Lozenges

I shouldn't have looked up my last post about this project. Realizing that five months had passed since the last time I picked it up just drives home how little quilting time I've had this year. Yeah, I've knit nine pairs of socks -- but I want to quilt!  

Now that I've made a dozen new blocks I'm feeling happier. I dug out at least three scrap bags full of fabric that'll be just perfect, but it's so hot lately I almost made myself sick ironing the brown fabric to start Chocolate Covered Cherries. Think a quilter has ever given herself heat stroke trying to iron during the summer?

I'm linking up to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

Girly Stuff to Sew

Sometimes it feels like my daughter is too old for all of the neat girly stuff I find online. But this week I've hit the jackpot.

Look at this Nail Polish Mini Quilt I found over at Bee in My Bonnet!  What could possibly be more perfect for the girl who painted Nancy Drew cover art on my nails to celebrate a new quilt? It's going to be fun to pick out the exact perfect colors.

And then there are the Metallic Thread Gem Pouches that I found over at Craftsy. I still don't love zippers, but these are so cute they might be worth tackling one for.

And the Lemonade quilt from Scrapbooks Etc! I like the cat mask, too. I could see myself making one just to hang on my sewing room wall.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 17 1/2 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 48 yards
Net Added for 2014: 30 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 200 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 4675 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 2610 yards
Net Used for 2014: 2065 yards

I'm linking up to Patchwork Times.

Pretty Stitches

I'm not sure how many books of knitting stitches I own. There are the Barbara Walker books, Knitting on the Edge and Knitting Over the Edge and the first few Vogue Knitting Stitchionaries...

Now I'm wanting to add these two to my collection



I don't love the spiral wire binding on this one. It makes it difficult to flip through the pages and I know that pages will eventually tear loose. They key to the symbols is buried in the back and I'll wind up copying the necessary bits of it onto the pages with stitch patterns I actually plan to use.

But I do really love that the stitch patterns are charted for both flat and circular knitting and that many of them come with instructions for both top down and bottom up versions. From what I can see, the ones that don't include both sets of instructions are the ones that you can just flip without noticing the difference.



There are some gorgeous patterns in this book. I don't know how many of them I could find in books that I already own and I'm not going to lose too much sleep or valuable knitting time trying to figure it out. I think the key for the symbols is the most confusing I've ever seen, but for some of these cables I'm willing to decipher it.

While I was Googling how to spell "stitchionary," I stumbled across this very condensed version on the Vogue Knitting website. There are only a handful of stitches, but what's there is gorgeous. I've got some sock yarn that definitely wants to be knit up as Snakes in the Sand.

Let's Make Baby Quilts {8/15/14}

A couple of weeks ago, Pam from Pam's Quilt Spot joined the linky party with a post about a Charity Sew Day. I'm just blown away by how many quilts these gals managed to finish. Go watch the slideshow -- it looks like they're having an absolute blast! 

Pam was kind enough to share more details and pictures of the finished quilts, so I'll turn this post over to her.... 

Hi – I’m Pam.  I’ve been asked to share a story of a great group of women who sewed baby quilts for a great cause.  We all get together to share our lives and our arts and our passions and big laughs!  One of the local quilt guilds makes quilts for the NICU unit for Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Hospital.  Not too long ago, there was an emergency request for the quilts.  With that, a sew day was put together to make quilts and get them to the babies.

To give credit to the groups, we had ladies from the Little Women’s that gets together at Jo Jo’s Quilt Shop in Chesterfield, VA and Happy Quilters of Chesterfield who sew at local libraries and a local church.  We came together to sew and we used mostly patterns Michelle was kind enough to share with the world.  We trimmed down the instructions to fit on one page so we didn’t have too many pieces of paper to print out!  We did a little preparation coming to our sew day for the baby quilts with about 15 kits cut, marked and ready to sew!  We had a pressing station, cutting station and an extra sewing machine so people could sew without toting their machine around.

Anne, Carol, Kathy, Lori, Mary, Pat and Vicki joined me to sew one Saturday at a Masonic lodge. We made 10 quilts and had a couple of more in progress.  Four were quilted that day.  Charlotte and Linda couldn’t make it that day but brought quilts to one of the groups to add to the pile.  We actually have 10 more ready to quilt and several more in the works.

We sewed and sewed.  Troy, my DH, smoked up pork tenderloin and we all brought some sides to go with it.  Nobody went hungry.  Of course, there was chocolate and music!  We had a great time and we have another day planned for October!

A huge thank you to Michelle for sharing her patterns with the world!  The patterns are so easy to make and everyone loves them.  If you haven’t tried any of them, you should!  But beware!  They are addictive and so much fun to see them in different materials.

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

New Ironing Board Cover from Old Fabric

But I dearly love my ironing board. It came from Grandma (of course) and I've had it for quite a few years. It's pretty. It's sturdy.    

At one point someone sold it for twenty-five cents.

When Jo suggested that we spruce up our ironing board covers, my first thought was that I did not want to sew a casing. I wondered if it would be sacrilege to staple it to the backside of the wooden board. Once I saw how the old cover was attatched with rusty nails, all bets were off...

(I can't tell what that said. The combination of old-style cursive and faded marker was too much for me to decipher.)

I didn't know what I was  going to recover it with, just that it had to be something already in my stash.  My first plan was to dig out a cute vintage sheet, but in the dreamland where my sewing room is all clean and tidy and my ironing board is actually set up, I don't do cute and flowered and coordinated.

Then I remembered the feed sacks that I unearthed while I was looking for self-striping sock yarn. I wish that webpages could convey texture. The fabric is old and faded, but it feels absolutely yummy! And I can just imagine a housewife covering this wooden ironing board with something like this back in the day...

It reads "Cinncinati Seamless," which I guess is the company that manufactured the bag. There are a lot of these for sale on etsy. It's probably a good thing I didn't see those prices before I finished stapling it to my ironing board... although mine is faded and has a few minor holes.

I'd planned to strip the board down to bare wood, but the padding under the nasty silver cover looks really old and was reasonably clean, so it stayed. There's an exposed section at the narrow end. I haven't  decided whether to cut into the second matching bag to cover it, or leave it as-is for now. And I ran out of staples.

I do not iron clothes. Ever. When I  press fabric for my quilting, I use one of those June Tailor Cut'N Press boards at the kitchen table.  

Now, who can solve a mystery for me? I've seen a ton of these wooden ironing boards in antique shops, but never one with a metal plate for the iron to rest on. I didn't even know it was there until I took the silver cover off, and when I called Grandma, she'd never heard of such a thing. Google isn't providing me with any answers, either.

This post is linked to Vintage Thingie Thursday, Thriftasaurus, Share Your Cup, Ivy and Elephants, We Call it Olde, Savvy Southern Style, Thrifter Maker Fixer, Melissa's Antiques
For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Self Striping Toes

Self-striping sock yarn can fun. It does pretty things while you just knit in mindless circles. Sometimes, it does things you'd rather it didn't do. 

This is ugly. I didn't like those big clunky stripes. I liked it even less once I saw that I was hitting a stretch of narrow stripes. 

The stripes at the toe are always going to be wider than the stripes on the foot and leg because there are fewer stitches in each round. I took a chance and cut the yarn, starting the toe over with those shorter blue lengths of color. And it came out SO much better! 

I had a limited amount of this yarn (Magic Stripes comes in a skein of 330 yards) and I didn't know if I'd be able to manage the same trick when it was time to start the second sock.  But once I knew which part of the repeat I was looking for, it was easy.

These are much cuter than I expected them to be based on that first toe. Teenage Daughter had dubbed them "sock monkey colored socks" and since she's much more excited about this yarn than I am, they're now hers.

I finally got a chance to finish reading Incubus by Ann Arensberg. The book is set in 1975 and it reads like it was written back then. It unfolds gradually and I had to find some distraction-free reading time to really get into the plot.

Here's the description from Amazon:

It begins with the theft of six candles from the church altar, a few herbs found strewn in the local graveyard. In the summer of 1974, the prosperous farming community of Dry Falls, Maine, is hit by a brutal heat wave. Crops fail. Drought blights once-verdant lawns. Men inexplicably lose all interest in sex, while women complain of erotic nocturnal visitations. Farm animals give birth to monstrosities. An unholy, unimaginable force is disrupting the natural order—and it seems to be specifically targeting Dry Falls.

Narrated by the careful and practical Cora Whitman, wife of the town pastor, this tale of creeping strangeness quickly turns sinister. Incubus subtly builds to its shattering climax with Cora at its epicenter. Expertly interweaving themes of faith, religion, and marriage with that of the supernatural, this modern horror classic will enthrall fans of Ann Arensberg and attract a legion of new readers.

The narrator, Cora, writes a newspaper column about gardening. It's interesting to watch her turn those talents to tell the story of her husband's studies into the supernatural. (A bit of warning here -- this book is very graphic when it comes to the sexual elements. Cora is detached and clinical, but there's still a lot of detail.)

For more fun projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times and Work in Progress Wednesdays at Tami's Amis.

Disclosure -- the publisher provided me with a review copy.

More Puzzles

Remember that jigsaw puzzle that I bought a couple of weeks back, against my better judgement? Based on previous experience with my older kids and other puzzles, I just knew that it was going to be a disaster. 

I was dead wrong. 

This is our second puzzle, which I picked up at the Friends of the Library Bookstore for fifty cents. The two youngest, with a little help from me, put it together over the course of two afternoons. It's missing thirteen pieces -- and had two extra pieces from an entirely different puzzle  -- but the boys are okay with that. We're blaming the previous owner. 

Puzzle number three was  hard. The pieces were too small and didn't stay very well together once they were matched up, and older siblings messed up our careful sorting once or twice before we decided to give up on that one. Lesson learned -- 500 piece puzzles from the Dollar Tree aren't a good purchase. 

We're doing much better on our current puzzle:

The plan is to coat the puzzles with glue after we finish them. I never in a million years would have guessed the jigsaw puzzles would make my eight-year-old son so happy! Or that he'd be a fan of Charles Wysocki and Thomas Kinkade. 

The Cookies are Escaping!

Vintage embroidery patterns are just puzzling. Yesterday, I found a pattern of a smiling apple running away from a knife. And a beet juggling pots and pans. And an orange with her arm happily wrapped around a juicer...  

It makes my terrified cookies seem normal by comparison. 

Is it just me, or do they look like they're screaming for help?

The hot iron transfer came from Mom's stash, so I don't have any idea what its origin was.

I Want Chocolate Covered Cherries!

Have you seen Jo's new Chocolate Covered Cherries pattern? I'm loving this quilt and it really doesn't hurt that I've been hoarding browns and reds for a couple of different projects and have a bolt of tea dyed muslin to use for the background.  

Now if I can just find where I put that bolt of muslin, I can start piecing blocks!

I'm linking up to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

Jo's Ironing Board Cover Challenge

Did you see Jo's ironing board challenge? Mine could definitely use a new cover. It came to me looking like this and for years I've just kept a folded towel over it. 

Weekly Stash Report 

I figured it out! I couldn't remember if I'd added in that last pair of socks or not. Finding out for sure was as easy as pulling out my list of finished projects for 2014 and adding up the yarn used for each one. Now why did it take me a week to think of checking my numbers that way ?

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 17 1/2 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 48 yards
Net Added for 2014: 30 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 700 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 4475 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 2610 yards

Net Used for 2014: 1875 yards

I'm linking up to Patchwork Times.

The Magic Pattern Book

I used to sew a lot of clothing, but it's something I haven't done much of lately. There was a little cotton top for my daughter a few years back and that possum costume last Halloween, but these days I'm more excited about quilts and the occasional tote bag.

Teenage Daughter, on the other hand, is starting to sew her own skirts (as long as I'm willing to put in the zipper for her!) When I got the chance to review The Magic Pattern Book: Sew 6 Patterns into 36 Different Styles! by Amy Barickman, I thought it might be a good resource for both of us.

I wasn't disappointed!  A beginner could use this book as a course in clothing construction. It includes chapters on the proper tools for each technique, charts for taking proper measurements, suggestions on how to choose fabric of different weight and prints prints, how to add extra for nap or plaids, how to repurpose fabrics for some of the projects... One cute skirt is made from two pairs of men's slacks.  There are cutting diagrams and clear and detailed assembly instructions for each pattern. The patterns themselves are on an enclosed CD.

This book is absolutely worth the purchase price. Just think of the cost of patterns these days. I'm still cringing at what I paid for the pattern I used as a base for that possum costume. Sure, the ones at Joann's go on sale on a fairly regular basis, but sometimes the timing isn't right. This book has six different patterns, a tank top, skirt, dress, cardigan, coat, and accessory, with six variations of each. There are suggestions for further customizing them with different fabrics and prints.

Disclosure -- I received an electronic advance review copy from the publisher, but I think I'll be buying this one as soon as it's available in print.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {8/8/14}

Are you entering any of your baby quilts in the 100 Quilts for Kids linky party this year? It runs through September 30, so there's plenty of time to get something finished and donated. There's lots of inspiration and suggestions for where to donate your finished quilts.

I'm dying to make this one.

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules: 
Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned,  as long as it's about baby quilts. You're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

Meet Roy!

Thanks for all of the great suggestions for cowboy names. I'm going to have to make more quilts just so I can name them Wyatt and Shane and Jebadiah and Matt and Chester.... motivation is in short supply around here these days, so I'll take any I can get! 

Meet Roy...

The pattern is Sadie, without the pieced border this time because I didn't cut enough squares. And it's probably a good thing, because the blue print I used for the backing wouldn't have been big enough if this quilt was another 3" wide. As it was, I wound up taking 1/8" off of one white border to make it work.

For more finishes, check out  Sew Much Ado, Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?,  , and Freedom Fridays, Wonderful at Home, and Inspired Friday.

Wrestling the Squid

The bobbles are getting easier, and I've almost figured out how to wrestle four skeins of yarn at once. Double stranding on a project with two colors isn't something I'd recommend, but I'm not sure how else to make this project work.

There's just SO much yarn involved. I'm hoping it'll get easier once I move on to the body...but first I've got to join the live stitches from all six arms. Twice, because there's one color for the bottom and one for the top.


I just finished That Night, Chevy Stevens's newest book.  Here's the description from Amazon:

As a teenager, Toni Murphy had a life full of typical adolescent complications: a boyfriend she adored, a younger sister she couldn’t relate to, a strained relationship with her parents, and classmates who seemed hell-bent on making her life miserable. Things weren’t easy, but Toni could never have predicted how horrific they would become until her younger sister was brutally murdered one summer night.

Toni and her boyfriend, Ryan, were convicted of the murder and sent to prison.

Now thirty-four, Toni, is out on parole and back in her hometown, struggling to adjust to a new life on the outside. Prison changed her, hardened her, and she’s doing everything in her power to avoid violating her parole and going back. This means having absolutely no contact with Ryan, avoiding fellow parolees looking to pick fights, and steering clear of trouble in all its forms. But nothing is making that easy—not Ryan, who is convinced he can figure out the truth; not her mother, who doubts Toni's innocence; and certainly not the group of women who made Toni's life hell in high school and may have darker secrets than anyone realizes. No matter how hard she tries, ignoring her old life to start a new one is impossible. 


There's a sad, hopeless feeling that runs through the entire book. A couple of days later, it's still hanging with me. My mood probably isn't helping -- I don't know if I'd have had a different reaction if I'd read it under other circumstances.

For more fun projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times and Work in Progress Wednesdays at Tami's Amis.

The Educational Value of Estate Sales

I love estate sales, especially the ones where you can tell that the people lived in the house for years and years and raised a family and grew old there. It's so much fun to explore basements and barns and outbuildings. I couldn't get pictures of the barn and kitchen because there were so many people milling around, but this shot of a back room in the basement gives you an idea. It was a mid-century house with one of those amazing basements that just went on and on. 

I love this old freezer....I'd love to have the kind of basement it would take to store a monster like this. In reality, I'm a little scared of my modern chest freezer, so I wouldn't really want to have something like this in a house with small children. But that doesn't stop me from daydreaming.

The boys were full of questions and I found myself trying to explain the full size craps table in the carport which I didn't understand myself. Who has one of  those? Who's going to buy it?

A helpful old man explained the pedal powered grinding stone in the barn. (I did understand that one, but he stepped in before I could start on my own answer.)

Why would someone tape books around their pipes? That boggled my youngest boy's mind until I told him that it was probably to keep the pipes from freezing. "Oh, you mean it's like insulation?" Um, yeah. That's the word I probably wanted.  

And can someone please tell me what this type of decoration is called? I know it's vintage and I know that someone near and dear to me had this type of stuff when I was growing up. But no one can tell me who....probably because I don't have the right terms to describe it.

When we first moved down here, I found an estate sale with a ton of Halloween decorations. I didn't have a lot of extra cash in my purse and decided to take my chances and come back on half price day. Of course they'd been snapped up. I'm telling myself that it's not a big loss since I probably wouldn't hang them in my own house.

What did we bring home from this sale? A lot of fun new knowledge about old stuff for the boys and a copy of Ginny Gordon and the Lending Library, a vintage mystery that I had as a kid and have been wanting to replace.

This post is linked to Vintage Thingie Thursday, Thriftasaurus, Share Your Cup, Ivy and Elephants, We Call it Olde, Savvy Southern Style, Thrifter Maker Fixer.

Embroidery

My first French knot came out just the way I wanted to. The second didn't. And then I decided that whatever this sprig of greenery that the lobster is holding would look leafier with little bitty cross stitches.

I found the chef and lobster pattern at doe-c doe. She's got a lot of vintage designs, but you have to search a bit to find them. 

 And then there's this --

I've never in my life scorched fabric like this.  In case anyone's wondering, this was with my old Walmart iron, not one of the estate sale finds. I was trying to get the lines dark enough to see. At least muslin is cheap and I didn't ruin the transfer.

This post is linked to Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

A Good Feeling

It really shocked me to realize that the little pile of sock yarn I'd put together a few weeks ago is gone. Those skeins are now the Summer Rainbow socks, and the Regia Surf Socks, and the Flamingo socks. I never work like that. I'll pull together yarn or fabric and patterns and make plans and something else always sends me off on a happy little detour.

I don't know if I like working this way or not.

It's a good feeling to use up stash that's been sitting there for years, especially when it's good stuff you'd almost forgotten about!

Just in case you're getting the wrong idea, this is not the yarn that I used up. It's the stuff I pulled together when I realized that I need a bigger pile.

Weekly Stash Report

I've got a finished pair of socks that may or may not be included in these numbers. I tried to go back through my last few stash reports to figure it out, but I've finished so many socks lately and I'm reporting them all as the exact same yardage and I can't remember quite when I finished them... Blame it on way too many nights with way too little sleep.  I've used a lot more yarn that I've bought and that's the whole point of keeping track. I'm sure it'll all balance out somewhere, right?

Fabric Used this Week: 1 3/4 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 17 1/2 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 48 yards
Net Added for 2014: 30 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 3775 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 2610 yards
Net Used for 2014: 1165 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.