Bloggers' Quilt Festival: Homespun

Hi!  This is my entry into the BQF for this fall.  If you're a regular reader, you'll have seen it before and therefore know how much I'm in love with it, so you'll forgive me for showing it again - I love you!  If you're new, welcome!

Title: Homespun - #132
Finished: May 2012
Category: Scrap Quilts
Size: 76" square
Composition: mostly scraps, an old pair of dress pants, a little yardage, and backed and bound with an old sheet.

I started this quilt about three years ago and it took almost that long to get it made.  When I started blogging, I was quickly overwhelmed with wonderful ideas and beautiful quilts made by others.  This quilt and this quilt in particular really inspired me.  So I set out to make a spiderweb quilt!

It took a lot of pencil and paper playing to figure out how I wanted my blocks to look. I cut my own cardstock templates, traced and cut fabric, added them to foundation paper, and then I had to wait until I had enough scraps to start it.  Since I had only made a handful of quilts, and wasn't as insane about keeping scraps as I am now, it took awhile to build up the stash.  Now I have tons. :-)

It's quilted using pebbles (a first for me at the time), some organic spirals in the webs, and straight line echoes around the edges.  I also quilted the name into one of the webs.

I had the horrific discovery of a hole in the top while quilting it.  It looked like a snag or like it may have been there, microscopic, until I had really started manipulating the quilt through my machine.  And I almost cried.  But then, I figured it's a spiderweb, and freehanded a little spider to cover it up.  His name is Troy.

Of all the quilts I have made, this one is definitely my favourite. My original post on this quilt is here.

Thanks for stopping by and thanks to Amy for hosting! I'm hoping to get around to see everyone's quilt by the time the festival is finished.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Playing with Fabric

This post is a few days behind schedule. Good intentions, blah, blah, shift in weather, blah, blah...

Firstly, this is what happens when you get fabric by mail and your nephew is handy.  He tears into the packages, is fascinated by a charm pack and the two of you make it rain patchwork for twenty minutes of pure fun. Regardless of whether the fabric ends up in anything, I've got my money's worth.  But now, all of Seester's quilt fabric has arrived.

I've got it separated in to darkish-lightish.

Secondly, I went to my first guild meeting on Monday and was pleased to finally meet a blog friend of mine - Flo, of Butterfly Quilting! Very exciting and fun! (Ps - she's a good hugger. :-)

The guild gave me homework.  I have to make a name tag/signature block to wear at meetings. We're allowed to use the block provided or to use our own fabric, as long as we stick to the format.  So, as I have been delighting a tiny piecing lately, I grabbed my crumb bag and my rotary cutter and went to town.  I haven't been able to sew them together yet but here's the preview of the top pieces and the back.

The squares are 1" so they will shrink up by half once the seams are sewn.  I know it seems like a lot of work, and it kinda is, but it mostly isn't. It's also gosh-darn fun and oddly satisfying. Order from chaos!  I whittled an entire  XL ziplock of scraps down to a series of 1", 1 1/2", 2" and 2 1/2" squares was pretty satisfying, too.  I have a really great stash of little squares coming along. Potential is brewing!  My scrap pile is getting smaller, too.

Speaking of guilds, people are talking of starting up a modern quilt guild in town here and I'm so excited I could squeal a little bit.  In fact, I did.  A little bit.  So, yeah, I'm all over that!  You can read more about it here.  PS - Periwinkle Quilting is my local and I love it there.

Okay, I've got get another Diet Coke.

Really Random Thursday

I'm going with a meme today.  Mostly because I'm feeling a little random.  And a bit like I need cheesecake....

This currently driving me crazy.

I know there's a software update but since I use the maps pretty intensely, I've refrained but that little red 1 in the corner is taunting me.  TAUNTING me!!
I had to bite the Reeder bullet. I'm almost caught up on the blog reading I've missed. I upgraded to Lion this summer not realizing that Mail - aka my RSS reader - dropped support for RSS reading.  I lost all my carefully preserved articles, posts, etc, and a list of certain feeds that I can't remember the addresses for. It's one of the reasons it took me so long to get back on the reading wagon.  It just seemed like too much to track down. Admittedly, I used my blogroll (and other people's blogrolls) as a 'reader' for most of them but there were others that I kept in the RSS reader that didn't fit with my theming.  It's taken me months to adjust to Reeder, which is the one I finally went with.  I don't hate it but I don't love it either. As I've been catching up, I've been adding every blog I pop-in on to it and turns out, there's a lot.  However, having them all in one place is making it far easier to keep up on reading. :-)

This is molasses.  The texture was completely amazing and I had to take a picture of it. However, I could not get around the enhanced reflective properties of molasses when viewed through a camera...

Fabric for Seester's quilt has begun arriving. Still waiting on one more envelope...

Fabric for a project I can't tell you much about other than there is a whole lotta strips going on...

A nearby store closing yielded 95% off Christmas ornaments, which worked out to $0.19/half dozen.  Score!  So I bought 3 dozen coppery glass balls for less than a twoonie.  In case you think I'm a crazy person and matched the ornaments to the cat, let me assure you that I'm actually crazier and choose the cat 14 years ago because he was orange.  True story.

Speaking of Christmas, Nephew MAY be getting Play-doh.  We MAY have tested it out first.  For safety reasons. Or something.  Remember when you were a kid and never wanted to go to sleep because you thought the adults would have fun without you and you'd miss it?  Turns out, they did.

This is me racing a giant turtle.  Got the opportunity to do a workshop with a friend on improv for a summer drama camp in Turtleford so we had to take pics with the turtle...

A pile of cut-up socks waiting to be interfaced.  I'm saving them up for a picnic blanket quilt.  I plan on calling it the Dirty Socks Picnic Blanket.  I need about thirty more pairs of socks to blow a hole in the toe or heel... :-)

And plain greek yogurt mixed with brown sugar for dipping fruit like nectarines is my current favourite snack.

That's my disjoined story for today!  I'll be linking up to Really Random at Live a Colorful Life, where Cindy started this whole Random movement. More power to ya, sister!

Knit Wits.

Okay.  Taking a break from catching up on two months (!) of blog reading.  I've missed you, people!  And I'm only just getting started on all the fabulous thoughts you've had, projects you've started, photos you've taken, and trials you've endured.  It doesn't help that as I get older, I find it increasingly harder to sit still for long periods of time so it's taking a while. Lol. I'm finding myself becoming more and more like that dog in Up;  I start out focused and th..."Squirrel!"

Turns out, I am becoming more dependent on keeping my hands busy just to keep my wits.  I was without anything on the needles since my last knitting projects with the big floor pillow and works-in-progress list I finished conquered months ago and  and I needed something else quick.  I ransacked my stash and came up with a chunky skien of wool that I picked up at a farmer's market in Edmonton about three years ago. It hadn't been dyed or processed and the woman who sold it to me raised the sheep and spun the yarn herself.  Definitely time to do something with it.  I'd always wanted to experiment with mixing feltables and non-feltables so I grabbed some neutral-coloured natural fibres like silk, soy (felts like crazy), bamboo (shrinks a little), cotton and linen from the leftover pile.

I randomly worked in little blocks of these throughout the wool background.  I had an idea that it might be a clutch with little bubbles of clear stitches popping out from the felt.  After several washings in hot, soapy water, it looks like this.

I'm sticking to clutch as its final identity and I'll let you know how it turns out after I've lined and finished it.

Then I knit the ugliest mittens this side of Thanksgiving.  I'm calling them Turkey Mittens.  Orange, brown, greeny-purple, and yellow.

Yep.  Uh-glee.  I think I'm going to flip them inside out and use them to line a larger pair of grey mittens so that I can bask and delight in their ugliness while keeping them from triggering sense memories of stuffing and gravy amongst the masses. :-)

But since my hands were free again, I cast on a scarf, again using stash. (I've done pretty good at using my on-hand supplies and not spending on new lately... yay!)  This pattern was written as one colour but I decided that was boring (read:  I had two colours in my stash and not enough of either to go with just one).  The good news is that the two-tone seems to be working really well so I'm happy.

Because I'm back to keeping the hands occupied, I have managed to clear some things off the PVR, which admittedly was getting kinda stuffed with shows and old movies that I always intended to watch and then never found the right time or mood for...  However, like my "one new recipe a week" rule, I've tried to make a habit out of actually watching the things I tape.  And boy! I've seen some gems but begun to lament the general lack of Cary Grant-ness in everyday life...  Such are the consequences of knitting.