Seeing purple

Chris Lynn Kirsch, author of Replique Quilts gave a workshop at our guild. Alas, I was out of town (well, don't be too sorry for me -- I was on vacation in British Columbia). But the chair of the Project Linus committee talked to her about making some of her cute quilts for Linus. She gave us permission to work on one of her cuddle and learn quilts (to be published in a forthcoming book, possibly with photos of the quilts we make!). Here's the purple block I made for a quilt that will have lots of color names. It looks like applique, but uses her technique instead. You'll have to get the details from her book, but basically you stitch from a pattern on the back of the block through two layers, then cut away some fabric and satin stitch around the edge. Fun!

Sock it to me!

A present! For ME! Yay! It's a beautiful sock that Jocelyn knit with self-striping yarn. I love the colors and it fits perfectly. I was afraid that hand knit socks would not be comfortable, but in fact this felt wonderful on my foot. I have been promised that sock number 2 will be forthcoming after Joss's very long plane rides to and from India. I can't wait!

Fun Fabric

Such fun colors! Wonder what these are for?
You'll have to wait and see...

Jocelyn's minkee blanket

Soft indeed! Jocelyn was just home for a visit, ostensibly to see her parents but I think it was really just to check out her minkee blanket. Definitely soft!


And apparently also good for hiding.












But not quite big enough to cover disrespect!

Christmas minkee quilt

Most of the quilts I make are not for me, often for readers of my blog. So how do I post my activities when I want them to be a surprise? At least this quilt is meant to be enjoyed during the holiday season, so I sent it early and now I can put it on my blog!


Jay's Christmas quilt - The Story: A couple months ago I went to an estate sale. It was my first one ever! The quilt guild sent a notice that the homeowners, one of whom was a quilter, were moving into a retirement home and were getting rid of quilting items. I went to see if there was any fabric for Project Linus, and indeed there was -- I bought 3 boxes of fabric for a total of $12! Some had to be discarded and a couple things were not appropriate for Linus, but the rest was a real boon. The holiday panel was in the box and we don't do Linus holiday quilts, so I pulled it out to use. I thought it would be good to practice my quilting on a big panel. And it would be nice to have a holiday quilt. Then I thought it would be a nice holiday quilt for my mother, who likes holiday decorations but doesn't have a lot of space. A quilt over a chair would be festive without taking up table or shelf space, and could be easily stored in the closet. So I decided to use it as a gift for her, probably lined with flannel to make it warm and cozy.

Then I discovered minkee! It's wonderously soft and cuddly (see my previous posts) and washes like a dream. Alas, I had no red minkee and was regretting it, when a new quilt shop in Mahomet opened and they carry lots of minkee. So I bought red for the panel. I didn't have the panel measurements with me so I guesstimated how much I would need and added extra for insurance -- and ended up with only 1/2" more than I needed! I pinned it to the panel with safety pins, lots of them, then quilted the printed red sashing with wavy free motion lines. Finally I put on a binding made of holiday cotton print, and that was it! It was fun and fast.

Here is a closeup of the pictures on the panel. They are holiday scenes in subtle tones -- but don't worry, I compensated for the subtlety with the red backing! Merry Christmas!

Let's see if this works

I'd like to add a photo and the url to grab mine from gmail is too long for blogger's taste, so I'm posting it here and will grab it.

Minkee!

I had heard of minkee, and when I finally felt it, it was beyond what I had imagined. Soft -- so soft! -- that you just want to keep touching it. I had also heard it was hard to stitch, so I hesitated to buy any.

But when I saw the fabulous blankets my nieces' Aunt Barb made for their new babies, I just had to try it. (Here's a photo of the one she made for Andrew.) Only one place in town carries Minkee, and they had a limited selection, but I bought some to make a small blanket for a newborn daughter of one of Brian's colleagues. Not hard to do! And quick.

Here's what I learned:
(I like this feature on Jocelyn's blog, so I'm doing it, too.)

1. Buy a lint roller and keep a vacuum or two handy when you work with minkee. There is amazing fuzz everywhere! Did I say everywhere? I meant EVERYWHERE!

2. Minkee is a cheap high. I don't care how bad you feel, working with that amazingly soft fabric makes you feel better. It does slip and slide, but somehow it just didn't bother me, because I was trying to hold that cushy-soft minkee in place.

3. Minkee is almost as good as bubblewrap. It doesn't have that satisfying sound, but button pushers and bubblewrap poppers (Val, are you listening?) will love the dotted minkee. Those little dots can be pushed down and popped up forever. You can get a closer look at the bubble dots in the photo to the left (they look a lot like what are called popcorn stitches in knitting).

Happy Challah-day and A Mystery Solved

L'shana tovah! (Or "happy new year" for those of you who don't speak Hebrew -- of course, I don't speak Hebrew either, but I know a phrase or two.) Today is Rosh Hoshannah, the Jewish New Year, which is celebrated by eating apples dipped in honey to ensure a sweet new year. A circular, raisin-studded challah flavored with honey and spices usually is on the table, too. The challah must be covered and blessed before it is eaten. And that's what the mystery block of a few posts ago has become -- a challah cover:



After Val described a meal she had at Jocelyn's, marvelous in most ways but pitiful in that they resorted to using a paper towel to cover the challah, I knew I had to get busy and make something a little more elegant. I found the pattern in Q is for Quilt by Diana McClun and Laura Nownes. It's a block from a larger quilt. The blocks are made in such a clever way -- each basic block (as in the mystery block) is cut in half diagonally to make the basket, then setting triangles are added and a plain rectangle is stitched to the top. The apples are appliqued.

I completely loved the machine quilting in the book, but of course, I have no skills in that area. But what the heck -- a challah cover is small and each block makes two, so if I totally blew it ... But it came out pretty well! I added the bee to symbolize the honey. I wrote apples and honey in one of the v's of the basket, but it doesn't really show up. (To make the rest of the quilting easier to see, click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Val, I sent this one to Jocelyn (care of Laurel, since Jocelyn currently has no address -- though she will soon! -- and Jocelyn got to play a little with Julia and Andrew as a bonus when she picked up the cover), but yours is underway!

Teatime

Happy Mother's Day to me! Val made that very cute tea caddy you can see among all those tea boxes. It's a Mother's Day gift that just got finished. I love it! I'll put several different tea bags in it and keep it in my purse. I wish I had had it this past week in Denver. The hotel I stayed in had only Earl Grey tea in the room, one of the few teas I just don't like. Rather an odd choice for a hotel, but I suspect that they used to have several varieties and this is just what was left. I don't think very many people are that fond of Earl Grey (nothing against the Earl himself, please, but the tea...).

'Tis a mystery!

Ah, yes, a nice boring square- in-a-square block. What's mysterious about that? It won't stay that way! I can't tell you more than that (it would spoil the surprise), but I will post the finished product. I promise. It's already getting close.

Not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4!

In this block for my Press for Success class, we had four centers to snip the threads in the seam and swirl around -- plus a fifth intersection where we simply snipped the seam to let the fabric fall in opposite directions. Pretty amazing. (Click on the photo to see the block in greater detail.) This block is called Shoo Fly, a new one for me. Again, my fabric choice obscures the design. I'm starting to regret that I chose such a big print. I knew it would be weird, but I wish I had kept the lines of the stitching cleaner.

Beautiful beyond words

Oh, I see, I think you think I think this block is beautiful. Well, I like it, but don't really want to waste my bragging rights on this. What I am referring to is the BACK of the block. While I did the stitching myself, the beauty is all from the wonderful method I learned in my Press for Success class. I can't believe how amazingly flat this block is. Right now it is next to my computer and I am patting it from time to time just because I can't believe it's real or that I had any part in its construction. Click on the photo to enlarge it if you want a better look at the way the block is put together.

Kudos for Myrna!

Here's my finished center block for Myrna Giesbrecht's Press for Success class at Quilt University. It went together so easily. I love putting blocks together this way! And check out the back:







What I really love about this (besides the flatness of the block) is that the blocks will join easily with butted seams. Take a look at the photo of the back. To join blocks, turn one a quarter turn and see how the seams butt up to each other so well! Hoorah!

Celtic Corners

Here's my Celtic tablerunner as it stands so far. Once you stitch down the bias on one side, you have to go back and stitch down the other. I think I'll do that all at the end, so right now it looks a little bumpy and curvy because the far side is coming up a bit. It's a neat project -- fun to learn how to put this together in a reasonable way rather than with one long piece of bias that you form appropriately. I worked on this in the car on the way back from Chicago, and had quite a headache by the time we got home. I hope it isn't a problem on airplanes!

Hovering Hawks

"Hovering Hawks" sounds so dramatic, like something is about to swoop down from the sky. It's the name of the first block for my sampler in the Press for Success class. (Did I hear you groan at the pun?) The angularity of the block and the half-square triangles (HST's) look like hovering hawks, I guess, but the impact of the line is somewhat diminished by my fabric choice (see photo below). That's ok, however, as I love my fabrics and couldn't stand a sampler of traditional blocks in traditional fabrics.

Anyhow, we started by making a grid and stitching 1/4" from the diagonal lines to form HST's. Very cool!



Then we cut along the lines and pressed (very important!) carefully, and trimmed the blocks to exactly the same size. It really is easy to work with blocks that are exact.
And this is what the block looks like!








And, very important, this is what the back looks like. Nice and flat, no?

My quilting buddy's convergence quilt

Great quilt, no? Glen, my good quilting friend, made this. It's a Ricky Tims convergence quilt that she made with hand-dyed fabric. Just gorgeous!

Consistency of taste & other news

I read somewhere once that if you buy only things you really love for your house, eventually you'll find that everything goes together, even though purchased independently. That's because your taste affects all your purchasing decisions. I seem to have very definite negative taste ("I don't like that"), but it's not clear to me that there is a cohesive style that captures what I do like. In any case, I laughed when Val gave me these great earrings on my birthday -- look at the quilt I was making at the time! I definitely like these!

And speaking of quilts I'm making, lesson 2 just went up yesterday for my QU classes. I have started stitching the celtic applique. I cheated and marked the design on my fabric with pencil. The instructor is afraid pencil won't wash out, but there are disadvantages to other marking methods, too. One student in our class marked hers, but the weather was humid, and when she picked it up to start stitching, all her markings had disappeared! Suzanne Marshall, who taught another applique class I took, marks everything in pencil, so I decided to do that. I marked well within the pattern lines to be sure the bias tape covers it up. Keep your fingers crossed!

Sampler done!

Yay! Here is the completed top for my first Press for Success sampler. I don't know what I'll do with it, but the pressing techniques will really help me with future projects.

Watch your back

My Press for Success class at QU is wonderful! Myrna Giesbrecht, the instructor, does a fabulous job. This is the back of our first sampler project. It's a simple 1-patch, no problem, but by the time all the rows get joined, there are always some seams going in the wrong direction and you get lumpy messes at the intersections. Myrna has a pressing plan for everything, so we pressed half the blocks one way, half another, and different rows different ways, etc., until by the last two rows that we joined, every seam on the row matched perfectly, each side butting nicely with the other. (Doubleclick on the photo to enlarge it so you can see how flat everything is.) The back looks great, and in front, the points are all perfect! This is all the more amazing because I did not use even one single pin during this whole project. I still have to put on the two borders. (She has one on the sampler, but I'm using two because my fabrics need them.) I can't wait until we do flying geese blocks!

Viva Italia!

Val has a blog! It's all set up for when she goes to Italy. She PROMISES to post photos so those of us on this side of the Atlantic can get vicarious pleasure from her sojourn. Check out the link to the right!
Disclaimer: Just so you know, I'm not the only one who suggested (over and over) that she become a blogger while abroad.

Good things come in EBay packages

Today's my birthday!! And I got three wonderful packages from EBay, each containing a fabric with a moose print. Thank you, Jocelyn & Valerie! As Val says, they all match since they all have moose(s), even though one is black with red mooses, one is green with batik mooses, and the other is blue and white one above. I need to don my Maine moose shirt and get a-quiltin'!

Am I biased? You bet!

And here's the proof! I just made 24 strips of bias tape for my Celtic tablerunner class. The instructor, Nancy Chong, gave directions for a simple way to make bias tape from any fabric using a Clovis bias tape maker (that's the little doohicky in the photo) -- but we don't follow the directions that come with the gadget. She has a very clever way to do it. She also has us pinning them on a paper towel tube to keep them from opening before we use them. Since they were so easy to make once I got the knack, I made them while Val and I watched an episode of Monk on TV. Guess what Val did:

And here I am, showing off:

Will the rightful owner please speak up?

Even I need to clean out the knitting basket every now and then, and yesterday had a "now and then" feeling to it. I knew there were two things in it, both needing to be finished, but I was delighted to find that one needed only to be cast off and the other just needed some ends woven in. Hoorah! But what was that fuzzy black thing at the bottom? Another scarf, presumably knit by one of my offspring, but I am not sure which one (sorry guys!). Could you let me know?
Here's a close-up of the yarn in case that will jog anyone's memory. Nice, I really like it!

The Little Man was in a modeling mood, so he agreed to show off the other two scarves. I have these, plus a lovely one Val made me, and so I shall have to be certain to wear them this winter. I think what I need now is a thinner, cotton scarf that I can wear indoors. No one sees the outdoor scarves, or if they do, they are too busy stomping their feet and rubbing their arms to keep warm to notice.

Our Little Man was given to us by Brian's mother when we moved into our previous house. She bought him at a crafts fair in Florida and asked the vendor to send him directly to us. When he saw the address, he told her that his sister and brother-in-law, a professor at the UI, lived in the same town. Seven or eight years later I went to a PTA committee meeting at someone's home only to discover all sorts of little men (and little dogs and little cats and not-so-little men) like ours all over the house. Turns out the woman's brother had made our little man.

Only in Illinois (or Nebraska or Iowa)

It's a beautiful summer morning here in Champaign. Browsing through the stands at the farmer's market when it first opened, I could just taste the lush peaches, the bursting kernals of sweet corn, the tomatoes dripping with sun-ripened flavor. Our soil is among the best in the world, and you can tell when you bite into those farm-fresh veggies. But what to my wandering eyes should appear but a craft booth selling potholders, aprons, clothing, and ... quilts! They were all crib-sized baby quilts. The featured quilt, draped over the table for all to admire, was a John Deere quilt. It showed what I just don't understand about the midwest, and I wish I had had my camera. A variety of John Deere fabrics (take a look at those ) were joined in 6" blocks, but between each block and each row were ruffles of white lace! Lace and tractors, an archetypical combination of rural midwestern upbringing. It reminds me of one of the students in my office who grew up on a farm in Indiana. She seemed in some ways almost a girly girl, but on her sixteenth birthday, her parents said they would buy her a car or a cow, and she chose the cow.

Lotto star & QU classes

Back to quilting! It's been awhile since I've done any quilting (although, ahem, I have managed to purchase a little fabric ...). I did some cutting and layout for Project Linus, but this star block is the first machine work I've done in a month. It's for block lotto at guild, and that's always a quick project. Background fabric is provided, and you supply your own contrast fabric. I used fabric left from a reversible table runner that I never finished because I didn't like it, but I do like the fabric. These blocks always go together smoothly until near the end, when I find I have bulky seams and don't know what to do with them. I hope to figure that out soon, because I'm taking Myrna Giesbrecht's Press for Success class at Quilt University. Click here to read about the class -- I'm really excited.

I'm also starting Nancy Chong's Celtic Tablerunner class. I love Celtic knotwork, and I've been wanting a project I could take with me when I travel. This may be it. The techniques will work for stained glass quilts, too. Isn't this beautiful fabric? The yellow-gold will be the background, and the patterned fabric (totally scrumptious) will be made into bias strips for the Celtic design.

Traveling, but ...

What's a vacation without a stop or two at quilt shops, eh? We've been in Beautiful British Columbia for a week and a half and been in three quilt shops, one of them twice. Batiks and Asian fabrics seem to be the rage up here, at least in the three shops I visited. But wow, is fabric pricey north of the border! I did splurge a little in one shop, but not in the others. Can't wait to get home and use the fabric! Wish I'd taken a photo so I could post it now, but I'll do that when I return.

My traveling craft project has been a counted cross stitch I started maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I hadn't gotten beyond the roots of the carrots, but it's almost done now. I photographed it a week ago, before I added any black. See if you can figure out what else might be done to this, and I'll post the finished project when I get home. It was fun to have this on the trip, but quilting beats cross stitch any day!

Jocelyn has a knitting blog!

At last, the secret is out! :)

Jocelyn started a knitting blog last week but I couldn't post the link because she didn't want Laurel to find the photo of Julia's birthday present before she gave her the gift. I'd post the link here, but my cheat sheet on how to do that is at home and I am not. So for now, the link at right will have to suffice (at least I remembered how to do that!).

We're having a great time in Vancouver. I went to The Thread Bare quilt shop, well, actually, I went there twice. Got some great fabrics and had a wonderful time. They were so sweet -- since I'm away from home without my sewing machine, they invited me to come sew there.

A pillow for PMac and an inspirational painting

We leave tomorrow for Vancouver and, since we need to get up early, I am of course staying up late. I decided to browse through old photos, always a rewarding experience. I came across two photos that seemed worth blogging.

It amazes me sometimes how undaunted my daughters are by doing something they don't know how to do -- and it seems that just by doing it they learn how to do it. That was the case with PMac's pillow, which Val made for her friend when they went off to different colleges. She'd never made a pillow before (never sewn before), but before long it was designed, appliqued, stitched, stuffed, and finally much appreciated by the recipient. How cool is that?

I took this photo at MOMA last November, Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall. It's the painting that inspired Jocelyn to make her first quilt -- again, undaunted by never having quilted before. You can see the quilt on an earlier post, here.

Blurry photo day

I spent an hour or so (but time flies when I'm looking at quilting magazines) looking for ideas for a quilt for Frances, Brian's mother. I narrowed it down to 3, with a fairly strong preference for one of them -- fortunately, Brian chose my favorite! I scanned the picture in, the first scan of our new machine, and it's not a great copy. (Oddly, I see it is in sharper focus here than on iPhoto.)

The quilt, designed by Laura Franchini, is in the January/February2006 issue of Quiltmaker magazine. She used Asian fabrics and quilted koi on it in metallic thread. The pattern is simple, the results -- at least hers! -- are stunning. I plan to use silvery greys and rosy pinks, the colors Frances has in her home.



Pondering the blurriness of the quilt scan, I was reminded of a blurry photo I took last Thursday on a bouncy little airplane from Chicago to the cornfields I call home. The sun had only just set, so the sky and lake still shimmered blue rather than black, and the city lights were on. It was a fairyland, but I wasn't able to capture it through the window. Still, the photo reminds me of how spectacular it was; I hope you can get an inkling of the beauty of night falling over the Windy City.

New Quilting Blog!

Check it out! My niece Laurel has started her own quilting blog, Laurel's Quilts and Such -- really nice stuff! Now if only Jocelyn will start a knitting blog ...

Yellow I Spy top

Done! Well, all done but the borders, but the hard part is done! I really, really like it. What fun to see all those cute fabrics. The piecing was a real bear, and the directions give no help at all -- "stitch blocks together, stitch blocks into rows." Geesh! Matching hexagon points is a lot trickier than stitching up squares. I futzed, tore out, marked, pinned, restitched, over and over, and it came out okay (not great, but okay). Many points are right on, a few are as much as 1/8 inch off, and the rest are somewhere in between. I am less concerned than I normally would have been because the quilt has so much going on that you really don't notice those not-quite-right points. And what kid will care?

Help with my quilting

We could all use a little help, and Whitney was there for me. Jocelyn had her tonsils out and my niece Laurel, who was away for the week, lent us her house and her cats. I brought my quilting stuff with me and used her machine while Jocelyn recuperated. It was the machine I learned on, since Laurel had lent it to me when we were in California in 2005. It's funny, at first I forgot how to use it, but it all came back. My current machine is a Janome and hers is a Baby Lock, and I find there are things I like and don't like about each. What I truly love about the Baby Lock is how quiet it is! Wouldn't it be nice to design your own machine?

Here's the tonsillectomy girl herself. The surgery was more painful and she felt worse for longer than we had anticipated. Painkillers and ice packs helped, and knitting a "Heartbreakingly Cute Kimono" for her new 3-week-old cousin Hannah took her mind off her throat.