glittergoods

I think these might be the exact same colors I used in the auction project last year

Thank you for all the terrific comments about the wedding quilt.  It's pretty amazing to put so much of myself into a project & then bring out the pictures to show to people who get it.  I particularly appreciate those of you who said you understood the fear of starting the quilting process.  I don't think I mentioned yesterday, I had to call my mother AND my husband for a couple solid rounds of stream-of-consciousness nervous chatter before I could actually start cramming the quilt through my machine.

To answer a common question:  the loopy quilting pattern is something I do freehand, not a machine stitch setting.  I started working with it on my quilted pillows a few months ago, & this was the first time I tried doing it on a large scale.  Despite the difficulties I had managing the bulk of the quilt while working my way across each row of loops, I felt very comfortable with the loop pattern itself -- probably because I had done a whole lot of quilt sandwiches (about 15"x15" so I don't have to wrangle material but have room to build up some movement, & I use that cheapo cotton solid from JoAnn so I can get a good look at what my stitches are doing) & over 25 pillow covers before I moved up to the big leagues.  Seriously, practice, practice, practice.  Also, practice.  I love that quilt, & complaining aside, am pretty satisfied with how the quilting went, but I came away from it wanting to practice more.

To answer Erin's question:

These are quilting gloves.  This particular pair is Fons & Porter, & they were very comfortable to use, even though the long-fingered among us should probably size up.  They're cotton, with little grippy rubber dots on the palms, & they were a huge help with moving the quilt around, though I don't think I'd bother on smaller pieces.

What's that those handy gloves are sitting on, you say?  Why, it's my little black quilting notebook, containing the beginnings of my next project:

School auction season & I are staring down the long lonely stretch of road at each other, revving our engines.

the wedding quilt post

Once upon a time, in the middle of planning for my sister's wedding, I decided that, much as the happy couple would probably like a new stockpot or etc, for their wedding present, instead I would make them a quilt.  In their wedding colors.  Sprinkled with little drawings I'd done for their wedding invitations.  So that they would never ever forget how hard I worked on their wedding that magical day.

(A less egomaniacal version of events is that there I was, gazing lovingly at the kona cotton wall in the local fabric store for no particular reason when I suddenly realized that those particular bolts of Kaufman "berry" & "sage" were perfect matches to Paper Source's "beet" & "pool," & what would it hurt to buy a few yards each, as if enough to make yet another version of A Day at the Beach?)

The plan, as it came together, was a big field of berry over a big field of sage, divided by a wonky-angled pieced stripe made up primarily of chartruese (the third wedding color), ivory, & black (my sister's wedding dress was this incredible ivory lace thing with a black ribbon sash), backed by wide stripes of grey & my favorite Amy Butler floral.

I was going to send it out to be quilted, but I didn't feel like I was finding a quilter love match, style & schedule-wise, so I just kept putting off the decision, & you see where this is going, don't you?

Meanwhile, I was learning how to do loopy quilting, & also letting the clock tick down until the endless & paralyzing recursive loop of "I kind of want to do it but it's too scary & I don't want to mess up the wedding quilt but I want loops on it but I should just send it out to someone else but I don't want stippled tiny ducklings but I'm running out of time but I want to do it" turned into me finally taking a good look at the calendar, shutting up, buying a pair of quilting gloves, & jumping in.

It was still terrifying.  Largely, I think, because the machine I was working on didn't have much in the way of throat space, & so there was a lot of quilt management that had to happen all the time.  Plus, turning it around to fit the other half in the machine?  Hello, backwards quilting.

But, oh, look how it turned out.  I didn't know -- as a little postscript to this quilt's reign of terror, I realized that I didn't know as I was putting the finished quilt in the washing machine -- how the loops would look post-washing on a large scale, but I think it turns out that they look pretty excellent.  I used an organic cotton batt, so got a nice amount of vintagey shrinkage, & the whole thing is squashy & inviting.

The screenprinted bits blend in nicely now, too.  I did their names + date, the cupcake, the paper airplane from their response card (a two color print, black & silver), & the ferry boat.*

I'm so pleased with it.  It's the...quiltiest quilt I've made yet, & I love most everything about it (except for some certain small parts of the quilting, you know who you are).  May it keep you guys warm for many years to come, sis.

*More pictures of details in my flickr set of the quilt.

December in the rear-view mirror

Wow, a low-grade, all-encompassing seasonal illness plus the secret + scary quilting of a very important project plus the usual holiday mayhem sure takes the will to blog right out of a girl.  Looking back over my shoulder, it doesn't seem like it was SO bad, which is probably the same sort of naturally-occurring blind spot that results in second children.

I made cookies:

{Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies from Martha.  So, so good.}

We made cookies:

{Thumbs up to Perfect Vegan Sugar Cookies, which are indeed quite perfect, definitely the best of the vegan recipes I've tried.  Thumbs, sadly, down to those cute little squeezy bottles I got for easy & fun cookie decorating with the kids.  There's a reason that pastry bags are tried & true, & that reason, my friends, is air bubbles.  I think I'm going to look into one of those icing caulk gun situations for next year.}

I finished the house pillow:

{For my father, who is a collector of house-shaped things, & I have only not capitalized "collector" because there are no caps LARGE ENOUGH to describe how much of a collector he is, so the pillow was well-received.  I made the house up as I went along, with about a 50% success rate in my attempt to be intuitive about necessary seam allowance additions, but in the end it turned out more or less as I'd planned.  I have some things to learn about piecing triangles, though.}

I also finished, on December 23, the wedding quilt for my sister & brother-in-law, then spent all day December 24 in mild fits about whether it was going to 1. survive the wash, 2. emerge from the wash without any remaining chalk lines, & 3. be dry in time for Christmas presentation.

{The answer is yes on all three counts, I am very proud of myself (also:  phew), but no finished project pictures here because I think I am going to give it a whole post of its own.}

The kids put together an ode to Santa, poster-style (complete with short song at the bottom):

{And Santa did not disappoint.}

Yeah, it wasn't SO bad. 

I'm hoping to whip out a couple pairs of New Year's pajama pants before bedtime tomorrow night, but a certain almost-seven someone who had plenty of time to cool his heels & ogle the wares at craft shows this month has some sort of stuffed monster animal project in mind for tomorrow, so we'll see what gets done.  Either way sounds like a pretty good way to spend tomorrow.  2007 is all but done!  Bring it on, 2008!

and now back to our regular obsessive progamming

It feels like fall around here these days, which means a variety of things, like leaf mold & the first worthwhile apples of the season; don't mess with my delicately orchestrated tivo setup, dear husband, & I'd better hurry up & find a winter coat for the girl, & wait, HOW soon do shows start?  It's got me thinking -- unusually for me -- about warm colors & I even bought a little bit of orange fabric.  Orange is consistently one of those colors that I can truly, deeply admire when I see it on or around other people, & I have a lot of respect for the particular quality of its...orangeness, I guess, but I always have to kind force myself to use it.  So I'm starting with red instead.

It suddenly struck me, late yesterday afternoon, that I'd really like to try quilting this one with red thread, only my husband wasn't going to be back from his business trip until after the fabric stores closed & I didn't feel like dragging the princess & the soccer hooligan out on a thread quest, but then, lo!  Turns out that way in the back of the drawer where I keep my quilting thread was a big spool of red thread purchased for no specific project that I can think of, which just goes to show that sometimes you really DO need to buy random supplies because they're pretty just in case.

I like the way the red thread adds another tonal layer to the front, but I really especially like the way the back of this one looks.  I'm having a little bit of a conceptual moment about colored quilting thread right now.  Up until this point, I had considered myself to be completely devoted, no muss-no fuss, to the school of "natural-colored" cotton quilting thread, but I like the red enough that this afternoon I went & bought a handful of other colors. Including orange.  Just in case.

return of procrasti-pillow

Shockingly, the second loopy pillow did not follow my failed-sophomore-effort rule, though this is perhaps because there was enough failed effort involved in the first go-round. I even managed to make the cover a little bigger, though am told by certain significant others that they are still too stuffed. (I don't know what happens, I swear, I cut them out the right size & then the ease just melts away. It's like magic, ruinous, irritating, sewing magic.) Better overstuffed than flabby, I say!

Thank you for all the wonderful comments about my free motion quilting. I'm finding it both easier & harder than I imagined, which is to say that I quickly learned that the whole effort has a lot to do with a relaxed but controlled touch, which is easier said than done. It actually reminds me of spinning, especially the incredibly tense hands & forearms of the novice part. Ow, a little bit. But it's addictive, plus more forgiving than the straight-line quilting I'd been doing on the pillows, so I'm hoping that the more I try it, the more natural it will feel.

Good thing I'm already planning my next one.

procrasti-pillow

Snaps & I continue to get along so well that my productivity claim of yesterday is actually just about true.  I can't say that I am necessarily working on things in order of importance, but sometimes just getting back into the making groove is the most important thing, I tell myself  (though now I have the Pro-crast-tin-a-ting song in my head, probably because my daughter loves that Audrarox album more than I love snaps & so we listen to it all the time lately.  Unless you have your own small child, all the time probably doesn't have quite the depth of meaning to you that I intend, except for those people who, like me, spent their formative years doing things like filling up extra space at the end of mix tapes with Bizarre Love Triangle over & over & over &, yes, over.  (If my husband reads this entry, he will be all "right, USED TO.")).

The other thing, besides snaps I mean, that I wish I had enough time to be inspired by right now, is the amazing Last-Minute Patchwork book that everyone is talking about.   I have only had the chance to flip through it a couple of times, but the book is so beautifully put together (&, really, did we doubt?  Also, holy moly, check out the new fabric line.) that even just a quick picture skim is enough to send me off in a million different directions.  I'm very taken with her version of the stacked coin quilt, & while there shouldn't really be are definitely not any quilts on my horizon until after the holidays (& all of the other Imaginary Quilts are yelling take a number! at it anyway), I can totally justify making a stacked coin pillow or two.

Though are they still stacked if I run the strip this way?  I don't feel that they're all that coin-esque, either, which is fine because this pillow ultimately ended up being less about the stacked coins & more about me deciding that last night was the night to learn free motion quilting (where "learn" means "figure out how to do this one specific thing I have in mind, never mind the fundamental techniques or etc").  The idea of doing this kind of freehand loopy quilting over an entire quilt is pretty daunting (for now), but it's a lot of fun at pillow scale. (And, yes, this one has snaps on the back too.  Did you doubt?)

I do love that elephant fabric, don't I?

I've been having an unusually busy meeting schedule lately -- event planning, new design projects, fun stuff all around -- & in a domino-effect kind of way, all of this bustling talking activity is spilling over into some actual productivity around here, hallelujah.

It's actually a complete cheat for me to put this picture up under a comment about my productivity, because I pieced & quilted the pillow top about a month ago, then just sat around & looked at it in mild annoyance as I tried to decide how to manage the back. I like my pillows a bit overstuffed (this one is a little more crammed than I'd consider ideal, but I've discovered that these particular inserts do smash down some with use, so maybe I'll just stack a few books or one of the kids on it for a while), & the whole ribbon tie situation wasn't keeping things as neatly tucked in as I wanted.

I had a brief flirtation with a lapped zipper that ended in -- not tragedy, exactly, but if that zipper had been a date I would have talked to him a couple of times afterwards in a half-hearted way about going out again & then started deleting his voicemails unheard, & maybe we'd give it another try sometime down the road when our timing was better, but in the meantime I'm going out with his really cute & stylish friend from down the block, snaps.

it's like a log cabin planned community

Today I'd like to go back in time, if I may, to the end of the school year when I suddenly realized that kindergarten "graduation" meant a reason to give our beloved kindergarten teacher a gift, which meant a reason to put my sister's wedding other projects aside for a minute & have a little fun whip something up.*

I settled on a pillow.  Then I decided no way, I have heard too many stories from teachers about having to contend with unwanted end of the year gifts.  Then I decided that my pillow would be WAY TOO AWESOME to cause anyone stress, even though it would be too big to toss in the junk drawer if she didn't like it.  And so on, back & forth, until I decided that I would just DO IT, except not tell my husband until after the pillow was finished, in case he tried to talk me out of it (I can't really explain this; he is not against my work or anything,  I just had this irrational certainty that he would come down firmly on the side of a tidy little Barnes & Noble gift card or similar instead of big invasive decor object).

Plus, I just really wanted to make another pillow.

This is the third pillow I've made using the same group of fabrics.  I like that they're, loosely, a series, I like that I'm doing some stash-management as I go along, & I have also come to really enjoy the challenge of making each one unique.

I cheated a little on the "unique" front this time, though, by adding some fabric screenprinted with my son's response to me saying draw me something about school.  Art time (two kids at desks), school fun (two kids holding hands).

This is my favorite, the tiny repeating kids holding hands.

I did vertical line quilting (width of the presser foot, ta-da straight lines) everywhere except that sky blue square at top left, where my son embroidered the red star.

This is my favorite of the three, & I'm not just saying that because my kid's art is on it (though it was pretty excellent, watching him be so proud of his work on a "real" sewing project).  I might be saying it because of the polka dot ties, though.

*Honestly, I loved designing for my sister's wedding, & am planning on talking endlessly about the details sometime soon.  But, well, wedding planning, you know?

you can't even see the holes in the picture

Ha, thanks for all of the sewing genius indulgence.  That was a little joke with myself, since I am so very much not an intuitive seamstress.  I've definitely come a long way over the past year, though, & I happen to have the sort of temperament that is 1. usually willing to give it a whirl to see if it works & 2. then (usually) willing to take it apart & do it over again when, inevitably, it doesn't work, so it's very satisfying to see that my doggedness has started to pay off.

Really what I need to be doing is getting back to the glitter, especially since I am now officially on board to be a vendor at at the Baz Biz section of Maker Faire at the end of May.  After our disastrous work/play family trip in December, we decided that I'd only apply to one show requiring plane tickets this year, & MF easily won out because of the relative closeness + high geek factor (have to keep the help my husband happy).  It was a good time last year, & I'm curious to see how the venue changes they're making this year (last year was a separate outdoor section with tents, this year is inside in the middle of things, with tables) affect things.  So, anyway, it's glitter time, only my computer decided to reboot itself & thereby lose a bunch of work I was doing, including a many-layered Photoshop file, & after I stopped cursing my computer & my own habit of living dangerously, backup-wise, I decided that I'd drown my sorrows in finishing that second log cabin pillow that has been languishing lo these many months.

You may recall that this is the second of two similar pillows (challenge being to use same group of fabrics in a different way) & was supposed to be donated to the second of the two school auctions we were involved in this year.  I was having a horrible time keeping my quilting lines straight on this one, though, & so I put off finishing it until the night before the donation deadline, at which time I promptly used my seamripper to put a hole in that red fabric up at the top there.  I stuck it shut with some wonder under, but it wasn't really auction-quality any longer, plus the quilting was still making me crazy, so I put it aside, again (& made up for it by bidding a little more enthusiastically at the auction than I'd planned. We ended up with an excellent garden consultation package that is happening this coming Tuesday & which will hopefully help me redesign the way-too-suburban landscaping plan we had drawn up last fall, so clearly the seamripper was guided by fate).

I like this pillow a lot (which is good, since various holes & wonky bits means it's never leaving the house), but I think it suffered some from the Round 2 Curse that I often run into with my projects, where the second try is never as easy or excellent as the first & much worse than the third, & I'm pretty sure it was the curse that led me to believe that stretch corduroy would be a fine choice for the back, no problem!  I love my stenciled twill tape ties, though (a zipper would be sleeker, but that tape makes wonderful little bows), & I also like how fat this pillow is (the cover is 18" square on a 20" pillow form).

Other pillows I've liked lately:  Blair's, on gorgeous new couch; this & this from Tree Fall; Dioramarama's Gee's Bend inspired one.  We used to have a lot of pillows on our couch, but time + toddlers have done away with most of them.  Perhaps it's time for a pillow renaissance!

 

signs of spring

While uploading this entry's pictures to my flickr I realized how springy they all are as a group; I mean, obviously, the cherry tree

(This is a lovely, sturdy, arching cherry (under grey March skies) in our backyard.  For about one week every year the blossoms form a perfect canopy of palest pink translucent fluff, & it's enough to make me not mind so much that we don't have room in our yard for my all-time favorite spring tree, the tulip magnolia.)

& the grape hyacinth

(This border has naturalized from about 20 bulbs planted 4 or 5 years ago.  I would grow a whole field of these if I could.  I'm especially pleased to see that some of my paler blue ones are starting to peek out between the tulip leaves.  We have big plans to redo our (tiny) front yard this year, replacing the near-tragic grass with a path + planting beds, but I'm feeling pretty nervous about disturbing my perfect muscari border in process.)

are plenty springy, being spring flowers etc, but it wasn't until this morning that I realized how obvious it is that I'm ready for the season change.  Granted, two of my three current projects are for my daughter, who is nothing if not pink so there's a built-in excuse for it, but oh how I'm enjoying being up to my elbows in bright girly florals.

I finished piecing this last night, & the first thing I noticed about it this morning is a mistake that I am going to try to ignore (I have been reading the blogs about doll quilts being slapdash by nature!  I listened to the podcast!) but between you & me, it's inevitable that I am totally going to end up picking apart a bunch of tiny seams before the end of the day.   It's particularly frustrating because I'd figured out what I thought was a reasonable compromise between obvious repeat (easy) & no repeat (hard) & was feeling pretty pleased with myself about it.  Until this morning.  Anyway, my ridiculous perfectionism aside, this is going to be part of a doll bed/bedding set for my daughter's birthday present, & I am having a fantastic time with the project. 

The doll blanket was not part of the original bed extravaganza, but what better excuse to get with the grannying?

At first I thought I'd make a whole bunch of tiny squares, but then, thanks to Alicia & an untouched ball of aqua cotton in my stash, I decided to go for a nice soothing border around all that pink.  I have some edging plans that I'm excited about, but first I have to decide how big to make the thing.  The squares are blocked to 3.5", so I'll probably do one more row of three & then get on to the fun stuff (like weaving in the ends, whee).  I like that this little project is giving me a sense of what it means to crochet a thing (the structure of the stitches hasn't quite snapped into focus for me yet, but I am sticking my hook into the yarn mess a little less randomly these days), but I wouldn't say I'm a crochet convert.  Yet.

Third project:

I love the way these colors are coming together, so crisp & light even with all the black.  Also, I'm already investigating the idea of sending this one out to be quilted by someone else, & I'm finding that just the thought of not having to carefully cram it through my machine is making me feel light & springy too.