Before I get into the birthday gifts I have to tell you that last evening my quilt club met as a big group for the first time in MONTHS and IT WAS AWESOME! We had a real program and real show and tell and lots of catching up chatter. It was a much better time than the 2 days Chris and I have spent burying he phone line (about 300') because the phone company couldn't be bothered. If you don't have Centurylink for your phone service you are blessed. They must have the worst customer service of any company in the world in any category. Now, on to Eli. Eli is brother to Ella (recipient of couture doll clothes). He's turning 4 this weekend and he's all boy. I decided to dye some shirts for and hopefully he'll like one or more of these. I'm especially thrilled with the spiral. The two in the back were dyed using Color Magnet and stencils. I had leftover fabric from his pillowcase so I made a gift bag for the shirts. Cookie Monster is his favorite Muppet. The bag is lined in turquoise. I was rummaging around the sewing room looking for something to use as the drawstring and I spied the clothesline that I usually wrap with fabric for coasters and bowls. I decided to see if it could be dyed. It turns out that it can! I put lots of Fray Check and glue in the knots so that they don't come apart in use.
Mom and I will go to his party Saturday afternoon. Not sure if I'll survive a party full of 4 year old's but I'll give it my best shot. Mom and I might need to stop at a bar on the way home to recover. I still don't know why I'm making these doll clothes but I can tell you for sure that I'm not done because there are other ideas floating around in my head. This diversion is simply bizarre for me. This is my newest outfit. Ella, the recipient of these, went to Disneyworld recently. I found this fabric when I was in Lancaster (along with the "handbag"). The next week Pixie Fairie had a 1950's shirtwaist dress pattern for free. It was meant to be! I've ordered a belt for it to complete the ourfit. Do you remember when I made this evening dress a few months ago? We're saving it to give to her on her birthday in July. That worked out great because a friend gave me some fake fur scraps. A fur trimmed cape seemed in order. The claps really isn't in proper proportion but I found it in the button cabinet and seemed like a fine way to finish it off. Anne gave me a bag of sparkly knit fabrics so I expect some sparkle t-shirts are in my future. I've put the doll stuff away for the moment. It's time tog et back to quilting. I will spend part of today trying to re-time my longarm so that I can get back to quilting. I messed it up before vacation. I've been meaning to purchase the timing tool for a while but now I have the need. It was time to invest. If I can't get it right I'll get my brother over here to help. He can fix anything.
I don't know about you, but I don't travel without some sort of sewing or craft project. I took some crochet for the car and my sewing machine for the house. I barely touched the machine because the weather looked like this EVERY day. I parked myself on the beach with books pretty much all week. But Anne and my SIL, Carol, got busy with the Cricut machine. Anne recently bought one and Carol offered to help her start it up. The first thing they did was make this iron on vinyl for me so that now I have dedicated crochet travel bag! Anne also brought along a dozen water bottles to decorate. Carol designed this cool puzzle label because we worked 3 puzzles during the week. There are 4 puzzle pieces: a fish, a beach sign, lounge chair and lighthouse (for the Hatteras lighthouse). I did help "weed" then. I learned that term last week. Aren't these cool? When I handed out the dyed tote bags, Anne chose an apron and added these designs to the pockets. Carol had the idea to put the apple stem inside the pocket. I can't wait to come up with some other ideas that Anne can make for me. I'm having a lot of problems with my hands so I haven't been crocheting at all. But I have to do something in the car to do. I've told you before that I'm a horrible passenger. I took along this car crochet project and I stitched really slowly and carefully. It has 2 skeins in it so far. I'll use all of this third skein and then add a fuchsia border. Here's a closeup of the pattern. This is my "go to" car project because it's so easy. It's all double crochet and chains. While on vacation I always feel it's my patriotic duty to support local shops and I was a good patriot this week at several shops. Mostly, I bought t-shirts and hats. But surprisingly in the little village of Hatteras there's a very nice yarn/gift shop that has the added bonus of a sweet welcome dog. They have beautiful yarns. Most are wool that I can't use but I found this beautiful chain spun yarn that's a cotton blend. Carol found me a really simple duster/cardigan pattern for it. I really need for my hand to get better so I can crochet again! Back at home I've got all the green quilt blocks sorted and paired together. These will be sewn together in pairs to make 12.5" blocks. I've started sewing these together. I expect this top can go together pretty quickly.
I'm also working on more doll clothes and I should be able to share those tomorrow. I've totally lost my mind over the doll clothes! Most years I try to make some sort of gift for my family for beach week. One year I made a bunch of fused glass things and one year I had commemorative t-shirts printed. The best gift so far was the year that I dyed beach towels. I was in the mood to do that again this year and I decided to give beach bags a try. The bags are from Dharma Trading. The last time I made shibori I decided to add a few bags to see how they would dye. They dye great! The stitching thread dyes too. I also had a few aprons left from previous gift giving and I threw some of those in too. Someone might prefer an apron to a bag. These bags have a pocket on one side so with this group I decided to do something large on the plain side and just do the pocket on the other side. I was going to do a lot more with the Color Magnet but these look entirely too feminine to be appealing to the guys. I didn't want to do too many like this but I love how these turned out. This is another Color Magnet one. I would have done more of these but it took FOREVER to print because I had to do it in sections and let it dry between adjusting. This one might be minee. Then a few more straight up tie dye. The sunrise colors were supposed to be on the blue one and the blue one was supposed to be on the orange/yellow one. I won't tell anyone. Of course I always have to make a patriotic version of everything. Again, with the guys in mind, I tried a couple of gradients and some "solids". I'll spread them out on a table and they can decide pick their favorites. I even ironed them all.
I made more than I needed so one of these might be included in a giveaway next week. This weekend seemed to speed by. I've put myself into some sort of self-imposed rush to finish some things before we leave for the beach Saturday. None of these apparent deadlines have anything at all to do with actual deadlines but I feel like I want to come home to a clean slate. First up was finishing the walker caddies. Here are 9 ready to deliver the next time I'm near the donation site. I purposely tried to make these look less feminine so that the men might get some caddies that they like. This denim should be very sturdy. One side has a wide pocket and the other has the small pocket. Next time I would make the caddie a little shorter and put wide pockets on both sides with a seam on one of the pockets to make 2 narrow ones. Then I decided to catch up on my Rainbow Scrap Challenge cutting. As a reminder these are blocks for a set of 8 quilts that I'm going to make using up 8 giant 8-pointed stars that my Great-Grandmother made. There are 8 blocks cut for each of these. I stack them on boards with the pattern on top. Here's everything that I've cut out so far. I think this might be the project that I take to work on at the beach. I only need to piece blocks so I won't need a lot of space. While I was cutting and sewing, I finished the last batch of pillowcases. I wanted these particular ones done because we saw the kids last night. They just got back from Disney so I wanted to give Eli a the Disney pillowcase. Ella got the American Girl gardening outfit and she loved it. We had a fun visit and I was reminded why old people don't have children. There's a lot of energy bottled up in those little bodies.
I think my goals for this week are to finish cutting out things to clear off the cutting table and get a few more veterans quilts quilted. When I get back from vacation I'll be ready to quilt one of my own quilts. I missed a couple of blog posts with my end of month book and accounting posts and then I got to take a quick little trip out of town so I have lots to catch up on over the next few days. First, I have to share something that happened on my book review post. For the first time ever an author actually posted about my review of her book! I can't believe that an author took the time to do that. I'm really glad it was a book that I liked! I've been reading about some authors misbehaving on Goodreads. Bizarre. Over the weekend I got lots of serger sewing and kit cutting done that I'll share here. Sunday I left on a whirlwind trip with my best friend. She had an appointment in Connecticut yesterday and invited me along. We hadn't taken a road trip in a very long time. We decided to add a day in Lancaster, PA for some fabric shopping. We left Sunday, spent the night in Lancaster then to Connecticut Monday night and all the way back to Virginia yesterday. It was fast but we packed in a lot of shopping that I'll share tomorrow.
But the pillow cases are so much fun to make because they are so fast. The serger makes such quick work of sewing things like this. It actually made constructing the dresses faster too. When I needed a break from serging I went back to cutting veterans quilt kits. On the left is a kit for 2 quilts that will look exactly like these that I made last year. I liked those quilts a lot and when I visited the fabric shop in White Stone I saw that they still had the panels and I picked up 2 more. On the right is a kit for 2 more veterans quilts in that star layout. One has a pale blue background and one is ivory. But I still have plenty of my patriotic batik fabric left! Some of it is going to be cut with my Go Cutter into 6" HST blocks for a blue and ivory quilt. With the scraps of the scraps I'm thinking about a completely scrappy tumbler block quilt, or a scrappy HST. Last night when we got home from the trip Anne gave me these as a gift so I have one more kit to cut out and then I will be totally set for vacation and quilt club sewing for the rest of the year.
Tomorrow I'll show you what I've been crocheting and all the stull I bought on our trip. Hopefully Friday I will actually have some veterans quilts quilted to share. The serger is out and I'm starting to work through all the projects that I cut out for it. I don't leave my serger out all the time so to use it I have to clear off a table and set it up. I don't like getting it out for just one thing so I'm calling this week "serger week" and I plan to get a lot of things done. I started with these mastectomy drain bags that I'll donate locally. This was a fabric that Mom gave me and it really lent itself well to this project. I enjoyed making these so I might cut out more before I put the serger back. These went together so fast. They get tagged and bagged individually before I drop them off at the donation center. Next I was on to doll outfits. This top is called California Baja and it's really easy. I had cut out a bunch of walker caddies with some leftover denim and there were enough scraps for 3 jeans for the doll. I found this ikat weave in my stash for the top. Do you see how perfectly that pocket matches up to the orange and purple stripes? That was complete accident! I've got to get some black velcro for the back opening to finish this one off. I'll probably save it to give to her until the fall since it's more of a fall look. I also think I will make a headband to go with it. After that I put white thread on the serger and will work on all of the rest of the projects needing white thread. First up is another pant but I decided to add patch pockets to the back of these because they are going to be "garden pants" and it made them so much cuter. A few weeks ago they were giving the Little Gardener pattern for free so I downloaded it and found this perfect fabric in my vintage fabric collection. It's a pretty darned involved pattern but it's really cute and the instructions are really thorough and clear. Here's the back of the apron. The straps are snapped on behind those blue buttons. If we need to adjust it to fit the doll I'll only have to move 2 snaps. The pattern also had a sun hat. It looks kind of weird here but it should fit. You can see it on the pattern cover. And gardening gloves! Once I change the serger thread to something darker I will be making a tshirt out of the same blue knit that I used for the cuffs of the gloves. After I sent this photo to my brother he suggested therapy. Here are all the garments together. isn't that cute? But that's not all! The pattern also comes with a page to print on card stock to make seed packets. They thought of everything! I cut them out, glued them together and put beads in them so they will shake like real seed packets.
Now I will switch to pillowcases for the boys because I have to have gifts for the boys when I take Ella her new outfit. I'll get back to the serger today after I empty another truckload of mulch this morning. Today's post is all about Ella. She's my SIL's 7 year old granddaughter and the one I make the doll clothes for. I've got the new dress to share and a couple of photos from a visit with her yesterday. First up is the dress. This was one epic dress to make. The pattern is called Opening Night and it has something like 36 steps. But it's so incredibly well written. I'd say that it's better than many patterns from the big pattern companies. I know that the AG McCalls pattern that I have is full of errors, including mis-labeled pattern pieces and spelling errors. This Opening Night dress pattern is incredibly detailed and very accurate. So it was hard and easy at the same time. It's hard because there are lots of pieces and some sewing gymnastics required but easy because the directions are clear and as long as you take it one step at a time and accept that hand sewing is sometimes faster than machine sewing, it will come together without too much of a headache. The fabric is silk shantung and was donated by my friend, Kim. The company we worked for has a lovely annual holiday event that was a great opportunity to make some beautiful evening wear. Kim loved full skirted dresses and this fabric was from the skirt from one of her party dresses. Silk shantung sews like a dream and has great body for a dress like this. She also gave me a pink silk that I'll use for another outfit at some point. Hand sewing was critical for this dress. I tried, for example, to do the edge stitching on the sheer fabric on the machine but this dress just didn't need to have that much profanity sewn into it. The story was the same with the invisible zipper. After 2 tries on the machine I sewed it in by hand and was done in 20 minutes. The dress is fully lined and it's hand sewn at the waist and around the inside of the zipper. The lining was some I had leftover from when I used to make my own suits for work. Ella's grandmother and I have decided to save this dress for her birthday in July. She's even getting some shoes to go with. Ella was staying with them for a couple of days this week while she's on Spring break so we went to visit yesterday and had a blast. Apparently Ella was excited for me to come because she had made me a thank you gift and card for making the outfits for her. She was so cute. We had a fashion show with each outfit and combination that I had made and then she gave me this potholder and thank you note. She definitely knows how to work me because she made a point of telling me that my clothes were special and that she kept them is a separate place so that nothing would happen to them. Soooooo cute. I love the potholder because it brought back so many memories of when I used to make these things by the dozen when I was a kid. I loved getting a new bag of loops whenever we went to the store. I didn't even know that this was still a thing! We did not go for our visit empty handed. The last time I ordered yarn I found this loop yarn from Lion Brand. The loops are all worked out so that as you "knit" them together you get an image. She loved making it and has decided to use it as a doll blanket. This type of yarn is available in big skeins and adult colors so you could make a giant afghan if you wanted. It's good because it doesn't require any tools other than your fingers but, I have to admit, I hope to never use it again. It's really easy to skip loops so you have to be very attentive. It also sheds like crazy and all that fluff stuck to my pants and nowhere else! I even brought some home with me. But, for kids, this is a fun project and the blanket is incredibly soft and snuggly.
We will be doing another because, in my wisdom, I also bought the unicorn skein at the same time. She got really good at it be the time we finished so the second one should go faster. PS, Ella is covering her face because I made her. She was happy to have her picture taken but I don't think it's appropriate for me to share photos of someone else's child on the internet. I don't even like to share my own photo on the internet! Yesterday was a great day for finishes. I'm heading off to my friend's house at the river Monday for a few days of sewing and yakking so I'm using that as incentive to wrap a few things up. First up is the baby blanket. You know how it is. Once the end is in sight you just have to motor through and finish and that's what I did with this yesterday. The blanket finished to about 36" square. Here are the details on the blanket for my future reference: I used the Purple Gingham pattern from Daisy Farm Crafts. It's really well written and they have nice videos to help out. Don't like this one? They have over a dozen gingham blanket variations. I'll be making more for sure. The yarn is Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn, 4 weight acrylic. I bought 2 skeins of the peach and 1 each of orange and white. I d love this yarn. It's really easy to work with and is very soft. It makes Red Heart seem like sand paper. Hook size K for the body and J for the border This border design is in the pattern. It's 2 rows of SC and a row of shells. Each side was 1 stitch short to make it work out perfect so I just put in a fudge shell (using one less stitch) somewhere along each side. The shorter shells aren't noticeable at all. My first round of SC on the sides is a bit messy but I do have trouble getting the sides to look good. It would have been better if I could have used white for the border but I didn't have enough leftover white yarn. I had to go either orange or peach. I think orange looks best. This is what's leftover. I have a few small balls of leftover yarn now and it's annoying me so I'm going to start a granny rectangle that I can use up all the scrap yarn on. As I finish each project I can just add the leftover yarn to the "scrapghan" and someday it can be a donation or camping blanket. But that's not all! I also finished the toy bags for the boys. I found the tutorial online but I've lost the link now. There are dozens of tutorials for bags like this. They are so nice that now I want some for myself. The bags even have fancy boxy bottoms. They are lined. And they have tabs made of faux cork. I bought this bundle of cork fabrics over 2 years ago and this is the first time I've used them. When I showed the dino bags to Chris he immediately noticed that the tab was dino teeth. He wins extra credit points. I'm also quilting and practicing my feathers. I forgot to take photos but there are a couple of veterans quilts getting a lot of fancy feather quilting! Thinking toward Monday, I'm packing up projects. I've decided that I can start my SIL's animal print quilt. It's going to be made exactly like my Indonesian Batik quilt, just smaller. She want's a sofa quilt. I'm also going to attempt this. My friend, Kim, is bringing me some leftover silk fabrics and I'm going to see if I can pull this off. I think the color will be teal or red.
Later today, though, I'll get back to sewing the big Summer Sunset star and there's lots more practice quilting ahead of me this weekend. I have three younger brothers and when I was very young there was a situation where I was favored with gifts over my brothers just because I was a girl. While I enjoyed the attention and gifts I felt guilty that my brothers weren't included. Our parents never treated us different and didn't tolerate other people treating us different. That particular situation never happened again and that was a good thing. I've been making the doll dresses for my SIL's granddaughter. She also has 3 grandsons and I didn't want to leave them out. Two of them are obsessed with dinosaurs and the little guy likes busses. I found some dinosaur fabric and EMS fabric. I made each of the older boys a pillowcase and the little guy a pillow. I'm using the leftover fabric to make them some lined toy bags. Kids love bags. A good drawstring bag has the added potential of becoming a weapon.
She will give the pillow/pillowcases to the boys next week and it will be good for the boys to get a gift when the girl doesn't for a change. I also found these hat kits that I'm going to make later this summer. I saw them a while ago and fell in love with them but didn't think I had anyone to make them for. Fortunately I got a Lion Brand newsletter while I was making these gifts and I realized that I could get them for the boys. They are all young enough to be big Sesame Street fans. These will be for later this year but I think they will be a blast to make. In between sewing sessions I went to the doctor for my toe injury. It's confirmed "turf toe" which is really funny because it's a common football injury. I have the added complexity of it involving 3 toes. There's nothing special about the treatment. I have to wear my stiffest shoes (that I hate) every day for several weeks and I have to start some PT in a couple of weeks. It's just going to take a long time because it's a foot injury. It's mostly just annoying. I didn't do it being athletic, I did it moving heavy furniture in flip flops. It's actually pretty funny and typical of my kind of injuries. |
FeedsTo subscribe click the RSS Feed button and copy the URL of that page into your blog reader.
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
All
Archives
April 2024
|