don't usually go crazy there.

I just got some more of the fabric strips from Cherrywood. I love Cherrywood fabric and it's fun to have these little strips to play with! I also always go to SewBatik because I love the owners and their fabric. This year I picked up a selection of blue 1/2 yard cuts. There were some dark blue low-contrast quilts in the quilt exhibits that I found fascinating so I'll probably try that myself sometime.

I also picked up some general stuff from Bohin:

I got a bunch of embroidery needles in different sizes because I use them a lot for both embroidery and for burying my threads when I quilt. Bohin makes great needles so I stocked up! I also decided to get some pins. Some of you will cringe, but I'm still using pins that I bought in the 80's when I was still in college. I love those pins, but at some point you have to move on. Hopefully, I'll love these just as well (although I'll probably keep using my old pins, too). The pink ceramic pencil was just an impulse buy because I already have pink ceramic pencils at home, but I don't have one where the pencil itself is pink so I know what color of lead it holds. I don't need it, but what the heck!

I also bought some fun toys for my sewing machine:

Bernina accessories are pretty expensive (but worth it because they are high quality) so it was great to see the Bernina booth selling everything at 25% off. I got a couple of big bags of bobbins because I like to switch thread colors a lot and often store filled bobbins with the spools of thread. So it was nice to see these larger bags of bobbins that cost a little less than the ones that they have at my local Bernina shop, and then to get the25% off the top of that was a bonus. I also got the thread couching inserts for the Bernina 72 foot. I had just heard about these a couple of weeks before the show and really wanted to get some to try out. There are 3 different inserts for different sizes of yarn. I also have the Bernina free-motion couching foot, but that foot has a single size hole. When free-motion couching, you have the best results if the yarn you use just barely fits in the hole in the foot. Any extra space is a place where the needle can miss the yarn leaving a loose spot. Having the 3 hole sizes should be a big help. Of course, what would really be nice would be for Bernina to modify the free-motion couching foot so that you can use inserts with different diameters because that foot is designed really well for the sit-down machines, but they don't have that so I have to make do with what they do offer. Finally, while at the show, I found out that Bernina also had a new yellow bobbin case with a higher tension, useful when free-motion quilting. This bobbin case is the same as the regular black bobbin case, so I could just adjust the tension on my original case. But it's a bit of a pain to adjust the tension in the bobbin case so it's nice to have one already set at the higher tension and easily differentiated from the regular bobbin by the color. I'm very happy with these purchases!

I also went a little crazy at a couple of booths that specialize in purses and bags:

I don't know when I'll have time to make all of these bags, but I also get joy just looking at the patterns! But I love to make bags so hopefully you'll be seeing a couple of these in the next year. And at one of the booths they had some cool printed cork that I had to splurge on:

They had some cool bags made wholy or in part with the patterned cork and I can't wait to try it out for myself!

On the international front, I found this wooden stamp that I thought was pretty cool:

I'm not sure what I'll do with this, but it should be fun to play with. And it will look good on a knick-knack shelf. And I found these pieces at an African booth:

I thought my niece, who studies African dance, would like the bigger piece. I bought the smaller piece because these are kind of thick. The lady said that some people have finished them with quilting, but I wanted a little piece to test on so I don't ruin the big piece if quilting leaves holes in the finish on the piece. If my playing around with the small piece doesn't ruin it, then I'll probably make a knitting project bag out of that one.

That's my entire haul. I'm pretty pleased with everything and look forward to some playing after the holidays!

Nancy

Houston 2019 -- Contest Quilts, Part 2 of 2

Hi all -

It's time to finish sharing the Houston 2019 contest quilts while I watch the Kansas Jayhawks play basketball. Rock Chalk, Jayhawk!!

Fantasy/Whimsy

Colourful Dreams by Lise Belanger-- 1st Place

Boogie Wonderland by Sharon Casey -- 2nd Place

Music by Kathy McNeil -- 3rd Place

Color My World by Sue Bleiweiss -- Honorable Mention

Boogie Brass Band by Sharon Casey -- Honorable Mention

Rafa by Marcia Baraldi

Group

Maasai Women of Kenya by Ann Brakob, Elsie Dentes, Neani Mee, Joan Watkins and Carl Yonetz -- 1st Place

Come Dance With Me by Dee Legvold, Page Johnson, Rita Perez and Gail Kieper -- 2nd Place

2 Degrees Celsius by Stephanie Zacharer Ruyle and BeeSewcial -- 3rd Place

Handmade

Summertime by Elsie Campbell -- 1st Place

Summertime by Elsie Campbell -- Detail

Gentle Flowers by Teruko Ono -- 2nd Place

Gentle Flowers by Teruko Ono -- Detail

Ariella's Dream by Sara L. Madson -- 3rd Place

Floral Star by Yasuko Sugaya -- Honorable Mention

Floral Star by Yasuko Sugaya -- Detail

Merit Quilting, Hand

Promised Season by Sachiko Chiba -- 1st Place

Promised Season by Sachiko Chiba -- Detail

Le Bouquet by Mayumi Ishii -- 2nd Place

Le Bouquet by Mayumi Ishii -- Detail

Joy of Spring by Jackie Perry -- 3rd Place

Joy of Spring by Jackie Perry -- Detail

Bouquet of My Gratitude by Midori Horie -- Honorable Mention

Bouquet of My Gratitude by Midori Horie -- Detail

Merit Quilting, Machine -- Frame

Nostalgia by Annelize Littlefair -- 1st Place

Nostalgia by Annelize Littlefair -- Detail

Song of Summer by Bethanne Nemesh -- 2nd Place

Song of Summer by Bethanne Nemesh -- Detail

Dangerous Liaisons by Cristina Arcenegui Bono -- 3rd Place

Merit Quilting, Machine -- Stationary

Hagia Sofia by Isabel Colilles -- 1st Place

Hagia Sofia by Isabel Colilles -- Detail

My Lone Star Quilt by Marisa Marquez -- 2nd Place

My Lone Star Quilt by Marisa Marquez -- Detail

The Beatles Love by Fabia Diniz Mendonca-- 3rd Place

The Beatles Love by Fabia Diniz Mendonca -- Detail

West Meets East by Linda Crouch -- Honorable Mention

West Meets East by Linda Crouch -- Detail

Miniature Quilts

Circuit Training by Philippa Naylor -- 1st Place

Circuit Training by Philippa Naylor -- Detail

Floral Filigree by Laura Welklin -- 2nd Place

Floral Filigree by Laura Welklin -- Detail

Plumeria of Koko Crater by Sue Sherman -- 3rd Place

Plumeria of Koko Crater by Sue Sherman -- Detail

Mother's Gift by Yuan Shan Jin -- Honorable Mention

Mother's Gift by Yuan Shan Jin -- Detail

Tight Pineapple by Amy Pabst -- Honorable Mention

Tight Pineapple by Amy Pabst -- Detail

Miniature, Art

Bath Balloon Fiesta by Miyuki Humphries -- 1st Place

Bath Balloon Fiesta by Miyuki Humphries -- Detail

Falling Leaves by Frieda Anderson -- 2nd Place

Can't Stop Yawning by Masanobu Miyama -- 3rd Place

Naturescape

In Full Bloom by Claudia Pfeil -- 1st Place

In Full Bloom by Claudia Pfeil -- Detail

Sonoran Desert Sunset by Kathy Adams -- 2nd Place

Faces of Four Seasons by Joanne Baeth -- 3rd Place

Morning Rain by Sarah Lykins Entsminger -- Honorable Mention

Morning Rain by Sarah Lykins Entsminger -- Detail

Mon Paradis by Brenda Roach -- Honorable Mention

Painted Surface

Pensive Pause by Linda Anderson -- 1st Place

Step Sisters by Sonya Prchal -- 2nd Place

Maria's Tree by Linda Anderson -- 3rd Place

Nevermore by Debra Crine -- Honorable Mention

Betts and Bardie by Kimberly Lacy -- Honorable Mention

Betts and Bardie by Kimberly Lacy -- Detail

The Calm by Melissa Sobotka -- Honorable Mention

People, Portraits, and Figures

Hanging at the Pompidou by Caryl Bryer Fallert-Gentry -- 1st Place

My Big Face by Cindy Stohn -- 2nd Place

My Big Face by Cindy Stohn -- Detail

Blessed by Rhonda Montgomery -- 3rd Place

Hello Momo by Hiroko Miyama -- Honorable Mention

Harvest by Li-Hsiang Wang -- Honorable Mention

Saving Paradise by Jan Reed -- Judge's Choice

Pictorial

A Garden is a Lovesome Thing by Barbara E. Nagengast Lies -- 1st Place

Nostalgic Recollection by Noriko Nomura -- 2nd Place

Artistic License by Kathy McNeil -- 3rd Place

Oriente en Occidente by Adriana Briones Calleja -- Honorable Mention

Protecting the Flame by Sandi Snow -- Honorable Mention

Soar! by Cheryl Quesnell with Pete Salcido -- Judge's Choice

Pieced, Large

Artichocky by Luz Seidensticker -- 1st Place

Memories by Joyce Hite -- 2nd Place

Starburst by Peggy Marquardt -- 3rd Place

Pieced, Small

Winter Trees by Frieda Anderson -- 1st Place

The Ugly Duckling by Mikyung Jang -- 2nd Place

Coronet by Melissa Tweedel -- 3rd Place

Surface Design

Curious Australian Bird by Barbara McKie -- 1st Place

Deconstructed Homestead by Shirley Hauck -- 2nd Place

American Portraits: Final Harvest by Patricia Kennedy-Zafred -- 3rd Place

Afterglow by Diane Rusin Doran -- Honorable Mention

Well, that's it for the Houston contest quilts. I hope you enjoyed them. There really are some incredible quilts!!

And I hope all of my American friends have a wonderful Thanksgiving!!

Nancy