 Through The Window by Julie Griffiths, 12" x 16" Today's inspiration comes from Julie Griffiths. Sh use the Jenny Lake Gradient and Gloria Loughman's Tile Technique to recreate the view from a home she recently sold. The view features Aspen trees, Snakeroot, grasses and shrubs.
For sharing, Julie 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.  On Monday I shared two more comfort quilts Monday and I used this fish fabric and the backing fabric. I had a little of the fabric left over and I really hate having scraps. That meant that I needed to come up with a quick project to use it and placemats are one of my go-to projects. Chris is big into fishing, especially off-shore. I got this fabric with because the fish are pretty accurate and I thought I might make him a quilt. I was just never inspired to make a quilt with it. Placemats are a fine tradeoff. He can see his fish while he eats his dinner. I even used 2 fat quarters from that bin of fabric that I pulled out a couple of weeks ago. That's the yellow and gold trim. The ohter blue is a hand dyed piece from my stash and I used all of it too.  I make my placemats with flannel from old (but clean) flannel sheets as the batting. It adds just enough weight but doesn't make them fluffy. I also like quilting them pretty heavily so they don't need much ironing. I use a lot of straight line quilting because it's really fast but I wanted a little movement in the ocean and did overlapping wavy lines in the middle. It looks like a lot of work but it went really fast.  I even dyed napkins to match!  My scrap usage doesn't end with the front of the placemats. Especially when I make them for myself, I try to use my ugly fabrics for the backing. I remember giving some placemats to a friend and I use one of my "uglies" on the back. She sent me photos a few months later to show me how great the placemats looked in her new home. It was the ugly back that matched her decor! They didn't look ugly anymore.  I had enough fabric to make 8 for 2 sets of 4. I'll give the other est to my nephew because he loves fishing too.
This weekend I'll be back to practicing my quilting and making the lap quilts. On Sunday I will be totally focused on the Eagles and the Super Bowl and I'm likely to be a little loud. I'm linking up to Alycia's Finished Friday and Confessions of a Fabric Addict Yesterday started off bright and early. I left my house at 4:45 so that I could get my friend to the surgery center by 6:00. After her successful (and efficient) surgery, I had her home and relaxing on the sofa by 10:30. I stayed with her until about 5:30 and then another friend spent some of the evening with her. She reports that she is doing great today now that the drugs and nerve block have worn off. She's a very low maintenance patient so I had a lot of time to fill.  I took my hat bag to the surgery center and finished this one up while I was waiting. The lady next to me noticed and we talked a bit about our various crochet projects and preferences. It's always nice to meet another maker. The donation place is a mile from my friend's house so I dropped off the other hats, with this one, when I went out to pick up her prescriptions. In all, I dropped off 7 hats and 4 lap blankets yesterday. I have a ton of this soft gray yarn so I'll just keep making this hat until it's all gone.  Back at my friend's house I had this big blanket to work on and made good progress because she didn't need my help much. It's about 44"square now and I'm pretty sure I have enough yarn to add another 14 or so inches. It will be good for a dialysis patient....or wherever the charity feels it's needed.  It was really beautiful and warm yesterday so Chris got all of the latest load of wood chopped. If you need me I'll be stacking and then I'll go check on my friend and buy a new small fridge for the dye studio. My old one is quickly dying on me.
 This is not one week's worth of work. I've been working on these off and on for a few weeks. It just didn't seem post worthy until I had a few to share. I've been looking for a good beanie pattern that I could use to make chemo hats for men. Honestly, the only thing that makes a hat a chemo hat vs a regular hat is the yarn used. Bald, sensitive heads want soft yarns. One of my favorites is Feels Like Butta by Lion Brand but all the major yarn makers have an equivalent chain-spun polyester yarn that's exactly like FLB. I found the Avery Brimless Beanie and gave it a try with some FLB. I started in blue and realized that I didn't have enough so I added some black and finished off with the blue. The stitches are half double crochet, herringbone half double and extended single. I think it's the combo of the special stitches that makes this a pretty classy beanie. It also looks and fits great on a man. After making this one I wanted to try another yarn.  Mandala Ombre is a very soft yarn and it's always in stock at my local Wal-Mart stores. It's really soft and I like it for baby blankets and it's great for soft hats too. I picked up 2 balls. The color Cool made these two hats, both from the same ball of yarn.  These two hats are from the color Mantra. I think they all have a nice masculine look.  I had little bits of yarn left from the other hats and I was able to get one more done. It had lots of ends to weave in but, being scrappy, it's my favorite.  Today I'm taking a friend for surgery and have my hat crochet bag and some gray FLB yarn to work on some more. I've made enough of them now that I have the pattern memorized. After I get my friend home I will drop these off at From The Heart since it's only a couple of miles from her house. I'm slowly working on the placemats and have been watching my quilting classes in the evening. I need to get to the basement for some more practice Thursday and Friday. I've also been stacking wood. A friend had a big oak fall in the woods on her property and Chris has been harvesting the wood. I help him haul the wood out to the truck and after he splits it I do the stacking. It's pretty good exercise. We were both a little sore last night after bringing home this new load. It was a big tree and we have a couple more loads of wood to bring home for next year's fires. Then we will be on the search for more!
 This weekend was great weather for staying inside and quilting. I kicked off my weekend by quilting two more lap quilts for donation. You might remember that I said I was going to use the lap quilts as my practice quilts for my botanicals quilting class. Well, I just couldn't put leaves and flowers on quilts with a fish print backing. I had 3 yards of this fish print and that meant that was enough for 3 quilts but when I was getting ready to load the quilts I realized that the fish would be swimming in the wrong direction so I had to turn the quilt tops and that limited me to 2 quilts, which wasn't a problem. I can use the extra top on another backing fabric.  Free motion waves were the right answer for these 2 quilts and I think they turned out really cute. I expect that the charity will allocate these to be kid's quilts.  I originally bought that fish fabric to make a quilt for Chris but I was never really inspired to use it. Now with the 2 lap quilts done I had one yard of the fabric left and decided to start some placemats so that he will at least get SOMETHING from the fabric. I was even able to use 2 more fat quarters from that bin of tester fat quarters for the yellow and gold accent pieces. The dark blue was a 1+ yard piece from my stash and I had enough for the edges and binding. I'll work on these a little at a time and might have them done in a week or so. I had enough fabric to make 8 of them so I'll probably send 4 to my nephew who also had the fishing "disease", as they call it.  I was getting ready to start making some more lap quilt tops and that required me to move this mending project for the 50th time. Instead of moving the pile again it seemed time to actually do the mending. I dyed a vintage tablecloth and napkins in 2015. You can see them on this page if you scroll down to the "Other Projects" section. I am still very proud of that project and use the tablecloth and napkins once or twice a year. They don't get a ton of wear but they are old and are showing their age. The napkins, especially, won't survive that much longer. The edges are wearing and the ladder hem stitching is ripping. I can't do anything about the frayed edges but I can do a quick fix of the broken ladders - by machine, of course. I'm not about to do hand stitching.  I played around with my machine stitches until I found a stitch that was good enough and then dug through my vast thread stash and found a perfect match.  It's not perfect but it's serviceable and my guests won't notice. I'm sure of that! At least, for now, they are back in the drawer and off my sewing table. I can start some more lap quilt tops.  I did get on with practicing my botanical quilting and forgot to take photos of the first 2 quilts. I have the third one set and ready to go as soon as I decide on exactly what I want to practice next.
I also did a good amount of crochet this weekend too and I'll share my progress on that later in the week. I was too lazy to take any more photos last night while I was writing this post.  Bed quilt by Patricia Caldwell, 78 x 78 This week's inspiration is from Patricia Caldwell. For this one she moved from the wall to the bed with a 78" square bed quilt made mostly with Stash Packs. Pattern is from the 2022 Moda challenge blocks . She choose one of the blocks that she liked and cut strips 2 inches wide. Sashing 2 1/2 inches wide.  She had it professionally quilted with a pattern called Vortex.
You will see next week that this project was also inspiration for me! For sharing, Patricia 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'm officially caught up on veterans quilts for 2 weeks. I know I'll get more at the meeting on the 14th but for the next 2 weeks I can work on the lap quilts and practice the quilting from my online class. This quilt was made by Mom and has a good story.  My Mom and I (but mostly Mom) have been working on my Great Grandmother's UFOs. One of her UFOs was a bunch of arcs to make a double wedding ring quilt. They weren't really shaped consistently enough to make a DWR so she brain-stormed with Becky at sewing one weekend and they came up with this idea and I think it looks great! She has tons of the arcs left and is using some to make a baby quilt for my cousin's first grand-child.  The final veterans quilt is my 7th for the year. This will be the last for a while because the next one that I'm working on will take February and March sewing days to get it done. I'm cool with that. My goal is to make 10 veterans each year and I've already made 7 so I'm way ahead of schedule. I'll make plenty more before the year is out. I've also been piecing more lap quilt tops. The multi-colored one is the last one it the previous purple-centric. Next I pulled the fish fabric and I have enough of it to back 3 lap quilts. I did 2 in the diagonal blocks and one in the blue squares with gold centers.  Yesterday I had an hour in the morning and decided to load these 2 for quilting and I actually got them loaded and quilted within one hour! In the afternoon I had an hour before dinner and I got started on the binding and got them totally finished in 45 minutes. These little quilts are going to be so much fun to make. I'll see what the charity thinks about them when I deliver the first batch.  The reason I started with these 2 quilts is that I knew that I wanted to donate them as wheelchair blankets and they aren't really candidates for floral quilting. My quickie wavy crosshatch was perfect for them.
This weekend I plan to do lots more piecing and quilting of the lap quilts. But if I get distracted by something else I'll do that too. I hope you have a great weekend. I'm linking up to Finished or Not Friday.  I got 2 more veterans quilts quilted and this pretty one is by Becky. These colors aren't quite true but I think it's OK for me to tell you that these fabrics are from an upcoming Barbara Brackman line and they are beautiful! If you like WIlliam Morris style prints you will want to look for these.  I think the colors are better in this image. I'm not sure the name of the block but it's a pretty one.  This quilt was made by Mom. In December I sent her a link to this blog post as a joke. I never thought she would make the quilt but she did! Here it is the beginning of February and it's ready for binding. I think it's a really striking scrap quilt.  Both quilts, and all of the veterans quilts I'm doing this week, are quilted with the Square Spiral pantograph. I have 2 more to quilt before I can pull out the lap quilts to start practicing my botanical quilts. Now a little product review.  When I ride in the car I like to have a crochet project to do. I'm a horrible rider and it's good for me to have something else to focus on. I'm just not good at sitting and not having something to do with my hands. We went to Charlottesville Sunday to watch the football games (Fly Eagles Fly) and I took some crochet to do.  But it was dark for the drive home and that meant that I could finally test out this light. I have seen the lighted crochet hooks and I suppose they could work. I discussed them with my driver and we agreed that the hook light moving around would be hellish for the driver. That's when I ordered this light. There are several out there and most of the have 3 light brightnesses and this one has 3 colors of light. It's nice.  I used the warmest color and the lowest light level. We agreed that the bright white light would distract the driver but this level was plenty for me. You can see from the first photo to the second that I made good progress on this chemo hat for donation.
Today I'll get the last 2 veterans quilts quilted and I should be free for other quilting until we have out meeting on the 14th. There's a great benefit of winter and not being able to spend much time outside. You have more time for inside hobbies. I took full advantage of that in January. Probably my best accomplishment is finishing up 6 veterans quilts. The last one was started and finished this month. I also quilted 4 veterans quilts for other members. All this means that I got the timing on my machine worked out and hit my goal of quilting at least 7 veterans quilts. It's really nice to be quilting again! I wasn't in the mood to start a new quilt project early in the month so I spent some time making surgery drain bags. I ended up with 74 of them! I did lots of crocheting and finished 2 hats and 1 baby blanket but I started 3 new projects: a big gift blanket, a cardigan and a large donation blanket. I finally got some piecing inspiration when I decided to use a bin of well-aged fabric to make a lot of small lap quilts for donation. some will be kids blankets for a cancer camp and some will be wheelchair blankets.
I also started quilting a big quilt for my Mom. That one will be finished after I finish a new online quilting class that's all about quilting botanical elements. My goals for February are: - keep piecing lap quilts - finish one more veterans quilt and quilt as many as are needed - practice class quilting on the lap quilts - finish the crochet cardigan - finish quilting Mom's quilt (if I've gotten through enough og the class to know what I want to do) |
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In Bloglovin you need to search "Colorways By Vicki Welsh" to find the blog. About Vicki
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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