Holidays Are Over

 Hi all -

The holidays are over and winter is starting to set in. I hope everyone had a great holiday season! I had a wonderful time visiting family, including the new great niece. She's beautiful and such a content baby! It was warm and rainy in Kansas City while I was there and we had perfect weather for the drive home. I'm sure glad we missed the current storm! Now we're back home and getting back into the normal swing of things.

Even with the holiday, I've been fairly productive. Before I left, I finished my first Posy Pocket Handbag.

Posy Pocket Handbag

I did a bit of stumbling while making this bag. I mentioned last time that this was a kit that I purchased from our quilting guild's online auction. The kit was donated by the estate of a crafter and it included the fabric, except for the stitchery background, and the pattern. There were supplies for two bags, so both of the bags pictured on the pattern can be made (they are the same bag, with just a different stitchery on the front pocket). My first confusion was with the fabric choices. I could easily see which fabrics went together for each bag, but there were three fabrics in the kit for each bag and the pattern calls for two fabrics. For each bag, there was more of two of the fabrics than there was of the third. In the bag above, there were large pieces of the light and dark melon and a smaller piece of the dark green. The bag would be boring without the dark green, but there wasn't enough of the dark green to just use it as the contrast color so I had to figure out which fabrics I wanted to use for each pattern piece. 

Posy Pocket Handbag - Side View

I also didn't like some parts of the pattern construction. For example, the pattern has you sew the front pocket on by hand after finishing the bag. That seemed tedious to me and less stable than sewing the pocket on by machine, so I sewed the pocket on the front by machine during the assembly process. The biggest change I made was the closure. The pattern has a string closure that you tie in a bow. That didn't appeal to me so I changed it to a snap closure. I had to do some finagling to get this to work since the inside pockets were too high up and interfered with the snap.

Posy Pocket Handbag - Inside

I like how this bag turned out, but there are still some other changes I plan to make in my next one. First, I'll plan for the snap ahead of time and move the pocket down further. I'll also sew a line of stitching down the center of the big side pockets to make them more useful (they tend to flop to the middle of the bag as is) and sew another line of stitching at the bottom of the pocket, where the side of the bag folds under to the bottom. (The inside pockets currently open all the way down to the center seam in the bottom of the bag.) This will make the pockets flop less and will keep the contents from sliding down into the bottom of the bag. If there's enough of the contrast fabric, I'll also put a strip of contrast fabric at the top of the bag inside so the contrast strip along the top of the bag will match the other contrast strips on the outside of the bag. I might also change the contrast fabric used for the inside of the handle, but I still have to think about that one.

I've also made some progress on my circles quilt. I got five more circle blocks completed:

Circles Quilt

With the four blocks I made in class, I now have nine blocks completed for the quilt. These blocks are 14" unfinished, so I think I'll make a total of 30 blocks to make a good size lap quilt. I'm excited about this quilt because I already know how I want to quilt it. Using thread that matches the solid color, I plan to first stitch in the ditch between the blocks and around the circles. Then I'll stitch straight lines from corner to corner in each block and echo those lines in the triangles that are created, skipping over the solid circles. Finally, I'll use bright perl cotton to do big stitching in the centers of the solid circles. In my head, this looks pretty cool! (There's no telling how it will look in real life.... 😉)

I've also been doing some knitting. I took my Mimizan Hat project, designed by Tess Young, with me to Kansas City and did a little bit of knitting on it there, but just got a few repeats of the body finished there.  But I was able to finish the hat after I got home:

Mimizan Hat

I really love how this turned out and am definitely keeping it for myself! Although the knitting was fairly easy, I'd probably rate this pattern as intermediate because you have to do some more complex maneuvering of the yarn on some of the rounds. And there is one decrease round at the top of the hat that took me a while to figure out. But the final effect is stunning, IMHO.

I've also continued to make progress on my Stitchscape Shawl designed by Malia Mae Joseph:

Stitchscape Shawl

The shawl continues to grow and it's up to about 675 stitches per row, so each row is now taking about an hour to knit. So it was a real bummer when I knit a fairly complicated row the day before I drove to KC and when I got to the end of the row I realized that I was off by one stitch. Looking at the stitches, I had made a mistake at the beginning of the row and I would have to take out all of that stitching. I put the shawl aside until I got back from KC! When I got back, I spent a couple of hours removing those stitches and another hour reknitting the row and now, I'm happy to say, I'm back on track and making progress again!

Stitchscape Shawl - Close-up

I just have one more row to knit to finish this section, then one more section of the yellow and I'll be finished with this shawl.

I also started a new knitting project. Laura Nelkin is having her annual first quarter knit-along (KAL) for finishing up her projects and I have a bunch of her projects lying around! Because of the clubs I'm in, I get six new small project kits and three large project kits each year. I love the projects, but have trouble finding the time to make them! So I decided to start this KAL with the Cuentas Scarf:

Cuentas Scarf

This is a cute little scarf with beads (I'm just to the first beaded row) that will be perfect for cool days. It's been a lot of fun to knit so far!

Finally, I'm getting ready for a quilting retreat next weekend. One of my guilds has a mountain retreat that runs from Friday afternoon to Monday afternoon. These retreats are always a lot of fun! We sew together in a large room with a large window looking out at Mt. Meeker, which is a beautiful mountain peak that is just under 14,000 ft. The retreat center supplies the food so we can concentrate on sewing and community. I've gathered more projects than I can possible finish in a weekend (because it would be a bummer to run out of things to do!). I'll be bringing mostly machine sewing projects, but I also prepared the embroidery background for my second Posy Pocket Handbag:

Posy Pocket Handbag - Embroidery Background

This will give me something that I can work on while sitting on the couch when my back gets sore from the chairs at the retreat. I'll also bring my English Paper Pieced hexagon quilt so I have choices in my handwork, too. I hope to have a very productive weekend!

Nancy