A good start

I am so good at starting...
I like a good beginning...
I get carried away easily...
There's nothing quite like starting a new project, is there? I know. I have UFOs to show for it. That's why I keep trying to get to grips with them all by making lists and showing photos at the beginning of the year and make plans to finish them all. I know I will, eventually, but I thrive on having different things on the go at the sametime. And there are always new things to try, new patterns that are so tempting, and why resist? We all know I need an excuse to buy fabric, and if you make stuff you get to buy more, right? In case you run out...

And yet I have focused mainly on quilting on this blog. I don't know why I rarely mention my knitting projects. It might just be because they take so long that I rarely have any finishes to show. I used to knit a lot in my teens and during my student years. I was rarely seen without a piece of knitting in my hands back then. But then I discovered quilting, and I lived and breathed quilting for years and years. I didn't knit anything at all. In fact, it was blogging and the availability of great patterns from sites like Knitty and Ravelry that lured me back in. Gorgeous yarn from Noro and various hand dyed wool tempted me no end, and before I knew it, I was a knitter again.
Now, if you have a peek in my little knitting nook on Ravelry you will see that I have several projects on the go. Mainly scarves and wraps, and I really need to focus on finishing them one by one like I have been doing with my quilting UFOs.

So what do I do? I fall head over heels in love with yet another pattern and before I know it the yarn is ordered and on it's way, along with some other skeins of lovely Madelinetosh Merino Light - it would be a waste of postage to order just the two skeins of DK, after all...
Oh, I'm going to have such fun knitting this lovely cowl in lovely shades of red and pink - just right for February, and there is more cold weather coming our way, I've heard, so it will come in very handy once it's done.
And since one can't focus on just the one craft, I also had to join the xandplusalong - it's no good just focusing on getting things finished when I'm such a great starter, is there?

EQ mock-up, not actual stitched blocks!

2013 Finish-A-Long Q1

Since I have quite a few UFOs lying around, and plenty of ideas for new quilts, I had better keep my motivation up. Being invited to join Leanne at She Can Quilt's  2013 Finish-A-Long seemed a too good opportunity to pass  - so I'm in!

I wrote about these in my UFOpost. The three first are hidden away and realistically won't be finished during the first months of 2013, and the first in the last row is finished (yay!), but the rest I should be able to finish during the first quarter of 2013:

• The garden quilt
• Amy's Daisies
• Numbers
• The Hometown Ripple bag 
• The nostalgia tote bag
• The Tuscany Quilt
• Bella X
• The Christmas runner

First finish

I finally managed to get some sewing time last weekend, and finished quilting my Lotta quilt. It took me a few evenings to finish handstitching the binding and, since it's January, I had to wait another few days to be able to take some photos in (what goes for) daylight.

The fabric is from Lotta Jansdotter's premier collection, Echo, combined with Kona Cotton in Raisin. As I mentioned earlier, I got the inspiration from this quilt, and it's amazing how different it is with a dark solid, instead of a light one.

I pieced the backing from the same fabrics. I have come to love this recently - you get a front and back that belong together, and you get to use up a lot of the fabric instead of leaving it to languish in the stash.

Since I cut the pieces for this quilt a while before I started it, I have already attacked the scraps and made four mug rugs, and still I have some bits and pieces to use in other projects.

The quilting is done in a kind of loose and loopy shell pattern - I wanted to keep it soft and drapey, and, let's face it, it finishes much faster that way...

2013 - bring it on!

Beginning a new year is like starting a new journal, isn't it? Lots of blank pages to be filled in as we continue our journey and wonder where it will take us. It's also a time to stop and look back and contemplate on what we have achieved.
2012 for me was a year of waiting, not a year of doing, and I really need to snap out of it. I decided in the end of 2011 that I needed to find a new place to live, as this flat is too small, needs more work done to it than I am capable of tackling and the thin ceilings give me too much information about what my neigbours are doing...

I was lucky and had a bit of a windfall in 2011 which will allow me to buy a bigger place, and I thought that would happen just like that. But it is not so easy - one has to find the right place first. I don't think I'm too picky, but I have some criteria that must be met, and I spent 2012 searching and waiting for it to appear.

I remember packing away my christmas decorations a year ago, thinking that the next time they would be used at my new place. I also started purging my belongings and packing away things I wouldn't need for a while, so much that when I was to start decorating for the holidays, most of my decorations were buried under so much stuff in the basement that I just couldn't be bothered, so I have gone for the minimalist approach to decorating this time - no tree, but christmassy quilts, light chains and lots of candles. Different, but very nice anyway.

I am also in a better place when it comes to preparing for a move than I was a year ago, so that's good - a lot of stuff has been cleared out, given to jumble sales or to friends, so the things I have left will be the things I really want to hold on to, which should make an eventual move much easier.
But I see that I really need to be more active and do new things, spend time travelling, visiting, doing, not putting everything on hold.

I'm not all that into making new year resolutions, but I think it's about time I made one - to make this year a more active one socially and also to spend more time making quilts than dreaming about them. And that should give me more to blog about as well...
Happy New Year!

2012 - summing up - UFOs

As I mentioned in the previous post I have quite a few UFOs. There are 13 projects that are in some kind of unfinished or just started state. One of them is for a competition and will not be mentioned again until after the fact, but here are the remaining twelve.

 

The first four were on my UFO-list last year as well, although numbers 1 and 4 have been worked at consistently during the year. In fact, number 4 is now a quilt top waiting to be layered and quilted. Number 5 is going to be a big quilt, I have cut all the pieces which are from a stack of precuts from Amy Butler's Daisy Chain. I need to get my design wall back up and start playing with them.

 

Number 6 is also layered for quilting. It is in fact just a piece from an IKEA duvet cover which I intended to use as a practise piece for my machine quilting, inspired by Malka Dubrawsky's quilts from the same fabric. Copying is the best kind of flattery, is it not? 7 and 8 are both plans for bags. Number 7 is a Melly&Me pattern called Raspberry Ripple which I'm going to make with fabric from the Hometown line from Sweetwater. The leather handles and red zipper I wanted to use arrived just before Christmas, so I can get to work on this one right away. The next one will be a shopping bag full of memories as it will be decorated with various characters from TVshows from my childhood.

 

Then we get to the last row. Number 9 is my Lotta quilt, whic is layered and ready for quilting. Next is the Tuscany quilt. The picture is just a screen capture from EQ reminding myself of the pattern, but the placement of the fabric will be more random. I have a pile of fabric ready in patterns and colours that remind me of Italy that will be used for this.

 

Then there is the Bella Quilt. I bought just a few of the fabrics from Lotta Jansdotter's Bella line, and have picked out several fabrics from my stash to go with these. The pattern is chosen and everything is lying in wait on my cutting table. That is as good as started, is it not?

 

The last one is a table runner from the Danish company Quilt My Design, which I started in the beginning of December, intending to finish it for Christmas, but that didn't happen. It isn't all that christmassy, though - more of a winter theme with trees, snowmen and a cabin, so I'm working steadily along hoping to finish it before spring. It is worked in needleturn applique and is quite a relaxing task for quiet winter evenings.

So there you have it, my list of confessions... Not hat I feel bad about it or anything, it is more of a reminder to myself of what I have on the go, so I don't forget. Because there are just so many other tempting projects out there, that things I'm working on might be forgotten for a while, but as I am my own task master, there is no rush. Things will be finished eventually, but I'm going to have fun working on them, otherwise, what is the point?

2012 - Summing up

The year is ending and I spent last night mulling over what I have achieved when it comes to sewing at least. I was a bit surprised to see that there are so few large quilts this year and kept going back through my blog posts and Flickr photos to check that there really aren't any more, because I somehow felt that there were, but that turned out to be in 2011 - how time flies... :-P
This also explains why I have been such a lazy blogger this year - not much crafting to write about!

Well I did finish some items, though, although most are small. The list is as follows:

1 lapquilt, 2 wall quilts, 6 small art quilts, 1 pillow, 4 bags, 7 purses, 1 phone cosy, 1 ipad cosy, 1 ipad support, 14 mug rugs, 1 sewing bag, 1 tablecloth and 6 placemats.

Not too bad, but all my plans for larger quilts have fallen by the wayside. This means that I have quite a few UFOs as well, so I'll have no problems with finding things to sew.

I may not have been such a busy quilter during 2012, but I have kept myself busy buying fabric, so I had better get around to using some of it. I have plenty of ideas too, so let's get started! 

Backing up

I finished the backing for the crochet blanket last night. I'm not perfectly happy with it, but it will do. I used an old medley of fabric from Keepsake quilting for this project. I couldn't get enough information from the selvedges to tell you about it, but I remember buying it when my youngest nephew was little, so it is at least ten years old and probably no longer available. Somehow I never got round to making that Winnie the Pooh-quilt for him, but I never told anybody about my plans so his mum was none the wiser...

As I mentioned, I had a bit of a struggle with this one - I was just to add a fabric backing to a crochet blanket, but the thing took on a life of it's own and seemed reluctant to accept the fabric. I measured and re-measured and everything seemed to fit perfectly. One of the things I struggled with was that my friend wanted me to hide that it wasn't perfectly even along the edges as best I could, so I have created some rather creative corners, as you might see in the picture above!

I didn't want to quilt it, as I didn't want my stitches to draw attention away from a young mother's effort of making the first blanket for her baby - my contribution was only to provide backing, after all. I tried tying at the intersections, but I ended up with a sad and baggy blanket and concidered ripping my stitches out again, but that would have been quite hard to do, finding sewn stitches in thick wool.

After a few days away from it, I decided to tackle it again. I found that I could start from the middle, smooth the fabric out and tuck some fabric in along the seams to make it lie flat. I basted as I worked and then added running stitches along the folds stitching the fabric to itself without stitching into the wool. It was a lot more work than it should have been, and if I were to do it again, I would have gone about it differently, but it is finished now, and looks quite nice, in fact, so I'm glad I didn't give up, and I'm very pleased with the fact that I finally got to use those sweet Winne-the-Pooh-fabrics!

Baking street

Holiday preparations have officially started ;-) I  baked a batch of orange-chocolate biscotti today after sorting out my kitchen cupboards. Three half used packets of brown sugar have joined forces in one jar, ten year old spice has left the building and I have a feeling of control over my cupboards for a while... The kitchen is clean and I have plans for more baking tomorrow.

This evening, however, is dedicated to sewing. I'm working on a blanket for a girl I work with. She has just had her first baby, a lovely little boy. She had crocheted a blanket for him and wanted to have it backed with fabric. I offered to do it for her, and could have kicked myself several times for doing so, because it has been more complicated than I thought it would be. The yarn is quite bulky and one side is about six inches shorter than the other and to get this to work with a fabric backing was not as easy as I thought it would be. I thought that I could join the two with binding and just tie some knots here and there to keep the layers together. But the result was just too baggy on the fabric side, so I had to come up with a new solution which involves folding and running stitches. It looks much better now, so I hope it will be done before the evening is over. Pictures tomorrow!

Flowers in December

I know I should have been concentrating on getting things ready for Christmas, but I have been struggling to get into that good old Christmas Spirit this year. I think it might have something to do with still being in the same place - I started househunting at the beginning of the year, and when I packed all the Christmas decorations away it was with the thought that the next time I opened those boxes it would be in a new home. Now that didn't happen, but I can't let that bring me down. I need to get into a more festive frame of mind and leave the househunting till after christmas. That new flat with my own studio will materialize in the beginning of 2013, right?

It hasn't helped that this last week has been freezing - me and cold weather are not made for each other. Everything grinds to a halt and all I want to do is huddle under a pile of quilts and wait for spring...

Enough moaning. Look what I got to help cheer me up! My mum just finished stitching this cushion for me. It needs to be blocked and backed, but then it will become a lovely hope of spring to grace my sofa. In the meantime, I'll get cracking with Christmas prep. My list is made, the first presents bought and tomorrow I'll get those boxes from up from the basement and start adding some holiday touches here. Christmas will arrive this year too, there's no doubt about it!

The tapestry kit, by the way, is called "Primrose Path" and was bought at the lovely Ehrman tapestry shop in Lancer Square, Kensington, London years ago. I never got around to starting it, so thank heaven for mums with time on their hands :-)

Witchy bookmark

In case you wondered what was peeping out from my journal in the  previous post, let me show you the bookmark I made for a friend. She loves everything to do with witches, and inspired by this bookmark, I made my own version to go with a book I gave her (Rivers of London - great fun!). I stitched some stripy fabric around some slivers of batting for the legs and added felt beads stitched into shape for shoes. OK, they look more like Minnie Mouse shoes than the pretty high heeled ones from the original, but use what you have, and all that - right?

The legs were stitched on to a piece of felt where I embroidered the words "A frightfully good book". While I was working on that, I came up with the idea of trimming the top end into a point to give the idea of a witches' hat peeping out from the book. Some staring green eyes in the darkness and uneven orange flame-stitches along the edges complete the spooky theme. A fitting companion for a book filled with witches, wizards and ghosts, don't you think?

My latest book

There has not been a lot of sewing going on here lately. Instead I have been making a book... No, not writing one, but actually making it. I came across this blog and joined an online class to make my own journal and I have been having lots of fun with it. The class is all about using all sorts of scrap paper and ephemera, but I went with what I had on hand for this one, so it is mainly made of scrap book papers and paper tape. I used the covers from an old book, added paper tape, stickers and gaffer tape to strengthen the spine.

The eight signatures (folded sets of paper) are stitched together with waxed linen thread and the first and last pages are glued inside the book covers. Now I realise I could have added more signatures, as the book isn't all that full, but the idea is that it will expand as I work on it, adding notes, pictures and magazine cuttings until it is bursting with inspiration.

It is already full of colour and pattern, and some of it will be painted over before I can add my scribblings, but I think it makes the pages less intimidating than starting with just blank pages.
Now the class focused on making travel journals, but as I'm not planning on travelling a lot the next few  months, I'll be using mine to gather inspiration for decorating a new home while I'm house hunting. Maybe I'll have come up with a usable plan by the time I find that elusive new flat I'm searching for. At least I'll make it a point to have fun while searching...

Try and try again

I fell in love with this tiny bag on Pinterest and just had to try making one. The link led to a photo tutorial in Russian (I think) and was easy enough to follow, except for one thing - a lack of measurements! Ok, it did say that the box corner seams are 4 cms, but that was it. I measured and calculated and came up with zilch. There was nothing for it, I just had to have a go and actually make one. My first sample was not all that great, and the box corners didn't match up, so there was nothing for it: I had to rip out the seams and try again. After lining up the cut out corners and trimming them to make my bag less lopsided, I ended up with a 6 1/2 by 9 1/2 piece of quilted fabric and finished my little bag.

It is a sweet little thing, standing 4" tall on its 2 1/2" square bottom, but I'm not entirely happy with it. It looks too tall and skinny compared to the original, so I need to work on the proportions a bit and make a new attempt, I think. Maybe I should have a go at making some bigger, more useful ones as christmas presents while I'm at it? I think these little ones are quite sweet, but maybe not so practical.. Oh well, I'll just have to keep playing and see what I come up with!

X-ing off my list

I've had a pile of the new Lotta fabrics on my work table for a couple of weeks and started slowly adding more fabric to it without a real plan. Until I came across this tutorial. Fun quilt - why not use the fabrics I already had piled up? I took advantage of  the bright Saturday morning light and got to work rifling through my stash today adding more blues and greens. I think I have come up with something to work with here. I would like to use the text fabric as a feature, and so far this first version with the dark grid and text behind the crosses is my favourite.

 Or maybe lines of text crisscrossing the quilt? I'll have to make a few trial blocks I think...

And then I really must get to work on sorting my stash or coming up with a new storage solution...

But, really, nothing of this will happen this week - I have a big day coming up on Wednesday - half a century, oh my!

Sometimes...

 Sometimes fabric shopping can't be helped... Just look at these lovely ovals by Pat Bravo. This line had completely eluded me, but when I came across it in a blog-giveway (I forget where) and didn't win, I knew I just had to find my own set. I eventually found them at Fat quarter shop, and of course once you start putting things in your shopping basket, it is oh so easy to add a little something...

...like these from Bella by Lotta Jansdotter. I was trying to resist this line, having just finished a quilt top from her previous line, Echo (even as I'm writing, I see that there is something warped about my sense of logic- I loved the previous line, why shouldn't I buy this one? Duh.). I settled for these five, and I have some matching solids making their way across the Atlantic to my door as we speak. Oh joy!
Now what will I make from these? A set of new placemats for myself, perhaps? That will give me lots of scraps to play with later... Or another lap quilt with some text fabric and lovely polka dots perhaps? Or maybe both? Sometimes it's hard to decide...

Memory quilt

Meet my new quilt, Memory. The idea for this quilt came from a stock photo of computer disks which came with my previous computer (remember those?). All the squares and rectangles immediately screamed "quilt" to me, and I had the idea in the back of my mind for quite a while before doing anything about it. Eventually I unearthed an old disk and took some measurements before constructing my disk block in EQ. I decided to stick to just a few colours to keep it slightly abstract. If I had made all the disks grey, you probably wouldn't have seen them as disks at all, but the red, green and blue ones help the eye a little.
The quilt top came together in a couple of days, but it has been languishing in a pile of fabrics on my table for ages, because I couldn't quite make up my mind about how to quilt it. Eventually I decided on straight lines and got to work. Well, I say s t r a i g h t lines, I should say straightish... I seem to find it very difficult to sew straight lines on big quilts. I mean, the first one goes great, but then the next one goes a bit wobbly, the next one will weer away a bit on it's own, and before you know it, the whole thing is a bit askew. I did about a fourth of the quilt, decided I hated the whole thing, and put it away for a while. A couple of weeks ago I dug it out again and had a look, and decided that I quite liked the quilting anyway - it was either that or unpicking everything...
No, seriously, I did like it, so I continued in the same manner, going a bit more wobbly so that it looked intentional. That's the trick, you know - pretend that's what you intended to happen all along!

I backed it with a favourite IKEA print - I've got almost a whole bolt of it, so you'll probably see this one a lot... So, there you have it: a 40 x 40" wall quilt, named Memory, both because that's what computer disks were, and because in our busy digital world, this way of storing data has become a mere memory.

More purses

I had a go at making purses again - practise makes perfect, right? A friend's birthday is coming up, and my mother wanted a coin purse for her next trip abroad, so I set to it. I made a pattern based on this tutorial the last time, but just couldn't find it anywhere, so I had to have a new go.

 Without checking the details of the tutorial I winged it and ended up with two quite small purses. The ones I made earlier are much wider at the base, but these two are quite sweet, and why carry so much small change around anyway? ;-)

I actually find it much easier to make this kind where you glue the fabric into the frame than the kind where you stitch the purse to the frame, but again, that might improve with practise. I used Guterman glue and found that by following the instructions, waiting five minuted after adding the glue to the frame, it was quite easy to attach the fabric to the frame, and any excess glue on the frame rubbed off easily.
And I found my first pattern eventually: it was neatly folded into the glue box. It must have made perfect sense at the time...

Expandable

 

I remember coveting my cousin's disco purse when I was a young teenager. It looked a bit like the one in the picture above, except this one is an antique. Hers was a bit more glitzy and shiny and I was so intrigued by the closing mechanism and thought this was the coolest thing ever. That's why I just had to get this expandable frame while I was shopping for purse frames online a while ago and came across it.

I looked for patterns and tutorials online, but couldn't find one, so there was nothing for it but to work it out on my own. I somehow got the idea that I should make it from a circle of fabric (this was before I had googled the one in the first picture). So I cut the largest circle I could on my circle-ruler, 10", in two different fabrics and stitched them together right sides facing, leaving an opening to turn them inside out.

After turning and closing the opening and pressing the circle, I pinned folds along the edge, gathering the opening to fit the opening of the frame fully extended. It took a bit of trial and error - 14 wasn't the easiest number to work with, trying to make even folds.

I got there eventually, though, and stitched the fabric to the frame all the way around, before adding a piece of ribbon  to the two loops on the outside, to make a handle.

This didn't make the best result, I think. I mean, the purse looks quite pretty in all it's polka dot goodness, but the fabric is rather stiff, there is a bit too much fabric gathered at the top and the purse sits quite flat when I close it, making it look like those ice packs you see creatures having on their heads after they have hit themselves in old cartoons. There isn't all that much room inside either, so it's not the most useful item I have made.

I really should have made a more square bag, instead of starting with a circle, to make it roomier, or at least made it from a softer fabric. But that's just something to chalk down to experience, I suppose. It is what it is, for now at least. I might rip it apart and change it later, though - we'll see...

Even the gulls are staying indoors...

Well, I can't really blame the weather - these two will not be going out when it clears up!
I found the pattern in Marie Clare Idees and just had to make them to show I could. Let's face it, a couple of knitted seagulls aren't the most useful thing to have around, but a bit sweet all the same. And the thing is, if the pattern hadn't been in French, and if a friend hadn't said that she thought I couldn't make head or tails of it, they would never have seen the light of day. But I'm all for a challenge, so off I went!
With the help of Google Translate, where I was told I'd need an apothecary's son and a sperm whale among other things, and with the help of the charts, I managed to work out most of it, and what I didn't get, I made up.
So here they are my two new friends. They've brought their own food, so they can stay...

The pattern is here.

New inspiration

Appy times

I resisted the lure for a long time, thinking I should make do with the old cell phone I had. Well, maybe not that old - I must have been the last person among my friends to even get a cell phone. “Who needs to be that available?” I would ask, and cite all the reasons why they were a nuisance, like people including everybody else in their private conversations on the bus, or guests spending most of their time on the phone with others during a visit. Now I must confess that I stubbornly make myself unavailable in such situations by switching off the sound of my phone, but about six months ago I finally caved in and got that iPhone I was so fascinated by. And how that has changed things!

I had heard of apps that would let you visit Twitter and Facebook, plan your dinners and shopping lists, but what my friends at work didn't tell me, not being crafters themselves, poor dears, was what a great companion a phone loaded with lots of crafty apps could be.

I started out by looking for free quilting apps, and found quite a lot, most of which I tried a few times and then forgot about. But there are a few that I use a lot - RK QuiltCalc is great for working out how much fabric I need for borders, backing, or pieces. A great tool when you come across a fabric bargain and want to make sure you buy enough. But my favourite quilting app is ProjectQuilt. I use it for keeping track of my quilting plans. You can describe your projects, adding deadlines, when you started, who it's for, prority and even calculate costs, if you must... You can add photos to identify each project - I usually snap a photo of the fabrics I want to use or a screenshot from EQ of a quilt I have planned. Recently I came up with the idea of using it to store information about all the backing fabric I have in my stash. I do this by snapping a picture and adding length and width of the fabric. It took a little effort to get them all out and measure them, but the beauty of it is that now I can quickly scroll through to check if I have the right fabric for backing a new quilt and if it is big enough without rummaging through it all.

Once I had my quilting sorted out, I went in search of knitting apps. I found Needles which is good for keeping track of all your knitting needles by size and type. Another great help if you want to shop for a new project and wonder if you have the right size needles at home. There are several apps that help you count your rows and repeats while you are knitting, but my absolute favourite helpmate is Knit Companion. In this app you can use a pdf file of yor knitting pattern and set it up, with written guides and charts separately. There is a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, you get text and charts where you can slide markers to where you are in the pattern, so you easily keep track of where you are. There are also counters to keep track of rows and repeats. The beauty of it is that you can close the app, put your knitting away and the next time you pull it out you can go right back where you left off; no counting to find out where you are in the pattern. You can have several projects on the go at the same time and keep track of them all.

Another great little app is Gaugefy, where you can work out sizes of knit pieces if the gauge is altered.

My embroidery has been left on the shelf for a while now, but with the recent smell of autumn in the air, I was inspired to have a look at my stash. There don't seem to be that many cross stitching apps yet, but I found Xfloss where I can make an inventory of all my floss. It is basically an illustrated list of all DMC colours arranged by numbers. You can add how many skeins you have of each colour, and whether you need to buy more, by tapping the shopping cart. You can also enter projects you are working on or planning, and once you have done that you can assign the different colours you need to their respective projects, giving you a great shopping list.

Now these are just a few of the apps I have come across so far – I’d love to hear about any you have found useful! Yes my phone has become a great little helper. Sometimes it even makes a ringing sound – I wonder what that is about… ;-)