This weekend wasn't nearly as productive as I wanted. I felt like I was fighting allergies all weekend but now I'm pretty sure that it's just a full blown cold. We'll see how it goes the next few days. Hopefully not the flu. It's a good time to sit and crochet! With the first baby blanket finished and delivered it was time to start looking at what to do next. The internet, as always, is a gold mine of ideas and wasted time. I spent hours and hours looking at free patterns and watching technique videos. Here's where I ended up. The firest task was to find yarn. The first blanket took 3 balls of the sparkly yarn in the background. I bought 4 so I had one left over. I went back and got 2 more so I could use the last one. While there I found this yarn and got 3 balls of it too. It's really soft. Then I started looking for patterns. I used the leftover yarn bits from the first blanket to work up some swatches. This pattern was from Yarnspirations.It's cute enough but I didn't love it. This pattern was really pretty but required more concentration than I'm willing to commit to yet. The hooks and the primary reference book that I'm using belonged to my paternal Grandmother. Did anyone else have this Reader's Digest book? It's still a very good resource. I've never been a big fan of granny squares but I see on Instagram that GS blankets are REALLY popular now. I thought that if I could do a giant granny square that I could easily make it as big as my yarn lasts and wouldn't have any yarn leftover. The book instructions are good but I found better instructions on YouTube. Here it is started in the sparkle yarn. (That first one was made with a leftover bit of yarn from the first blanket.) I finally settled on this pattern. I don't know anything about Rescued Paw Designs but she has tons of crochet patterns and this one is really simple and fast. I'm already making great progress! Now that I have these two projects planned I can clear off the cutting table and start planning the next quilting projects.
I got bored with binding but I finally finished the placemats and I'm really pleased to be down one more UFO. For the first time in forever, I'm below 10! Not to worry, I'm about to start another new one. I broke them up onto 3 sets and Mom got this set. Here are the other 2 sets. I may keep both of these or I might gift a set. I haven't decided. But, either way, they also have matching napkins! I didn't make napkins for Mom's because she doesn't use cloth napkins. The napkins were screen printed with Color Magnet, my favorite screen printing medium.
Now that these are done I can start planning some new projects. This weekend I want to get my Hunter's Star quilts quilted and do some reorganizing to make way for new projects! Betty cleared out her stash of 2 1/2" neutral strips for these 2 Jelly Roll Race quilts. With some quilts, like the ones I featured yesterday, I do quilting that will not show. But on these quilts I felt like I had a good opportunity show off quilting. I picked a very dark green thread and quilted this simple leaf pattern. It shows up nicely in the finished quilts. I picked the dark green thread because I had a pretty dark green fabric for the backing. This color isn't true, it's more of a dark blue-green. I think it works well on these simple quilts.
That's all of the veterans quilts for this month, except for my own Hunter's Star quilts. This quilt was made by a former member, Carol. She relocated from Virginia to Georgia to be closer to family. But she sends quilts to us occasionally and I'm happy to quilt them for our cause. Carol is a very unique quilter in that she has NO STASH! Yes, you read that right. Carol gets fabric for the project she wants to work on so we can be sure that these fabrics are left from a recent project. Once she's done she finds another home for any remaining scraps. Amazing. This one was made by Becky. It's from one of Barbara Brackman's block programs. If you click on it you can see some of the wonderful fussy cutting that Becky does to make her quilts special. I took the photo with the quilt upside down so that's why you see the watermark at the top! I quilted it with the Woven Wind pantograph and used a butter cream for the backing. I found a backing for my Hunter's Star. I had SIX yards of Gray Skies Gradient that didn't process right. It was my own fault but the light side of the fabric ended up pink! But by stitching two lengths together on the dark edge I can eliminate the pink edges. I'll take those pink strips and over-dye them and use them in another project. I had a bunch of wide strips of batting left over from quilting sets of veterans quilts so I stitched them together to use in this quilt. It's like free batting!
New Gradient!I've been pondering a night sky gradient for a while and I have a new blue dye that was perfect for my vision. I can see this as a background for a full moon night sky scene. I hope that the Midnight Gradient will inspire you too. Fabric of the Week - Midnight Stash PackKeeping with the Midnight theme, the fabric of the week is the Midnight Stash Pack. The pack has 10 fat eighths in a wide variety of dark blues with some purples and grays. This pack is 20% off through Sunday. More Dark BluesIf these aren't quite right for you check out these other fabrics in dark blues.
I love our monthly sewing "retreat" days. We are so fortunate to have a county resource at our disposal so we can get together and sew for 2 days every month. I finished the second Hunter's Star veterans quilt top! I absolutely love this quilt and can't wait to quilt it and get it done. I knew I would finish it this weekend so I was ready to go with one of my other quilt kits that I cut a few weeks ago. I decided to start with a really easy one! I just have to add the bottom 2 borders and an outside green border. I wasn't sure how this would look but once I added the green border I knew it would be OK. I will miss the March sewing days so I'll finish this in April. In the evenings I've really enjoyed crocheting again. I think the last thing I made was a blue sweater that I crocheted in high school. It was easy to get back in the groove. This is just a small double crochet baby blanket and I'll give it to a friend who donates quilts and blankets to local agencies. These are going to be perfect projects for TV and car time. We'll see how long I stay interested in this. My goal is to not start collecting yarn! The edging started off a little messy but I figured it out by the time I finished. I'm pleased with it and the yarn is really soft. Here's the free pattern for this blanket. Of course I had one whole skein of yarn left over! So I'll just buy more of this for the next one. I'm not even getting close to Ravelry and I'm already down a large rabbit hole of free crochet patterns.
This week I want to focus on more veterans quilts and getting those placemats wrapped up. This week's inspiration comes from Katherine Donaway. She made her Seahorse quilt starting with a pattern by Laura Heine. She created her collage using Sea and Sky gradient as her background. All of the elements are applique and some are 3D. Here's a close up. For sharing, Kathleen received a 20% coupon for the shop that's good for 3 months! If you have made anything with my hand dyed fabric I hope you will consider sharing it in the Customer Gallery. The only rule is that projects have to be complete. It doesn't have to be made totally from hand dyed fabric, just include a recognizable amount. I haven't finished the placemats but I have made great progress on my first crochet project. I'm working on the edging now so it will be done by Monday for sure. I really enjoyed working on this while watching movies and relaxing with out friends. The crochet blankets will be great travel and TV projects for a while. I'm slowly getting the binding done on the 12 placemats. Sometimes I edge placemats really quickly on the serger but this time I'm doing an almost real binding. It's "almost" because I don't actually join the ends together. I fold under one edge and jsut tuck the other end under the folded edge. The tucked in piece hangs over the edge a bit so I cut it flush to the edge once I've stitched. Like this. Only a few more to go but I'm really bored with then at this point! I don't think I shared that I sewed all the leftover strips together and now I have about a half mile of fabric that will probably become even more placemats!
There once was a time when I labeled my quilts with a Pigma pen and date with my name. Then I started making labels in Powerpoint with images and printed them to fabric for stitching to the quilt. Those were certainly the good ole days. Now my labels are multi-day and, sometimes, hours long processes. Here are the 2 most recent ones. First I started with the Groovy quilt. I decided that I would do this one in color and see how well it holds up in the wash. I've had good luck with color photo labels in the past but they do fade a little more than black and white. I printed the text (using a new font that I spent 30 minutes finding and downloading) and then started drawing small Spirographs all around it. I didn't take any more process photos because I was too caught up in playing with the gears. For Jackie's Choice I wanted an oval label because the family name starts with an "O". I know, it will be sideways, but that's the idea I fixated on so that's where I went. I started by trying a lot of different gears in an oval gear to see what pattern I liked best. Another 30 minutes on the font website and I finally had the label printed and was ready to draw out the design. I was able to get them both printed on one sheet of fabric! You can see that I colored in some of the sections on the Jackie's Choice label. I thought it needed a little extra. Here they are done! In other news, the placemats will be done later today so I can post them tomorrow. Tomorrow is also quilt club sewing weekend so I'll have the second Hunter's Star quilt together by Monday.
I've got several irons in the fire right now. I'm working on binding the flower placemats and I've dyed matching napkins for them. I'm also finishing labels for the 2 quilts that I finished in January and. in the evenings, I'm crocheting away on the baby blanket. I'm finding that I really an enjoying doing crochet again. Laura is busily cutting fabric for her new quilt so that when she comes to the beach in May she can get right to sewing. She will leave that project here to work on in May and August when she's back here. While she's using the cutting table I'm in the basement quilting veterans quilts. These two are both from Betsy. Betsy loves reproduction fabric and chain piecing small pieces. Her quilts are spectacular. Because of the geometric nature of this quilt I decided to add some curves and angles with the star and ribbon pantograph and I picked a thread that would not show much on the next quilt. This one is also Betsy's and I think it looks like an antique quilt. Here's how the same panto and thread looks on this quilt. The back is this nice sky blue. The next 2 quilts are already loaded but my main goal today is to get quilt labels sewn to the January quilts.
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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April 2024
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