Work in Progress Wednesday - 20 February

Moving forward on a few pieces this week, including: 
Tumbler baby/lap quilt: 

Floral Cascade (icicles? waterfall? stalactites? best description pending): 

First Years squares on the design wall: 

Work In Progress Wednesday - First Years Quilt

 Cutting has begun on another first years quilt. Pattern to be determined, but will likely be a four-patch or nine-patch. Sample fabrics are a delightful mix of baby and toddler prints and patterns. 

Work In Progress Wednesday - Tumbler Quilt

 This is part of a small crib-size quilt, made with die-cut tumber blocks:

These blocks were made using the AccuQuilt Go tumbler block, which comes with the benefit of docked corners. pre-docked corners save time and prevent the dreaded haystack at triangular seams. 

Fussycut Fail - Awkward Pattern Placement

This is the sequel to Rainii's quilt from last year, for her little sister. It contains some of the same fabric prints as big sister's, but a different backing fabric and quilting pattern. As alike as siblings often are, I think it is important for everyone to have something uniquely their own. 

Of course, babby sister also has the makings of guffaws in a classic fussycut fail: 

 My only regret is that I won't be there when big sister finds the fail and collapses in a fit of giggles. 

Orange Creamsicle

 Getting summer vibes from this vibrant citrus orange fabric. 60" square lap/picnic quilt, ideal for a picnic if you're cool with the white back being covered in grass stains. Sometimes my design choices are less than practical. 

Rainii's Quilt

 Rainii's Quilt features flowers, food, and friends! 5" squares are a great way to incorporate scraps, including pieces of garments from friends and relatives. All cotton fabric and needled cotton batting, this will be warm when needed on the bed and soft and comforting as a play mat. 

Double Irish Chain

 Classic and traditional geometric quilt - in two colours with a solid white field. 56"x66", this style and size are a popular gift for going away to college, as it lends itself well to incorporating school colours. 

Flashback Friday - Grand Children's Quilts

 Flashback to these two great quilts. A pair of siblings, their mother saved some of their favourite and most well-worn clothes from their baby and toddler clothes, to commission these full-size quilts for when they started school. 

Mancheseter City Quilt

 This quilt was inspired by a custom request  I made a few years ago, to make a quilt for the child of a Manchester City FC fan, incorporating the team colors. The effect is subtle and I am pleased with how it turned out. Straight-line in-the-ditch quilting yields a nice drape, as well. 

The fabric for the backside is reclaimed from a duvet and shows of the weight of the heavier stitches in the center: 

Heriloom Alterations

 With the blessing of the current owner, some of these blocks will be over-stitched with fancy stitches, in the style of a Victorian Crazy Quilt. There's simply no saving some of these frayed fabrics, and certainly no matching the old clothes they came from. 

Slow Stitching

 It's been a minute since I have had a large finished quilt to share, but that doesn't mean there isn't stitching going on behind the scenes. Right now it's a rather summery-lush, sorbet-hued traditional nine-patch quilt. Quite generous for a child, this will be large enough to follow them easily into toddlerhood.

Quilted Accessories

 This pouch measures only 4.5" across and was quite fiddly, but still enjoyable to make. With a thinner batting layer (quilted with two layers of cotton fabric and needled cotton batting it is quite bulky) I feel like these might become a great way to use up larger scraps and stray zippers. 

Not Quite a Quilt - Hexie Mini Bowl

 Orphan Blocks - whether they are samples that didn't work out or leftovers, almost every quilter ends a project with one or more leftover blocks. At a certain point you decide there's no more drinks coasters or potholders a person needs in their life . . whether a 2" fabric bowl is the right solution is still to be determined. 

Curved Piecing - as hard as it looks!

This may be an hour of my life but, more importantly, it is validation that curved piecing is a skill, a talent, and possibly an act of magic

Table Setting for Two - Steampunk Adjacent

 This gift set didn't come together quite as quickly as I would have liked, but the end result was worth it to me. The coasters are 5" finished hexagons, one of which includes two internal borders. 

The centerpiece mat is a traditional block, featuring full squares and half-square triangle blocks. Do the math on your HSTs and stitch and cut in pairs, don't play with that bias edge if you can help it. 

And you guessed it, it was the bias edge on that bordered hexie that took the near side of forever. 

Quilted as stitch-in-the ditch to maintain structure and prevent bunching in the wash. It's a tea set, it's going to get drips and crumbs and (hopefully!) need to be washed often. 

Not Quite a Quilt

Between projects, but still couldn't resist sewing a few layers together. The butterfly needs some support between the layers to hold the wings up, but it was still a successful use of an afternoon.  

bookshelf - The Smell of Other People's Houses

I will freely admit I was taken in by the title of this book.  I grew up associating the smell of people with their houses - stale cooking fat, concentrated pine-scented solvent, the stale dust of closed-in homes, the faint goldenrod of open windows.

The title may have pulled me in, but it's the characters that kept me there.  To borrow a sentiment from  Miss Buncle's Book, these characters are 'real live people.'  They are deftly drawn, open and honest in all their value and flaws.  There's not a gross caricature in the lot, no wicked villain or heavenly angel, yet each character is compelling.  There's no major external conflict, either, yet the story never crosses the fine line between meandering reflection of life into boredom.

Set in Alaska in 1970, with a quick flashback to the statehood conflict a decade before (which could be the dystopian external conflict that started it all) the main conflicts are the common everyday anger, violence, and despair that afflict people everywhere.

There's love, loss, disappointment, betrayal, hope, fear, and despair; rage, anguish, and misdirected self-sacrifice; inability, or unwillingness to communicate; greed, poverty, and hopelessness.  Lessons are spoken, unspoken, or simply illustrated with the smooth hand of a narrator telling a tale with no judgment.  The reader is left with a journey of broken lives stitched together with a waxed thread of coincidence, tenacity, and good luck, even if they don't see themselves as lucky at the time.

TBT - Texture!

Throwback Thursday!  Heavy texture keeps quilts from being as warm, but makes them so much more delightful to pet!  From the way-back machine, a close-up of a baby quilt that I wanted to keep for myself. 

National Readathon Day - 21 May 2016

National Readathon Day is coming again, which means it's time to bookstagram your edited-for-tidiness book nook, complete with elegantly draped vintage pashmina and perfeclty poised cuppa . . .

Or you could use it as an excuse to blow off your chores and lounge around reading all day, or browsing bookshops all day, or hitting the 'big' library and shutting it down.

In the spirit of encouraging your latest forage efforts, be they second-hand or library based, my favourite marathon reads (in no particular order):

via

Waiting for Godot  - - All I learned about life I learned from Estragon.  That's a painful oversimplification, but Gogo is everything I aspire to be in life - as a friend, as an unobtrusive member of society, as someone with the simple kind of life where you don't need to know what day it is, ever.  You are never too old or too young for Samuel Beckett - frankly the younger the better, although I will concede that at certain ages you may not want to have to explain to your young what crablice are . . .
This takes only a few hours to perform, and so, only a few hours to read - read it aloud with a few friends and gain a whole new insight into who you all are.

via 

A Christmas Carol  - bear with me, I know it's May, but remember the full title is A Christmas Carol: Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, and nothing is more appropriate for late summer evenings by a campfire than a ghost story.  It only takes a few hours to read aloud, making it eminently suitable for a readathon, and the words - dialogue and description alike - are worthy of being spoken aloud.  And that cover?  Old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig, who "was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term."  A cleverly crafted scene, jovial warehouse camaraderie in stark contrast to the office he left that day, loving couple in contrast to the split he is about to relive.  This book makes an excellent marathon read at a party, with different guests taking a chapter a piece, all the better if you hot chestnut or smoking bishop to lubricate the social gears.

via

The official mantra of my life is that you should recycle and be nice to people.  Perhaps I read Dr. Seuss' favourite propaganda piece, The Lorax, one time too many as a callow yute, but it still resonates and makes my heart sing, weep, and hope.  It takes no time at all to read this, and so is perhaps not entirely perfect for a readathon, but if you are sharing many books with young readers, please consider including this in your day.  These are words we can't hear ourselves say enough.

Mental Health Awareness Month - Knitting

I think we can all agree that the Craft Yarn Council may be a little biased towards anything that encourages the consumption of yarn, but in this article from the NY Times we see both a first person experience and supportive research about the value of knitting for mental health.

Paul Rogers via

The short notes that any knitter can attest to are -
 - knitting helps improve focus; paradoxically it improves focus on both the project and outside forces.  Any student who doodles can attest that often the practice of letting your hands work, frees your mind to focus on the lecture, in the same way knitting can make a movie, a TED talk or a conversation with friends more memorable
- knitting, at least when you finish a project, boosts self-esteem.  The act of creating something that wasn't there before is both incredibly fulfilling and life-affirming

Whether you are looking to distract yourself from crippling social anxiety or improve your memory and mental acuity, seek out a local shop, grab a beginner's kit, or checkout a YouTube tutorial and break out the sentimental needles and yarn you inherited and get to knitting and purling!