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

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