Miles of Muslin

It seems like I'm always running out of muslin. The nice white muslin, not the tea dyed that I need to save for the sashing of the cat quilt, or the heavy craft stuff that a cousin gave my grandma who gave my mom who gave to me, or the cheap stuff I bought a bunch of because I wasn't paying enough attention and thought it was the same as the last stuff I bought.

I didn't know about Kona muslin until my best friend bought it for her glorified nine patch. It's much nicer than the cheap stuff I had been using, and I bought a bunch for my Birds in the Air quilt. Since then, I've decided that if a quilt uses that much muslin, I should probably splurge for something decent.

There should be enough left from the bird quilt to make the buzz saws, but I can't find it. And even if it does turn up, I need more for the curved blocks. So I bought five yards this morning when I went to the Memorial Day sale at Joann's. Even with a coupon, I have a hard time spending that much on muslin, but I wanted to make those quilts and I wanted to use that fabric and and that was what it cost.

Then we detoured to an estate sale because I'm still on the prowl for cheap cotton shirts. Fifteen dollars for an old iron seems kinda high -- especially when I paid less than ten for an identical one at Walmart fifteen years ago. I was headed toward the door when Alex asked if she could look in the cabinet with the sign that said "open -- more stuff inside."

The "stuff" turned out to be a stack of very nice white cotton sheets -- nicer than the muslin I'd just spent twelve bucks on. I've been watching garage sales for sheets to use as backing, but they always seem to want more than I'd be willing to pay for new sheets for my own bed. These were a dollar each. And did I mention that they were thick and soft and in perfect condition?

I bought four. In hindsight, I should have bought all five, but I was sulking over the money I'd just spent on the muslin and not thinking about how many yards of fabric are in a full flat sheet and how many future projects that'll make.

I like muslin. Almost as much as I like sheets that are going to pretend to be muslin.

When I first started knitting and quilting I read stories about how stash, sometimes lots of it, just fell into people's laps. Even after Alex and I were given a nice pile of yarn that had come from my great-aunt's dentist's wife's dead mother, I still had my doubts that so much yarn and fabric was just floating around in search of a home.

I'm starting to believe it.

Thursday, I called a quilting friend to see how she was doing. Turned out she was on her way home with a few bags of scraps in the trunk of her car that someone had called to see if she could use, but she didn't have the heart to bring them into her own sewing room and deal with them herself. Did I want her to drop them off at my place?

Personally, I'm still at the stage where the answer to offers of free quilting cotton is always yes. I can find plenty to do with two large white trash bags of strings and crumbs. Not sure what that'll be yet, since I'm focused on finding three inch strips for the Bento Box quilt and 225 different calicos for the curved one, but knowing that it's there waiting for me makes me very happy.

There will be quilt tops in my future, whatever other stupid crap may happen. If it seems like my priorities are skewed here, I've got confidence that we'll buy groceries and pay the mortgage and everything else, but fabric and yarn, which aren't a necessary part of the budget, might be severely limited for a while.

If I was buying my supplies one project at a time, I'd be very worried, but I've got crumbs and strings and scraps, not to mention a whole bunch of UFOs.

Yesterday, my best friend talked me into going shop hopping with her. She was seriously after fabric, but I was just along for the ride. I was kind of hoping to find another Moda scrap bag with dark colors, which would make finishing my Bento Box much easier.

At the first shop, I found a bunch of nice fat-sixteenths that should be perfect.

The second shop had scraps for fifty cents and ounce. A little rich for my blood right now, but I dug through the big basket to see if there were any good dark florals for the Bento Box. No luck with that, but there was a huge bag of scraps sitting on a shelf with a piece of paper taped to it.

$4.00

It didn't seem like that could possibly be the price. From the outside, it looked like mostly little pieces. I had those two brand new bags of scraps in the sewing room, not to mention the big box of calicos I got at the yard sale last week.

I walked away from the bag. I followed my two preschoolers around while my friend picked out fabric for an entire quilt shop. The differences between her fabric shopping style and my fabric shopping style are endlessly entertaining.

I decided that if I didn't ask if that was actually the price, I'd regret it. There was a little handful of novelty prints from the scrap basket that were too neat to leave behind, so I went up to the cash register feeling stupid -- four bucks was just too good to be true. Grandma usually spends more than that for the scrap bags she finds at the thrift store, which are about the same size.

It was four bucks -- and she threw in the handful of expensive scraps! I haven't had a chance to spread it all out yet and see what's actually there, but there are some fairly big pieces in there including a bunch of black wool felt. I'm not sure what I need that for, but I'm sure it has something to do with birds.

I have enough blocks this time! Monday afternoon, I sewed the last triangles onto my Weed Whacker strips and got them pieced into blocks. It was a couple more days before I found the time to press the last bunch of blocks and the courage to actually count them. I needed forty-eight.

Assuming that I counted right -- and I was VERY careful this time around -- I've got fifty-one. Hooray!



I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to get the top assembled, but right now I'm content just to have the blocks done. This hasn't been the most fun quilt ever. It's not the horrible waste of perfectly good green fabric that I started to fear I was making, but I'm not in love with it. It will look better once the blocks are assembled into a top. And better than that once it's quilted.

The problem with that plan is I'm going to quilt the tops I love first, so who knows when this poor thing will gets its turn. I don't have a whole lot of time to play right now, let alone worry about when I'm going to get a free day to drive up and use the long arm.

This forced semi-no buy is going better than I thought it would. With eleven days left in the month, I've spent --

less than $2.00 on postage for a fabric trade

$5.00 on a big box of calico from a yard sale

$1.50 on thrift store shirts in really good colors

$3.79 on muslin so I can make more little curved blocks and a fat quarter for the Bento Box

$6.17 for Scrap Basket Surprises by Kim Brackett

I think that's a respectable job of keeping my spending in check. Not good enough for me to buy that bobbin case when the month's up, but bad enough to be ashamed of either.

Traditional quilts with pieced curves make my heart go pitty-pat. Up until this afternoon, I'd only pieced one block with curves, but that hasn't stopped me from aspiring to do a Double Wedding Ring, and a Pickle Dish, and a Drunkard's Path, and Robbing Peter to Pay Paul, and whatever that block I played with today is called...



Just got up and checked the pattern, which calls it the "traditional Rose Dream" block.

The pattern is from one of those magazines Lori sent me. I'm sure I've seen this block before and mentally added it to the list of quilts I was going to make when I got brave enough to tackle curves.

I don't know that I was feeling brave today, but the kids were outside and I had to do something with that precious alone time. I thought I remembered where my template plastic was and I really didn't feel like sewing corner triangles onto those Weed Whacker strips, so I gave it a shot.

I could seriously fall in love with pieced curves.

Many years ago, I could touch type close to a hundred words a minute and actually keep whole sentences organized in my mind while I did it. But I couldn't knit or quilt back then, and I had far fewer children, so this has been a good thing, shifting from my old skills to my new ones. Quilting is much more fun than writing romance novels, and easier to do with a pack of little kids underfoot.

But it does get frustrating when I want to write something and have to work much harder at it than I used to. I wonder if I'd be able to type faster if we moved the computer from the bedroom floor onto an actual table?

But I can make paper pirate swords, inspired by my new favorite blog, Filth Wizardry. And they are the coolest idea anyone ever came up with.

My little boys will make anything into a sword, complete with ching ching noises and dramatic swordplay. It's all absolutely adorable until someone gets hit a little too hard.

The Dollar Tree had foam swords a while back, but ours didn't hold up well. Ours appear to have been gnawed by hungry sharks.

Newspaper swords don't cost anything but a couple of inches from Mommy's secret stash of masking tape, and if they only hold up for ten minutes, they're a total success. But they've held up longer than that. They're amazingly durable.

I wish I'd known about all of these great possibilities when I had extra kids at the house all the time!

The giddiness has subsided into a nice sane happiness. There's been no quilting here for going on three days, but I've really been too busy to notice. Right now, I'm typing fast and trying to get my thoughts down before it's time to stick dinner in the oven.

Things have been going very right.

I finally, after several months of searching, found another Core Five on eBay selling for a decent price. It's on its way to us now, it's insured, and I've got tracking numbers so I can keep obsessively checking to see when it might actually get here. This means that I can stop writing my own curriculum for my oldest as we go and stop searching eBay every single day. But it means I'll be obsessed until it gets here.

I also found Guest Hollow, a website with printable schedules that tie in so perfectly with what we're already using that the whole thing could've been put together with my kids in mind. So I've been printing and searching the online card catalog and made an extra trip up to the library to get books to keep Alex busy until the real curriculum gets here. Too bad I didn't find this in January, which would've cut way down on my stress.

My wee tiny sock arrived earlier this week from Michelle -- can you see those tiny little watermelon seeds? Aren't they adorable?



Lori sent me some fabric for my Bento Box, along with about a dozen quilting magazines I haven't seen before. I've only flipped through a couple, but I've already found a bunch of quilts I think I can piece with what I've got. I can't wait to go through the rest of them.

Gotta go heat the oven! Hopefully I've have more time, or be able to type faster, tomorrow.

I finally got that chicken grit I've been waiting for. Actually, Alex found it when she was cleaning the porch and asked me where to put it. Now I can't find the pincushion I wanted to use it in.

But I was going to use it in something, so I sewed some of the bonus triangles from my weed whacker into a pinwheel and cut a square of green fabric and made a new little biscornu.



Isn't it cute? I put grit in the very center and then some extra scraps of batting around that to make it soft. And although chicken grit is really heavy in the bag, it didn't add much weight to my little pincushion. Another source suggested uncooked rice and since I've got several cups that my darling babies dumped into the bottom of a kitchen drawer, so I'll try that next.

The giddy descent into madness continued yesterday when I sewed four of the pastel string blocks together to see how they'd look and absolutely fell in love with how they felt and how sturdy they were. I've done the whole string piecing on a fabric foundation before, so it shouldn't have been a surprise.

I had been kind of reluctantly slogging through this project, but seeing those blocks together got me going and now I've only got a few left to piece.



And that's where I lost my mind. There's a five gallon bucket that I toss my threads and tiny scraps into and all of the edges I've trimmed from those blocks have it about half full. I've read over and over how some people save those little scraps and stuff pillowcases with them to make beds for animal shelters.

I've always thought that was overkill, but yesterday I decided it might be nice to have an actual bed for the barn cats who sleep on our porch. I could get rid of the pile of nasty blankets that came with the house. It'd be perfect if I had a ratty old pillowcase.

I kept piecing and letting my mind wander and now, somehow, I'm using those string blocks to make a bed for my daughter's favorite cat. The one that sometimes sleeps in the house.

I don't even like that cat. I don't truly believe for a moment that she's going to sleep on a bed instead of in my clean laundry. Or in my drawer of folded clothes.

I'm just a bit giddy this afternoon. First, there was the new addition to our household --



To see really giddy, you had to be here in our living room when Alex came in with the news. Our girls, who spent weeks sitting on infertile eggs last year, are finally mamas. This fella (or gal) looks a few days old, so I'm not sure if there's hope for the other ten eggs or not.

We've got a baby goose! And it happened in our backyard, which does not in any way compare to driving down to the feed store and buying a baby goose.

Then I realized that today was the new clue for the Big Busted mystery quilt, and the kids are going to take a nap and Bill's out shopping, so I can actually sew my pieces together!

Then I found the Panda. I need to quilt a panda. I have a cousin who's expecting a baby in a couple of months, so I have a genuine need for a panda.

And there are quilted chairs out there in the world. I need one to live in my sewing room.

I cast on a project Friday night and actually managed to join 130 stitches in the round without twisting them, and to get the pattern established with the right number of stitches and continue the pattern through a full repeat.

Not a big deal, unless you're me and your knitting has been going horribly for the past four months.



The pattern is Square Cake, a cute little bag that was in Knitty a while back. I've been wanting to make it since the pattern was published a couple of years ago, but never got around to casting on.

The knit and purl diamonds don't show up in the picture, but I love the texture and depth they add.

Now the question is whether or not I've got enough yarn. I should have enough to make the large size as written, but I'd really like to add another pattern repeat and make it deeper.

Where's the rest of that sweater? I made a small shawl out of part of it, but there should be another ball or a sleeve or something around here somewhere. Where would I have put it?

What does this look like to you?



I see a noose, but I'm not sure if that means my kids have a morbid streak or that their Mommy does.

It's been an unproductive afternoon. Well, I did read to my kids and help them with math and give them spelling tests and everything else that was on the schedule. And I ran a load of laundry and did a bunch of dishes, but I missed out on my afternoon quilting time. I need to make up for that when I'm done here.

While I was trying to convince the littlest ones to fall asleep in my lap, I fell in love with an elephant quilt. I've seen the block (Ararat from the Kansas City Star) quite a few times, but I've never seen a bunch of them put together into a quilt. I can't even find a picture of an elephant quilt online, so I had to take a picture of my television screen so I won't forget how wonderful it was.

I want one!



Now that its safely arrived at its new home, I can show off my second knitting finish of 2009, a wee tiny sock for the wee tiny sock swap.



I knew I was knitting 20 stitches on size 0 dpns (first time I've used those!), but it still shocked me how tiny my tiny sock turned out. I did mine toe up, with a short row heel that's garter stitch partly because I've been thinking of trying one of those on a big sock and partly because I didn't want to fiddle with turning and purling back across those few itty bitty stitches. And there's a bit of lace up the front that doesn't show up in the picture.

I want to knit some more of them with cables and fancier lace, just because I can. I've gotta do something with my yarn and needles, right?

I found the pattern for the Cheery Buzz Saw quilt, which isn't on the magazine's website anymore and which I was thoroughly annoyed at myself for not taking better care of and I think I've decided to use my Country Essentials Breeze sampler. I'll save the Mama's Cottons for something else. Now the question is whether or not I've got enough good muslin left.

The plan for right now is to embrace my stash and see what I can make with my "good stuff." Doesn't that sound far more productive than sulking and pouting about trying to stay mostly no-buy for the indefinite future?

I've decided to take it thirty days at a time, with very few exceptions. I'm allowed to spend on 90% off thrift store shirts and fabulously cheap estate sale fabric, or batting for quilts that I'm about to load into the longarm, because my access to it is so limited. If I make it the whole month, I'll buy one small thing off of my wish list -- that's batting, backings, patterns, books.

I can do this. I've done it before, but I've got a habit of rewarding myself with fabric and yarn for dealing with stressful crap, and there's far too much stressful crap going on in my life lately. Stuff that'll be resolved quickly won't actually kill any of us, but it's enough to mess up my days and keep me up at night. Add the no-buy thing to that, and I'm getting seriously annoyed.

On the bright side, I've put my foot down and absolutely refuse to speak to Pat the insurance adjuster ever again. And the phone is working for the moment.

I misplaced the notebook with my list of quilts in progress and it seems like I've also misplaced the quilts. I know where they should be, I'm just a little bit hazy on exactly what I'd be looking for. And I'm having too much fun with the new quilts to scroll black through blog posts and remind myself.



The Bento Box is FUN. I could have had it done in a day or two if I'd started with enough lights and darks. As it is, I'm glad I plunged in without counting, and I keep making a few blocks at a time as I unearth suitable prints from my stash.



All of the pieces for Weed Whacker are cut and there are a ton of them. I stitch them together in batches and as long as I keep slogging away at it I guess I'll have a quilt top soon. This is the first time I've laid out what I've got and I really do like it.



I've been reading lots of blog posts about string quilts. I've got a book from the library about string quilts (Not to mention five blocks of that string quilt I started ages ago!) A quilt I saw at the show last weekend finally pushed me over the edge, so I dug through my strings and pulled out all of the gardeny pastels and cut some foundation squares out of the ugliest color of not-cotton I could find.

I wonder if I've got enough fabric to make Alex a cute summery top like this one. I wonder if she'd wear it if I did. Do I remember how to make a ruffle?

A new mystery

Stashbusters started a new mystery quilt this weekend -- Big Busted! The pattern itself is hilarious, so even though I have no clue what the finished quilt is going to look like (guess that's the point of a mystery, huh?) I scrambled around to find enough lights and darks that I could cut 44" strips from.



I got the strips sewn together for the first clue, then dug out the nine patch blocks that have been sitting waiting for me to cut them up and make them disappear.



Some of the blocks got twisted, but the pinwheel effect was so subtle I'm not going to worry about it. This little quilt turned out so cheerful and girly. I've got some ideas about how to machine quilt it if I can get the tension to cooperate.

The last light blocks for Weed Whacker are cut and I've got enough 2 1/2" squares to start piecing Simple Pleasures. And I've finished a couple more blocks for the Bento Box.

I'm feeling very productive today!

The quilt show started this morning and we were there, even though I couldn't work up a lot of enthusiasm about leaving the house that early. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot, both of my little guys announced that they wanted to go back to the house. Not even promises that both grandmas and their best friend Janet were waiting inside to hold hands with them changed their minds. My quilt show days are definitely numbered.

Quinn got very cooperative after we promised to buy him a milkshake if he walked and held Grandma's hand. Leif was a little less cooperative, but he's smaller and easier to lug around, so I did get to see all of the quilts.



I was going to stay away from the vendors, which turned out to be a mistake. The guild was selling books and patterns dirt cheap -- I'd love to have seen what was there when they started! I got a three books and two patterns for a grand total of seven bucks.



Aren't the fishing lures great? And the blackbirds. I love blackbirds. I've completely forgotten how much I hated doing blanket stitch around blackbirds.

And the fabric, which is exactly what I need to make those last six blocks for the red quilt. I'll have to tear apart some of the other blocks to make it work, which doesn't sound fun, but now I'm out of excuses. And I really do want to finish that quilt.

We also had a bit of a mystery. The shop called Grandma to let her know that a lady had brought in a bunch of quilting scraps. I assumed that it was the same dealer I'd bought the other fabric from, because I'd asked Grandma to tell her I was interested if she had littler pieces to get rid of. But it wasn't her.

No one knows who it was. Someone apparently heard Grandma talking to someone else about the quilting fabric she was getting for her granddaughter and brought it in. None of it actually is quilting cotton, but there are some neat upholstery fabrics in there and Alex is going to make tote bags and purses.

Time to start sewing!

This afternoon, I cut the rest of the green strips for my Weed Whacker quilt, including a few extra so I don't run into the same trouble I did with the red quilt. It feels good to have those done, but now I've got the three and a half inch light squares to look forward to. I think I'll sew some of the strips together first.

Or I'll play with my Bento Box. I'm delighted at how quickly the first few blocks came together, and surprised at how much fun I'm having with that fabric since my relationship with it started out so badly.

A few weeks back, a friend and I went on a little shop hop to find fabrics for her next quilt. I wasn't buying much of anything (mainly because I'd already splurged on the sale fabrics at Connecting Threads), but at the last shop I got sucked in by the Moda scrap bags.

I wanted to make selvage potholders. The bag that someone else had opened was full of selvages with pretty dots and words. I picked out one with dark edges visible and asked the saleslady if they all had selvages, took her word for it, and didn't open it until we'd left.

Not a single selvage -- not even the edges without printing. Every strip of the fabric was cut along both long edges. I did call the shop (which is 80 miles away) to let them know what happened, so they didn't unknowingly promise selvages to anyone else. They were very nice and offered to let me bring it back, or send it with a friend, or mail it back to them so they could send me one that did have selvages...

At that point, I wasn't about to spend any more money on the problem. The fabric was gorgeous, I'd done the math and figured that it worked out to about three yards of fabric for ten dollars, but I couldn't make my selvage potholders and I wouldn't have BOUGHT the fabric except for the potholders, and I was feeling crabby about the whole thing.

A while later, I sat down with the Bento Box pattern that I'd planned on using with my Root of the Madder fat quarters and realized that I didn't have the right balance of lights and darks. But I did have a bag of gorgeous fabric with lots of lights and darks that would trim down to 3" strips without wasting much fabric at all.

I'll have to throw in some lights and darks from my own stash, but as long as I can find prints that don't stick out like a sore thumb, I'm a very happy quilter.

That trouble I was talking about in my last post -- I did get myself into it yesterday. One of the dealers at Grandma's antique mall had brought in a bunch of quilting fabric for fifty to seventy-five cents a yard. I'm not sure exactly how many yards I got for my fifteen dollars, but I came home with at least twenty yards of nice fabric. And I hear she's bringing in more.

I was looking through a library book while Alex was in karate yesterday and found another five quilts I want to (and probably can) dig up fabric for -- and the quilt show is tomorrow, so I'm sure I'll come home from that with another dozen or so in mind!

How many quilts do I have to make out of my existing stash before I deserve a special treat? I discovered Bee in my Bonnet this morning and I'm absolutely enchanted by her patterns, especially Women's Work and Grandma's Kitchen. I can't decide if I'm more in love with the applique pressure cooker and hand mixer or the iron and vacuum cleaner with their little rick rack cords.

At what deluded point does a quilter convince herself that the folded fabric doesn't count as stash? I hit that point this weekend, but I'm feeling a little saner now that I've got fabric pulled out for another few quilts that I suddenly must make.



Do you see those wonderful pieced whales and boats around the borders of North Passage?! It'll be by far the most complicated quilt I've tried so far, but between the scraps and the whales and the boats, I've GOT to give it a try.

My need to make Simple Pleasures is harder to explain. Maybe it's the way the snowball blocks look like circles. Or the 2 1/2" squares. I like scrappy little squares. I like quilts that use scrappy little squares and don't look anything like the other quilts I've already made that use scrappy little squares -- and I think I've found my explanation!

And there's going to be a Bento Box (with the Moda scrap bag that didn't have any selvages in it), and the green Weed Whacker, and the scrappy courthouse steps. And a scrappy pineapple quilt when I work up the nerve to tackle that one.

These might keep me out of trouble for a while. If I didn't know exactly what trouble I plan on getting myself into later this week.

I spent the afternoon fighting with my stash. My plan was to pull out lights and darks for a couple of ambitious quilts I'm hoping to start soon, then cut some 3" strips out of what was left in the scrap bags. I'd found a new block pattern this morning that I wanted to use for a baby quilt.

I've already pulled out all of the reds for the red quilt, and the blues for the flying birds quilt, and the greens that I hadn't already pulled out for the tree quilt are out now so I can use them for a Weed Whacker quilt. Oh, and I pulled out the browns when I was working on the Irish Chain...

Those scrap bags are getting pretty picked over. There's still plenty of fabric in them, but it's odd shapes and sizes or it's not cotton, or there's some other reason I haven't used it yet.

I did manage to scrounge enough fabric to make this --



The bags are slowly vanishing. Isn't that neat? Means I've almost got an excuse to look for more.

First Annual Bloggers Quilt Festival

This is the quilt I was hoping to enter in the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show this year. It doesn't look like I'll get to go at all, but they do it every year and I'll be there next year and the year after that. And this is as good a chance as any to show off what I made my grandma for Christmas.



I had a very strong bias against log cabin quilts, started by a quilt shop owner who answered my question about another pattern by telling me that I couldn't make a quilt until I took a class and everyone had to make a log cabin quilt as their first one. I really don't like being told what I can and can't make.

Quite a few years later, I'd made a few quilts and still never taken a class or intended to ever make a log cabin. My eleven year old daughter had made one. My mother had made one. And although they now don't remember it, they both told me that they'd decided you couldn't be a real quilter until you did a log cabin.

My best friend was in the middle of her own log cabin quilt using the Quilt in a Day book and I was talking her through it over the phone. The more I looked at the pattern and saw how quickly hers was coming together, the more it started to seem like a log cabin would be an perfect way to make the dinosaur quilt that I'd bought fabric for when Heath was a baby. So I did.

And then I saw a picture of a scrappy log cabin. Thin little strips of fabric. Lots and lots of them, in hundreds of different colors and prints. THAT was the log cabin I wanted to make. So I started cutting and sewing and the more strips I cut and sewed together, the more I fell in love with my quilt.

In mid-November I showed my grandma, who doesn't quilt but is the source of most of my scraps, a picture of my half-finished quilt. She really liked it, and I decided that I had to give her a quilt for Christmas, and it had to be a log cabin, but I didn't want to give up my own.

So I started a second one and somehow got it quilted and bound in time for Christmas eve. I'd thought about finishing mine for her and then starting a second one after the holidays were over and I wouldn't have to rush, but I just couldn't bring myself to give it up. So I pieced another thirty-five blocks.

The weather turned nasty and I wound up venturing out onto icier roads than I've ever even dreamed of driving on to get batting and backing. I ripped out more machine quilting than I left in. The weather got worse, and it didn't look like we'd see Grandma or anyone else on Christmas day. And I got it done. And the weather cleared up in time for Christmas dinner.

By the time I got both tops done, I was so burned out on thin little strips that I still haven't quilted my own log cabin top, but I'm so glad I made the twin quilts.
I'm even gearing up to cut more 1 1/2" strips of lights and darks so I can make a scrappy pineapple and a courthouse steps.

This one is mine --



Park City Girl is hosting a Spring 2009 Quilt Festival -- go check out the other quilts!

Am I the only one trying to knit a pair of Lake Effect Double Knit Mittens?! It sure seems like it. Mine is the only project on Ravelry. I've googled and there's no mention of these mittens anywhere that I can find. I even searched the archives at Knitlist and Knittalk. There's no mention of this pattern anywhere.

I'm ready to knit the thumb stitches onto waste yarn. I've done the same thing plenty of times with regular mittens, but this whole double layer thing is making me nervous. And after that there are the colorwork charts, which make me even more nervous...and even if I do pull it off and make an actual mitten, it's not going to fit even the littlest hands in the house because the bottom edge has no stretch to it.

If I do finish this thing, it's going to be purely decorative. Why am I doing this? Because it seemed like an entertaining, quick project that I could handle. It's a lot more involved than I expected, but I'm tired of casting things on and then giving up and ripping them back out again.

Another fabric give away, this time at The Farm Chicks. They're giving away two yards of fabric from Pixie Dust and the chateau charlotte has such an adorable story book feel to it that I couldn't resist entering.

And this, which starts tomorrow, looks like it could be a lot of fun. I've got my quilt all picked out.

Finally -- my first knitting finish for 2009! It's the Victorian Scarf in Knitpicks Crayon. Jalapeno, because they were out of Beach Glass when I placed my order.



I like this pattern. It knit up in a couple of evenings and was interesting, but simple enough that I could keep track of it with my pack of kids running through the room. I'd recommend as a beginning lace project, but with a different yarn because I had a hard time reading my stitches with the boucle even though I supposedly know what I'm doing.

The yarn itself is incredibly soft and smooshy. I haven't had the time or patience to try wet blocking it yet and find out if the lace in my scarf will stretch out and lay as nicely as the one in the pattern. Maybe when the blocking wires get here, which might be today.



I was so annoyed by my goof with the palette colors that I forgot all about my other new goodies until I got into the box for the skein of Crayon.

I love the Knitting Needle Coil Wraps. In this picture, they're around four size two needles and they're very snug. Looks like they'll stretch enough for bigger needles, but nothing is going to fall out. I want these for ALL of my dpns. Fifty cents each seemed pricey at first, but not when I considered how much I've got invested in needles.

I did read on one of the knitting lists a while back that you could cut up one of those plastic coil ID holders and get the same result, but I don't know where to get one of those.

I like the Sock Knitting Needle Holders too. It was a bit of a challenge to get my sock into it, but to pack them for travelling in the car, this may be exactly what I needed.

I got the tree together!



After getting up before dawn to see dh off to work, it seemed like I might as well work on it for a while before it was time to drag the kids out of bed. It went a lot faster than I expected and if I hadn't put one entire section together backwards, I would've had it done before I started breakfast. An on-time breakfast, not one that's really closer to lunch time.

I wound up ripping and resewing the messed up section after we finished school for the day, but it's together and I really like the combination of greens and neutrals I wound up using. The selection process was more "rummage through the scrap bags and see what's in there" than carefully considered and planned.

This is one of those "use your design wall" projects, and I still don't have a design wall. If I'd planned ahead, I would have laid out the flannel side of my old table cloth so I could take my time instead of racing the clock and kids, but it was five in the morning and I was happy enough to be getting something done.

Now I've got to figure out the borders. The pattern calls for a solid green border, but I want to do something pieced. I'm tempted to add multiple borders and make it a lap quilt.

Check out the giveaway at Turning*Turning. Her post about stash infusion has me wondering -- is $12,000 of fabric okay if you use it up?