Oops!: Now with Finishes.

I had considered calling it Oops!: The Musical, but I couldn't get song rights. :-P

Seems like I forgot to check the internet for a month.  Oops.  Maybe it's a failure to really dig into the new routine or just a need to spend less time with my computer but I've definitely tried to prioritize other things this summer than blogging and blog-reading.  You do NOT want to know how many unread posts are in my Feedly....

I have been busy with the following:  meeting blog peeps in person!, sewing, knitting, teaching Nephew a bunch of stuff his mother doesn't approve of, hiding in dark basements away from sunlight, teaching English as an Additional Language, offering my shoulder, cooking while listening to loud music and kitchen-dancing, watching just about every CFL game (something has to fill the void between hockey seasons....), and reading actual, physical books.  Books, people! Remember those? I love real books, but man, I have a hard time sitting still long enough to get "gripped".

Anyhoo.  I'll ease back into the (ir)regular blogging routine with some finishes I meant to post ages ago.  A couple of months ago, I was giving a little presentation on QAYG at the Saskatoon MQG as part of our meeting.  I had done up a few slapdash sample pieces using scraps and 12" batting squares just to illustrate some things that I'd learned for the prez.  And then, of course, I'm left with these little thingies and no plan.  Blergh.  So I just started throwing them together.

I ended up with two mug rugs from my piles of scrap,

a mini table topper,

and a coffee table runner.

The white on white chunks are leftovers from my brother's Punisher quilt.  The muslin that backed most of these was from yardage, but that too was leftover from another project so I call it a win.  Even the binding was from the leftover basket.  The batting was scrap that had been cut into 12" squares just for practicing free-motion.

Is this my best quilting/sewing? Heck, no, but I used up some scraps , I learned some techniques, and if I spill something on them, I won't cry for days. So there you go.  Not every piece has to be show-worthy.  I think these are like the quilt version of sweat pants. I wouldn't show them off to fancy company, but to protect a table from Hot Wheels or the carpet from living room picnics, they're just fine. :-)

And now I have a month's worth of blogs to catch up on. Again.

Still kickin'

Well, it's been real... lol.  I find that in the spring, I need a little more downtime than the rest of the year due to the season-shift and the migraine-related consequences that come with it.  This year, with its whack-tastic weather has proved to be a little more difficult than usual and results in the frequent disappearing act.  It's not that I don't miss reading blogs and keeping up on the haps but this last little while, I kinda skipped the glare of the internet - my laptop sat abandoned - and my sewing machine gathered more dust from disuse than lint from overuse.  It's Easter break so I've had the week off but while I had big plans, I crashed hard instead. My productivity was more of the passive kind - I cleared tons off the PVR and watched almost the entirety of Game of Thrones. (I was also holding my breath approaching the NHL trade deadline... Phew! Dodged an unneeded goalie-sized bullet there!)

This was the first day of Spring 'round these parts.... Chest height snow. After the first two melts.  Yeah.

So, I'm a week behind on everyone's blogs if you've been missing my comments or hits on your site. Sorry, I'll get there. :-) (Oh, so very Canadian....)

I am working on a tutorial for the random piecing demo I did at the Saskatoon Modern Quilt Guild at our last meeting and I'm hoping to get it up before the end of the weekend.

The guild has a couple of challenges going at all times.  The one we just finished was the Ugly Fat Quarter Challenge.  We all brought an ugly FQ, dropped it into a pillowcase and took turns pulling one out. What did I get? A green/brown floral monstrosity.  I went pouch because I was mentally blocked and after experimenting unsuccessfully with some FMQ and mock-trapunto, I was running out of fabric.  I did manage to quickly design my own gnome-y accent for it though and it makes me happy.  My sister thought the pouch was cute and it now lives with her.

'Scuze the shaky photos - took them months ago.

Our current challenge is a Two-Colour Crayon Challenge.  You pull two crayons from a magical toque and those are the colours you're stuck with.  You can use only those colours, and neutrals if you really feel you need them.  I pulled yellow and white.  And as much as I'm happy with how it's going, it will also be living at Seester's.

I managed to get my Simply Solids Bee block finished.  Karen @ BungalowBayQuilts asked for Scrap Jar Stars and I was thrilled that I had tons of scraps so I could make it really colourful for her. Hopefully, colour was what she wanted because, boy, there's a ton in there!

The major project I had planned for the break was the quilting on a quilt that's sat waiting, basted and ready, since the middle of January. Well, folks, it's already the end of Thursday and this is how far I got.

10 minutes in...

But when HotWheels interrupt your projects, it's really hard to be annoyed at a lack of progress.  Nephew's learning about why we don't keep pushing the button with the scissors on it...

And since you may have noticed this, I'm not on Crackbook, I don't pin anything, I don't use Twitter or Instagram, and am kinda lame and inept at using Flickr.  Therefore, please understand how very difficult it was for me to do the following.   I am resentfully claiming my blog on Bloglovin'. (I am a curmudgeon, yes, I get that.)

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Yeah.  I have no plans to use it - I'm happy with Reeder - but I know that I keep a pretty low profile and thought it might make it easier to find me, if you're looking.

Now - I'm going to send some overdue emails and get back to reading.... Have a lovely one!

Hexes Finished!

Somehow, February always gets away from me....

I finished the hexie table topper on Sunday, just before our guild meeting. I filled in the edges with half hexes and tiny kites (only every other half hex on the two sides they fit - I'm not THAT intense, though some folks and good for them!)

I used four or five long, skinny pieces of batting - you know, leftovers that aren't good for much, you hate to throw away, but leave you with a big pile of batting that makes you THINK you have a piece big enough for your next project...? Yeah, those. :) I didn't join them; I just cleaned up the edges, butted them together on my back piece and then laid the top over it. I quilted pretty thoroughly, (leaving this sort-of jewel shape...) and since this isn't going to be used in a cover hog battle or for making forts in the living room, that''ll do.

In keeping with my scrap plan, I used only bindings remnants from other project. Between this and my scrappy trip blanket, I have few binding scraps left! Yay! I did have to go into my stash to grab a yard for the back but that's what a stash is for.

Title: Compulsive :D
Approx 30x34"
Given to my mum
Never want to see another hex for as long as I live (or a year, if it turns out I'm exaggerating... )

I also finished my bee block for Simply Solids Bee for March. My lovely guild mate sent out these beautiful fabrics, for squares in squares... On Sunday, she showed us her inspiration piece so I'm really looking forward to seeing this one when it's done.

Off to take a thread-painting class from My Sweet Prairie.....!

Busy. Compulsive.

Ha! We all knew that "three posts a week" thing wasn't going to hold up for long. :-)

In all fairness, I had other things taking up my time.  Like teaching, and spring, and play rehearsals, and vehicular accidents (no injuries!), and general life stuff.  Priorities.  We all have them, so no apologies, no obligations.  However, other than keeping up with the hockey news, I haven't been reading anyone this past week.  So you know what I'm doing tomorrow. :-)

I have been sewing, amazingly enough.  A paper-piecing workshop at last month's Modern Guild meeting led to a scrap-busting explosion of hexagons in my living room. This is what 400 of them looks like.

All from scraps. Randomly pieced.

Yeah.  Since I ran out of my purchased hex papers about a week into this, I ended up making a crap-ton (yes, a crap-ton!) of my own.  You can read more about how on the guild blog here.

I still have some edges to fill in and a border to do but I'm pleased so far.  It's going to be a table topper.  You'd think after all of this hand-sewing, I would have mad skills when it comes to the whipstitch. I should have a wicked whipstitch. But nay, good folks, nay.  It still looks a little like I did it with a chicken bone for a needle and with my eyes closed.  Oh well, maybe some day...

I was working on this piece at my other guild meeting (there are two different guilds in town - I belong to both) and a fellow member, whom I'd never met, snarked me, "Well, that's just compulsive!"  Fair enough - there is a nugget of truth in that, my mother would certainly agree with her, but handwork helps me focus and keeps my hands busy during stretches of time where my attention would otherwise wander, like the occasional guild meeting, and I'm therefore less likely to run around like a four-year-old dragged to a tupperware party for lack of a babysitter. To my credit, I did not snark back, because I don't know her and wouldn't want to inadvertently offend her while trying to crack a joke to prove I have a sense of humour. (However, blogging about it might have devalued that credit somewhat... Oops!) I couldn't help but feel though, while not offended, that there was a different way to offer that opinion that didn't make it a personal attack.  "I personally don't have the patience for something like that" or "I can't be bothered to do hand-sewing or something that small" or even "that kind of thing is not for me" would all have come across as more supportive or polite than the undertone of "there's something wrong with you!" implied with the word compulsive. 

Of COURSE it's compulsive.  Look at this.

I had a pretty good laugh about it.  I'm fairly sure she didn't mean any harm. I'm not generally bothered by criticism. In fact, I think constructive criticism is key to growth and development, and our tendency to over-nice each other, particularly in the quilting community, detracts from our ability to deliver or accept such criticism without taking something personally.  What made me laugh was that the comment wasn't even about the work (too  many colours, poor whipstitching, inaccurately cut or sewn hexagons, or not to someone's personal taste), but that the statement was a value judgment on ME, and not the work. Now, I get called crazy all the time, (there probably IS something wrong with me - lol) but usually by people whose first names I know, and who I have an established rapport with.  I have called fellow bloggers crazy in a loving way, particularly when they are exceedingly prolific or unjustly hard on their own work. I guess I've become more aware as a teacher that what we put out there can have a impact on people.  Imagine if I'd told another artist, a potter, that pottery was a useless art, or a child whose room is covered in pink, purple and sparkles that only losers like unicorns (or apply it to weightier subjects that I won't get into here). It might roll off them like nothing, or it could stop them from enjoying something that had previously.  For the record, I think pottery is amazing and the skill level some people have achieved is staggering. I also have no problem with unicorns, though I don't embrace them as strongly as would your average person on the street.  And I LOVE constructive criticism. It helps me get better at the things I do.  I could not survive as a teacher without giving and getting constructive feedback. But this has been a reminder for me not be conscious of applying value judgments in that criticism. 

I guess you can say I DID learn something from the comment after all. 

I've got other things I've been working on but that's what's tickling my mind today.  Hope you didn't mind the musing.  Maybe it gave you something to chew on.  

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

Wanted: A Clever Post Title

So if you think of one, let me know. :-)

The tree came down last weekend and my desk returned to its place in the corner, but along the other window this time, which has freed up some space.  I'm still in the process of getting organized but I'm getting there. Given that this new setup has led to long, uninterrupted stretches of sewing, I have taken full advantage.

My nephew's 2nd birthday was on the 5th and while I did give him a bunch of Hot Wheels, I hadn't finished the other half of his gift until this past Wednesday:  the bag to put them in.

See my oops? :-)

I found the paper-piecing patterns on Fandom In Stitches - totally free - and then I framed the results with a lovely little traffic print, lined it with the leftover solid from Seester's quilt and added two ribbons to act as drawstrings. It finished about 12x15".  He was thrilled. "Oh!  MAY-turr...!"  Happy boy, happy auntie.

The other advantages of gaining back the workspace is that I was able to cross off a goal by organizing my scraps.  I went from this...

...to this...

...and finally this:

Ooooh, that's one fingerprint-y desktop...

Neat and tidy. Well... they're contained, anyway.  I would like to organize further but right now, they're sorted by size. Crumbs and short strips in the orange bin, everything else sorted in large ziplocs, etc, in the white laundry hamper.

The sort also allowed me to do something I swore I didn't have time for...

I drank the kool-aid.

For the record, I don't do instagram.  I wasn't exposed to this virus through instagram.

Nope, it was y'all.

Within a two week period, it seemed that almost every feed in my RSS reader was throwing Scrappy Trips at me.  I'm not generally a joiner in the "everyone's doing it" sense (I still haven't seen Titanic, and don't intend to) but they were so pretty! And EVERYWHERE.  It was a bombardment; I was hiding in my "I don't have time" bunker but being shelled within an inch of my quilting sanity.  I came out waving my white flag. Of scraps.  That was my one rule for myself:  I had to use only scraps for these blocks.  What will happen with the back and binding? Don't know.  But for now, I'm pleased (and sickeningly shocked) that I made 36 blocks without cutting into yardage.  That's a sizeable dent in the old scrap heap, eh?

And then there's my first ever bee block for the Simply Solids Bee.  Never done a bee before but it was on my quilting bucket list, so...  Lethargic Lass asked for asterisk blocks - and they were much more fun than I thought they'd be; the fabrics she sent were different than what I usually use, too, so that was very enjoyable!  I threw it in the mail last week so she should have it soon.

Believe it or not, I actually got MORE sewing than that done last week and I have the iron-steam burns to prove it. But why spend all my projects on one post...?  :-)

Have a stellar week!

Early gift

Yep.  I went AWOL again. It happens.  I get busy, life happens, you've been there.  Plus, most of what I was busy with is not interesting or a Christmas secret, and then there were real world incidents that break my heart so much that I can't bear to write about them.  I've had to filter a great deal of what I've been watching and reading because as a teacher and someone with a precious tiny person in her life, my grief is too much.  For everyone who has been affected by the horror of it, my prayers are with you...

It was overwhelming but now, I am choosing to concentrate on all the incredible blessings in my life and remember why I love this season so very much.  Peace, hope and love.  I am extremely grateful, extremely hopeful, wishful for positive change, and finally, finally, able and inspired to blog.  Sigh.  And here we go...

***

If you haven't come across Cindy's blog, Live a Colorful Life, you're missing out.  Not only is she talented, and marvellous, wonderfully funny, she's about the nicest person I've never met in real life.  :-)  When she asked me if I wanted to do a private swap, I instantly and nervously said yes!  We decided on pouches, though we were both a little skittish on zippers.

I knew the one I made would have to be full of colour so I went to the rainbow side of things.

Plus, I got to play with teeny tininess which always makes me happy. Then I added a little Saskatchewan and sent it off.  Cindy blogged about it here.

A week ago, this marvellous package arrived.

It's beautiful!! And huge!  It's now my new knitting project bag (and the zipper is perfect.  Yes, perfect. The one I did?  Well, Cindy was nice enough not to mention the amateurish installation...)  Cindy does these amazing things with selvedges.  And this hexy flower is no execption! Somehow, I've missed taking a decent photo of the inside (so hard to get good light these days!), but the fabric is perfect and there's two big pockets.  And then there were the goodies she threw in!

California honey, chocolate covered jumbo raisins and almonds (completely gone, by the way - so good!), a wonderful bag of pretty buttons (I have a weakness for buttons) and a box stuffed full of 1 1/2" squares. Joy!

Plus, something I've longed for since she opened her etsy shop, a custom pin cushion, all of selvedges and so completely perfect.

I won't lie and say that I didn't get a little misty-eyed, because I did.  I was terribly sick and had a bad migraine to boot so it's timing was amazing.  My thank you email feels inadequate.  I am so lucky to have such fantastic people like Cindy in my life...

And now, I have a month's worth of blog-reading to catch up on but as I am officially on holidays, officially done shopping, making and wrapping, and officially into the buttertarts, I will be able to do so before 2013.

Regardless of your faith, background, geography or politics, I am wishing you peace, love, and hope today and every day of the year.

Much love,
Carly

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!