Vintage Shoes

I stuck with two colors for this one, hoping to capture the look of an old catalog advertisement. 

For almost all of my embroidery, I use a basic back stitch, but for this one, I needed to remember how the Lazy Daisy stitch works. I'm not claiming to be very good at it yet, but this is just a tiny block that'll go in between some of the larger images.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {5/22/15}

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.

Looking Back...

10 years ago this month...

We were starting the process of buying this house and I was beyond giddy at the thought of having a huge sewing room all for myself. I was also trying to figure out how I was going to pack and move with an eight year old, a five year old, a six month old, and another one on the way.

I was  finishing up my Clapotis at the park, hoping it didn't start to rain again.

5 years ago this month...

I was working on Strawberry Fields, realizing how much fun tiny pieced blocks could be.


I finally got all of the cat blocks assembled into a top and was intimidated by how huge it is.

And my husband was warning me not to burn down the house with Grandma's old iron. I never did work up the nerve to plug that one in. 

.

{Yarn Along} The Mountain Story

The end is in sight! Turn the heel, pick up the gusset stitches, three more owl repeats and the toes... and I've already done it once. There's no reason I can't do it again.

Now I get to start looking through my book collection and Ravelry queue for the next challenging pair.



The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens caught my attention with its description of four people trapped on a mountain, able to see the city below, but with no way of reaching it. Really, it's the story of one of them, Wolf Truly, who went up the mountain on his eighteenth birthday with no intention of coming back down. But before he can carry out his planned suicide, he finds himself helping three women who are trying to find an unmarked lake.  Flashbacks tell Wolf's story, but we never do learn a lot about his companions.

For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times.

  Disclosure - The publishers provided me with ARCs.

Along Came a Spider...

Little Miss Muffet

Sat on a tuffet

Eating her curds and whey

Along came a spider

Who sat down beside her 

And frightened Miss Muffet away

I just can't decide how I feel about her hair. If it was redwork, I wouldn't have to wonder why she had single curls sprouting out of her nearly bald head, but this is a multi-color project and I don't want to make all of the little girls blonde.

As soon as I started stitching this one, I found quite a few vintage Miss Muffet patterns that I like better.  My absolute favorite is this one from Urban Threads, which just has the abandoned bowl and the spider. I'm tempted to either buy the pattern for this quilt, or buy several of them (probably Humpty Dumpty, Jack and Jill, and The Cat and the Fiddle) and make a little Mother Goose quilt. I want these dark fairy tale patterns, too. Because I obviously don't have enough embroidery patterns on the burner.

 So this one may or may not  wind up in the finished quilt. It depends on whether or not I actually stitch one of the other ones and whether or not I decide I'm okay with two Miss Muffets.

Lots of New Lozenges

They're not the most fun units to sew up, but they're a great excuse for watching Netflix with my Kindle propped up next to the sewing machine. I'd planned on laying out all of the pieces for a progress shot, since I've got about twice as many as I did have,  but the box with the rest of them is winning the current game of Hide and Seek. I'll take pictures when I find it.

This post is linked to Design Wall Monday.

Not the Week I Expected to Have

It was a wild week. Monday, I went to the walk in clinic to see about a muscle I pulled a month ago which wasn't getting any better and wound up in the emergency room at 1am getting diagnosed with a blood clot. How does it go from "You should've waited to schedule an appointment with your regular doctor" (that was the receptionist) to a 10pm call telling me that the test results were back and I needed to get to the emergency room immediately?

If you've been reading my blog for a few years, you might remember the drama of my knee surgery and the subsequent blood clots. I've got a new one, this time with no apparent cause. Needless to say, I'm not a happy camper.

While I was waiting for the call with the blood test results, still sure that they were doing to be negative, Hubby came in with the mail and there was a box from Janice, a blog reader who had emailed me a while back that she was downsizing and had a stack of transfers she wanted to send me. That box was packed tight with Aunt Martha's patterns and older ones and some embroidered blocks and some fabric that had already been prepped with transfers... and the amazing part is that, with as many patterns as I've got in my stash and as many as I've been drooling over online for the past year, I hadn't seen most of them. A few I had seen and desperately wanted.

Tuesday afternoon, I sorted through it all while I was waiting for an appointment with the coagulation clinic. Those daily shots to the stomach that I hated so much last time around? This time I don't have to go in to the hospital every day. I get to do them at home myself -- and its twice a day. Actually, I'm pretty proud of myself for being able to do it. I really thought I'd have to get Hubby to do it. And the rat poison pills? I'm on that stuff for life.

I'm so glad to have embroidery and knitting and quilting to distract myself with. There's going to be more than one embroidered quilt. All of the pretty images I want to stitch won't fit into one quilt, even if I make it huge.


Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 0 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 41 yards
Net Added for 2015: 38 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 2800 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 3675 yards
Net Added for 2015: 875 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

Duckies!

It's not a show-stopping block, but it's cute and small and I think it'll make a great bit of filler when I finally try to assemble all of these into a something shaped like a quilt top.

And, after Kitty and her bicycle, it was nice to have a quick little finish.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {5/15/15}

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.

Blogger's Quilt Festival -- Little Letters

It's time for the Blogger's Quilt Festival. I'd hoped to have the nail polish quilt done but life has been keeping me too busy to get it pin basted and quilted.  So I went looking through my projects for something else I wanted to show off. 

Little Letters (free pattern from Temecula Quilt Company) was just the challenge I needed last year. The blocks are fun and fiddly, without being too overwhelming. And I'd been wanting an alphabet sampler quilt.

I decided that mine needed a pieced border, something that would make the finished quilt feel more like a stitched sampler... (And isn't it cool that this one is dated and I can tell when I made that project instead of trying to figure it out from old blog posts like I usually wind up doing?) 

Honestly, I think my favorite part of this tutorial series was the pictures of stencils and apples and rulers. The letters look nothing at all like those stencils, but I still think of them every time I look at this quilt.

{Yarn Along} Second Sock Syndrome

I've been suffering from second sock syndrome, casting on everything but the second Owlie sock. I don't care for top down socks to begin with, and I really don't care for these cuffs with all of that knitting to the back of the loop. Seriously, is there any reason I couldn't have just done knit stitches? It wouldn't have looked like the designer intended it to, but it would have made me less crazy. 

Now that the cuff is done, though, I'm on to the owls. I can do these. There's a rhythm to them that's easy enough to follow - as long as I keep my eyes on the chart. 



As soon as I finished Big Little Lies, I went onto the library's online card catalog and reserved as many other books by the same author as I could find. What Alice Forgot was the first one to show up on the reserve shelf. This book just about broke my heart. Alice is deeply in love with her husband and happily pregnant with their first child...or that's what she believes when she regains consciousness after an accident at a health club. Alice quickly learns that she's ten years older, her first baby and two others have already been born, and she's in the midst of a divorce. Everyone she loves has changed and, she unhappily begins to discover, so has she. This book was hard to read, and I mean that in the best possible way. At first Alice is so sure that if she can just get to her husband things will be better, but it's not. Everyone she thinks she can turn to knows things that she doesn't, and no one is really helping much to fill in the blanks.

For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times.


  Disclosure - The publishers provided me with ARCs.

A Little Finish

I'd been wanting something to keep my yarn from tumbling off of my lap while I'm knitting at the kids's activities, so I whipped up this little pyramid shaped wristlet. One side is almost completely open, with no zipper or hardware to catch on the yarn. 

It took twice as long as it should have, because the first one I made was too small to hold a 50 gram skein of sock yarn. Guess that's what I get for cutting into the good fabric instead of making a mock-up first to test the size. But it looks an awful lot like the little bag I had pictured in my head, so I'm happy!

This post is linked to Finish it up Friday.

What I'm Working On

Pieces cut out for a brand new project, hot iron transfers transferred to the fabric and ready to stitch... I've got plans for this week!

This post is linked to Design Wall Monday.

A Trip to the Quilt Shop - Grandma's Attic

I haven't been spending much time in quilt shops lately, but we were already in Dallas and I knew that Grandma's Attic carries a lot of redwork....

Before we even got into the store, my mind had gone from embroidery to applique. Look at that washtub! And the stove! 

Three spinning racks full of Aunt Martha's hot iron transfers. No mermaids, not that I'm looking anymore, but it's a hard habit to break. But I did find a couple that I hadn't seen before.

Parakeets! And a  coockoo clock! But there's also that phone....and the mirror.... I need these in the Garden Party quilt.

I wound up getting two sets of Aunt Martha's transfers, the pattern for the Sunbonnet Sue quilt, and some other embroidery patterns with fantastic vintage appliances. I'm loving that television set and vacuum cleaner. Those will get their own quilt.

Weekly Stash Report 

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 0 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 41 yards
Net Added for 2015: 38 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 2800 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 3675 yards
Net Added for 2015:  875 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times.

Look -- I Found Yarn!

I finally got a chance to slip up to the sewing room and dig around for some yarn that might stretch the Outback Wool I'm using for my Constant Companion. It's not the exact color I would have chosen if I'd been standing at the yarn shop with an unlimited selection, but it will felt and it blends with the colors of the bag. The more I knit, the less obvious these stripes are.

If it's hard to tell where the substitute yarn begins and ends, it works.... right? I might be fussier if I had a better history of actually using my felted bags.

Now I've got to teach myself to do an Icord bind-off and figure out how my scaled down stitch count will work with the buttonholes for the strap. I can do this!

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {5/8/15}

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.

Askew!

When I was digging around in the sewing room for something else entirely, I found a couple of WIPs that I couldn't even remember casting on. One was apparently a summer top for Teenage Daughter. I can only figure that much out because the yarn I was using made it for either her or me and the size eliminated me. And because it was in the same knitting bag as this project, which is now a happily finished tote bag.

This started life as a thrift store sweater. Back in 2007, I took it apart and wound the yarn and cast on for Askew. My yarn wasn't getting the same gauge as the pattern, so I did the math and made some adjustments and got the right circumference (a little bit harder than it sounds, since the front is knit on the bias.)  I don't remember much of this, but a blog post that filled in the details for me.

The whole thing was there, all finished except for the straps. Teenage Daughter tried it on and the straps don't sit right. That's why I abandoned the project seven years ago.

I was just getting  ready to throw it out when I remembered the no-sew tote bag tutorial that Teenage Daughter had showed me that morning, because she couldn't imagine why someone would buy a brand new shirt, not wear it, then hack it up into a tote bag. That's what you do with Goodwill Bins shirts that are the wrong size but have great logos. And, apparently, failed tank tops that have interesting design elements.

Swarming Bees Don't Sting

That's what I kept reminding myself a couple of hours ago when I was reaching over my head and trying to shake a mass like this one (a swarm from 2013) into a cardboard box. Even in a full bee suit, that's not my idea of fun....and it didn't help that I could only find one of the gloves. 

I don't know whether I got the queen or not. If I did, there's a chance. If I didn't...then we've lost our last hive.  While Hubby was laid up last year we lost all but one of them.....and then a tree fell on that hive. Have I mentioned that 2014 was a really bad year?

Cross your fingers that my attempt at saving the bees was a success!  While I wait to find out, I'm linking up to Farmgirl Friday and Simple Saturdays.

Sixteen Dollars and an Estate Sale

When we headed out to an estate sale on Saturday, I didn't expect to buy anything. Once we got to that old metal barn and walked in, I was sure that there was nothing I'd want, but Hubby started poking around and I wandered a bit while I was waiting for him. Everything was dirty. Nothing had prices. 

There are some things I'd love to have, but don't want to pay the going price for.

Like this fan....

And this scale...

A vintage bottle and jug cutting kit has never been on my list, but I know I saw something on Pinterest that required cutting bottles. And I remember wanting one as a kid and I'm sure this would be safer than using string and nail polish and fire and a sink full of ice water. (I should buy band-aids, shouldn't I?)

I've got two of these drying racks already, but my girl is going out into the world someday and she's not taking mine. This one is a slightly different style than mine and definitely neater...but keeping it means I'm the one who gets to clean it up.

I got my share of the haul, which also included the tea pot that's hiding there by the drying rack and a wonderfully sturdy step stool for my kitchen (something that's been on the wish list forever) for sixteen dollars Seriously, I would have paid that for a new stool if I'd ever found one as sturdy as what found in the old dirty barn.

This was the kind of sale I love, where people are just trying to get rid of stuff they want and don't really care too much. The drying rack wasn't as cheap as I would've liked, but the scale and bottle cutting kit were super cheap (two bucks for that scale?!?!), so it all evened out.

And now I've got a fan and a scale and a bottle cutting kit!

This post is linked to Treasure Hunt Thursday.

{Yarn Along} Have I got enough yarn here?

The more I knit on my Constant Companion, the more convinced that I am there's not enough yarn here. I already knew that I needed something else for the straps, but now I'm wondering about the body....and I'm not quite worked up enough to go through my stash to see if I have any feltable yarn that will go with this colorway. I'm fairly sure  I don't, but I suppose I should check just in case.

It's not helping my knitting mojo that I can't find the second partial skein of Mellow Stripes that I need for the Leftover Socks that I showed you last week. Two projects I'm making great progress on, and I probably can't finish either.





If you read thrillers, run and get your hands on a copy of Method 15/33 by Shannon Kirk. I did think twice about reading this one.  Was I really in the mood for another abduction story? In this case, a pregnant sixteen year old is pulled into an old van and driven for days....and that's where it stops being like anything else I've read. The book opens with the girl alone in a locked room, carefully listing every asset and assigning it a number. She is determined to keep her baby safe, to escape, and to exact her revenge.  I read straight through, turning pages to find out just who this girl was and what was going to happen to her. And was surprised when I thought the story was coming to an end and realized that I still had half of the book to go. (One of the quirks of reading things on the Kindle is that you don't have a constant physical indication of your progress.)

For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times.


  Disclosure - The publishers provided me with an ARC.

No More Bicycle Wheels for Me!

Not for a while at least -- until I find another pattern so adorable that I forget how much of a pain these wheels were. 

My problem with them?  I couldn't find a logical order to do them in without carrying the thread more than I'd like.

Now that she's done, I'm busy on a new block and not avoiding my embroidery anymore.

Garden Party Quilt Update

I haven't taken a picture of my Garden Party blocks since November.  A couple of blocks are winning the game of hide and seek, but this is almost all of them. It's the closest to a quilt that this project has ever looked!

Laying them all out like this is a pain, but it gives me an idea what the finished project might look like and reassures me that I don't have too many chores or plates or things taking baths, so it's worth the hassle.

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

Stocking Up on the Self Striping Stuff

In the year and a half since the accident, I've knit twenty-four pairs of socks, most of them with self-striping sock yarn that's been aging in my stash since I first fell in love with the idea of sock knitting. 

I've still got plenty of sock yarn to play with, but most of the self-striping stuff has been converted into striped socks. I've been waiting for Serenity Sock from Joann's to go on sale.

This time, I did my homework, checking to see what the yarn would look like as a sock so there shouldn't be any unpleasant surprises when I start knitting.

It puts me a little bit in the red for the year, but I don't think that'll last for long. 

Weekly Stash Report 

Fabric Used this Week: 0 yards

Fabric Used year to Date: 0 yards

Added this Week: 0 yards

Added Year to Date: 41 yards

Net Added for 2015: 38 1/2 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards

Yarn Used year to Date: 2800 yards

Yarn Added this Week: 1610 yards

Yarn Added Year to Date: 3675 yards

Net Added for 2015:  875 yards

This post is linked to Patchwork Times. 

Ask the Past: Pertinent and Impertinent Advice From Yesteryear

If you're as intrigued by random bits of history as our family is, Ask the Past: Pertinent and Impertinent Advice from Yesteryear by Elizabeth P. Archibald may be just what you didn't know you wanted to read. I learned how to dye my hair green (from a source dated 1563), some new tips for childbirth (scream loudly so people will feel sorry for you and give you treats), and to only give cheap clothes to small children because they tear and stain them. Although I knew that last one already.

It's all in the original spelling and grammar and some entries are more challenging to decipher than others. There's a brief comment after each entry and I found myself giggling at quite a few of them. What I really wish the book included was some explanation of the historical context.

If you're intrigued, you can check out Ask the Past, the blog that the book is based on, or the Ask the Past Facebook Page. Both will give you a good feel for what the book is all about.

 Disclosure -- The publisher provided me with an ARC.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {5/1/15}

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.