Spellbinding

A few more pictures in somewhat better light yesterday morning, before this top too disappeared into a moving box...

Now all my projects, supplies and tools are packed away, I feel all antsy. It's a bit strange as I can often go days or weeks without touching any project if I'm too tired or busy or distracted to work on anything, but as long as the option is there, I feel fine. Take away all those options, and I feel a bit uncomfortable. Whilst outside catching a little natural light for a few last pictures before things were packed away, Miss Matilda wanted to snap some too, focusing (or trying to) on the fabric that caught her fancy: the moons with the clouds:

I just liked how she ended up framing the shot, with a chunk of leaves.

Fossil Squared

Over the summer I finally finished my brother's quilt. This was the quilt I'd hoped to finish back in May to take with me when I visited, but sadly it didn't work out that way. I was unhappy with the random straight line quilting I was doing, and had to take all that out. I ended up running out of time to take it out and re-do it.

The pattern is based on How To Be Jenna's Dusty Springfield quilt (which she now sells a pattern for on her site!) I made mine larger and made it 6x7 colored squares rather than 5x6. I wanted to be a nice big quilt for a 6 foot guy to snuggle under, hence sizing up. At this size it'll also be a decent throw across the end of his bed too.

For the back I used a charcoal batik from Joann's with 2 more squares from the Benartex Fossil Fern charm pack. As my brother liked quilts that ran from warm to cool colors, I picked one of each. In the future if I go the route of (Joann's?) batik again, I will likely pre-wash the batik, or not forget the color catchers in the wash. I think it was the batik that bled through a bit and left some staining on the white on the front around the stitching. It wasn't hugely noticeable, but it was a rather devastating find, as I had wanted it to be amazing. The color catchers would likely have really helped. I quilted it with straight lines through the white between the color blocks and the crosses.

Besides the bleeding issues, I'm really happy with how this turned out. When my dad and step mom came to visit from the UK in October they took it back with them and will be giving it to my brother when they see him in December. I hope he loves it as much as we here all did, it was hard to let that one go!

Spellbound

With about 12 minutes to spare, I managed to finish my Spellbound quilt using Tula Pink's Nightshade fabrics to be able to participate in the Sew Sweetness Tula Pink Sew Along!


Things have been a bit chaotic here lately, especially as we're in the process of packing to move to a new apartment this upcoming weekend. The move was fairly short notice, so my plans to finish the Nightshade quilt before Halloween went out of the window. As did our Halloween plans, as Hurricane Sandy hit the area. We were extremely fortunate to miss out on damage and power outages (unlike last Halloween's snow storm), even as towns around us were hit much harder, including my kids' school district just miles down the street. Even as I packed away all my fabric, I left the Nightshade out, just in case I found some time to try and squeak in before the deadline of the sew-along. The pattern is the Spellbound pattern for the Nightshade fabric from Freespirit's website. It's an easy pattern to assemble, and I picked it because I liked the way it showcased the portraits nicely. The pictures aren't what I'd like, but at 11.48pm in a house overflowing with boxes and mess, the staging areas are lacking...





For the backing and binding I have a white-on-black pin/polka dot (Free Spirit Designer Beads) that I'll be using. I saw it used in a Nightshade quilt, I think the Snow Globe pattern, and decided it'd be a good fit. And so, my last quilt top in this house. Kind of strange...

WIP Wednesday #9

I'm feeling pretty good about the progress I made on the weekend with my brother's quilt, which only has the hand-stitching on the binding left. A task that's being accomplished in the evenings whilst watching TV.

Then there was the Flip Side top I finished, which now moves towards another stage of completion. Or, rather, the stack of finished quilt tops that need assembling and quilting. With that one, I have the backing fabric, and won't need to agonize over the choices for a pieced back (Ghastlies quilt, I'm looking at you! And my Lotta Jansdotter Echo quilt for that matter.)

Over the past few days, though, I've been working on a Sparkle Punch (Wonky Stars) quilt. I'd cut 3.5" wide strips of about 81 Lizzy House fabrics back in April, and now came time to convert those strips into squares. 80 pairs of 5 squares for whole stars, and then more squares for the partial stars.

Monday I sliced up some white cotton for the 384 neutral squares I'd need. Then more cutting as most of the patterned squares needed slicing into triangles. Presently I'm sewing the star points. Hopefully by the weekend I can get most of those sewn, trimmed and sewn some more and ready to plan the layout of the entire quilt.

Echo sitting on a project in a more embryonic stage, which will be an adapted Jaybird Quilts' Chopsticks quilt, with Wrenly fabric and Kona solids. This will have to wait a little longer, as I want to clear a few more WIPs off the list, or make some more progress on them first, before I end up with a huge stack of quilt tops and too few finished quilts.

New Little Kitties

As long as I can remember, I've loved Russian Blue cats with their intense graphite color. I remember being a little kid and seeing them in an ad for some cat food, and that was where the love affair began. I'm not alone in loving them, as it happens Jeff does too. Somehow, a while back, a seed was planted to add a Russian Blue to our existing clowder. We weren't really planning on adding one immediately, as the place we're presently living in isn't the largest.

After scouting a variety of Russian Blues in the area, and missing the boat on them too, a lucky find of a petfinder.com listing for a Russian Blue at the local SPCA led us to go have a look. At 2 brothers. As the above picture shows, we didn't just get the one kitten, but both. We just couldn't split up a pair of bonded brothers.

They're super-duper cuddly, in no small part, I imagine, due to the fact that they were rescued and taken to the SPCA when they were about 2 days old and hand-reared. It's been 3 weeks, and they've settled in well with our other 3 cats. I'm also enjoying watching a bonded pair of kittens grow up together. Their interactions are a lot of fun, and it's so cute to find a little sleeping kitten pile every so often.

Echo's the darker and skinnier one. Tesla has a more round face, and gets that Russian Blue smile going quite well.

Too Long!

It's been much too long since I posted. A trip overseas, to visit family in Holland and England, and a bit of a sewing funk too, conspired against me. Or rather, one was a pretty valid reason but covers only a 2 week period, and the other just left me with nothing much to post about and made me feel guilty about being in the funk and not having anything to write about or show off.

My birthday was May 25th. The middle of the 30s, eep! With my dad and stepmum we planned a trip to Europe to coincide with my birthday. A trip just for Jeff and myself. While grandma and grandpa would have loved to see the kiddos, sometimes it's nice to just get away together. Also my dad and stepmum will be visiting in September and will get to see the wee people then.

I had tried very hard to get my Fossil Fern quilt finished for my youngest brother, but I ran out of time. I'd started quilting random straight lines on it, and ended up unhappy with how the couple I'd sewn looked. Rather than keep going and be dissatisfied about the result, and not having enough time to do it the way I wanted to (while also not having settled exactly on what I wanted to do) I just put it aside and told my brother he'd have to wait a little longer. This was as far as I got just before we left:

It's pretty big, about 76" x 65". Not quite a bed sized quilt, but as both my brothers are over 6 feet tall, I wanted to give my youngest brother a good sized quilt for him to be able to snuggle under. You know, manly snuggling...

This weekend has been the first weekend in about 6 weeks that I've had to myself (literally, as Jeff's working in Raleigh NC this weekend), and have been able to sew uninterrupted. The kids' dad was away for several weeks, and so they were here the entire time. The summer seems to have zoomed past... summer day camp has come and gone, and now the start of school is almost here!

Yesterday I completed the quilting on my Fossil Fern quilt, made the binding and sewed that on. It just needs hand stitching on the back and it'll be ready for my dad and stepmum to take back with them for my brother.

Then, after getting that quilt out of the way, I pulled out my Flip Side quilt top, one that had given me a headache last year and that I'd put away. In hindsight the issues weren't so terrible, but at the time it had me so frustrated and annoyed that I really needed a mental break from it. I managed to fix the problems and complete it, so I'm very happy about that!

A quick picture on the couch with less than ideal light, before I headed off to bed. The pattern is by Rachel Griffith, and the fabric is Kate Spain's Central Park.

I'm happy to be out of my funk a bit, and glad to have gotten some overdue projects done. How's everyone else doing?

WIP Wednesday : #8

A continuation from last Wednesday's WIP, it's the Fossil Fern quilt.



This picture is actually from yesterday, as I was assembling the smaller rows into larger blocks. Taken indoors as we've been having rain the past 2 days, and mostly to show my brother how it was going too. I have a little over a week left to finish piecing this and to assemble the quilt sandwich and quilt both this and one for my step mom and my dad. Eek!

I realized this morning that I'd also pieced some of the green squares into the orange row of one block, and had to re-do that earlier. Besides what's visible in the picture, there'll be a row of blue and purple.

Somehow this quilt is also a little larger than I thought it'd turn out to be. The top looks like it'll be barely a bit wider than my queen sized mattress. It's mostly meant to be a good size snuggle-on-the-couch (and also a thanks-for-letting-us-stay-here-you're-an-awesome-brother) quilt for a guy clocking in at a little over 6 feet though, and I think that'll suffice.

Presently it sits in 6 large pieces waiting for me to press seams and assemble more, but it's time to deal with the evening's dinner, being Heidi Swanson's recipe for Baked Farro Risotto, which is made with the whole grain Farro, and a dish which I end up finding very similar to Lasagna both taste wise and the way the grains remind me a little of pasta.