 I didn't get a ton of things done this weekend but I did finish the firefighter quilt! You can see lots of photos and read all about it here.
I tried to spend a lot of time outside this weekend. I did lots of weeding and got some sun on Saturday. On Sunday I went for a long walk and then Chris and I trimmed the edge of our property against the road. We got notice that repaving our private road is happening this week so we needed to cut the jungle back a bit. The weather was just perfect for being outside this weekend. I did not start the Goldfinch quilt because I forgot to dye 3 fabrics that I need. I also didn't get two more veterans quilts loaded but that will happen today or tomorrow.
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 We leave tomorrow so today is baking/cooking day. With my allergies, I can't eat in restaurants and I can't eat food prepared by others so we have to bring all of my food (or cook it there). Anything that's baked, bread and cookies, I like to do ahead of time. That's what I'm doing today. But I really wanted to finish quilting this quilt before we left, and I did! Ripping out that one long border really tore up my hands. It will be days before I pick up the crochet hook again. Fortunately I can hold a scotch glass so vacation is saved. I'm really happy with this quilt. I'll get it bound when I get back and it will be ready for our guild show in September. It will be gifted after the show. I hope the recipients find out about it while it's hanging in the show.  I even got the table runner quilted!  Since I haven't been able to crochet in the evenings I decided to pull out the Goldfinch Quilt and start picking fabrics.  It's a daunting task because there are this many colors! You can buy these patterns as a kit with Kona fabrics. Of course, it has to be hand dyed for me.  I started by matching fabrics individually and was getting frustrated. Then I realized that I needed to work on them in color sets. This approach is working much better. It's been fun to shop my scraps and gradients and I think I'll only need to dye 1 or 2 fabrics. I'm excited to get started on this project when I get back. I want this one done for the September show too.
I hope you have a great week next week and that you enjoy the giveaway packages. Check in every day to enter!  Yesterday morning, before it got too hot, I got my last truckload of mulch spread and now I'm done! I even hosed all the dirt out of Chris' truck. It was the hardest one to do because it required more shoveling and wheelbarrowing. By the afternoon I was ready for a little nap. But before my nap, I unbasted teh firefighter quilt, oriented it correctly and rebasted it. I got started on the quilting. This is going to be done pretty simply because I want it to be a quilt that they can use so I want it snuggly. I think I can get it quilted in a few days.  Today and tomorrow I'm headed off to sew with my quilt club. I missed last month because of that cold that I had in April. I'm looking forward to being back with the gang and working on my veterans quilts.
What I will not be doing is any yard work! I spent most of yesterday in the basement making soap....10.5 pounds of soap! That was 3 big batches and I'll get a photo after I uncover them. They have to be kept insulated for the first 24 hours. But, trust me, it's a lot of soap. I donate about half of it, sell a little and the rest is for me, family, and a couple of friends. After the soap was cleaned up, I made lotion and that was about all my energy for the day. I got a little motivated after dinner and decided to clean off the cutting table from all the placemat fabrics that I pulled yesterday. It only took about an hour and a half and now I have placemat kits and a clean cutting table.  The fishes got paired with a shibori. I even cut the binding for each kit. I have 4 of these and will need to dye matching napkins. I'd like to get this set done before the beach because I think my brother or nephew will want them. But Chris would like them too.  For the rest of these I only had 2 napkins and 1 fat quarter so each set will be only 2 placemats, plenty for me and Chris. The nice thing about "special" fabrics is that you don't need to do much with them. Just add a little accent and enough fabric to get to the target size and they are done.  This is one of my all-time favorite fabrics. It was done with glue resist and dyed at least twice. The top/bottom fabric is a sample that I made for a customer YEARS ago and I'm happy I've found a home for it. I also have 2 more napkins out of the overdyed napkin bin. A friend gave me bags of napkins many years ago that she collected from thrift stores. I often put them in with gradients on the edges of the bin to soak up run-off dye. I've used tons of them but still had an overstuffed bin. I can now, finally, close the lid on that bin.  I know that I dyed this fabric with my friend when we were doing monthly "technique exploration days". We tried everything (shibori, batik, printing, screen printing, stenciling, sun printing.....) and we both ended up with some fun fabrics. This one was done during the dextrin resist exploration. I was lucky to find 3 fabric bits in my stash that would work with it.
All of these are set aside for sewing. It probably won't take an hour to stitch then all. I think I'll look for a backing scrap that's bing enough for all 10 of the so I can load and quilt them on the longarm all at once. What I know for sure is that if I don't get them done before the beach, they will likely wait a while. After the beach I want to get started on the Goldfinch quilt. Today (and maybe this weekend) I'll be quilting the baby quilt for Mom after Chris and I do a little kayaking on the lake. It's going to be a beautiful day to be outside.  This will be the last view of the baby Eastern Bluebirds. They all look healthy and ready to fly out into the world! We are still waiting on the Wrens to hatch but hope to check in on them in the next day or so.  I had a nice, but quick, visit to the river Monday for one night to hang out with my friends (person and dog) and help my friend so some sewing room organizing. We didn't do all that much organizing but we did make some progress. I came home Tuesday afternoon and got this little quilt loaded and started quilting it. It will look familiar to you because Mom made two of them. This is the second one. I hope to have it done by Saturday when I see her. That's very doable because I don't have to go anywhere today or tomorrow. Today I plan to make a lot of soap and lotion and then do some quilting.  In the sewing room, I'm continuing on my placemat frenzy. I asked Mom if she would prefer a set of 4 or 4 different ones. She chose 4 different ones. That gave me the idea to use some of my sun prints since I only have one fat quarter of most of them. I will get these quilted and bound this week and then I'll need to work on napkins. I do have a big bin of overdyed napkins but none of them matched Mom's placemats. As I was going through them I thought I might as well match up some fabrics with them. Three of these photos are napkins in sets of 2 and I found some really early hand dyes (like 2008) to go with them. In the bin I also found these fish prints. I doubt of the pairs will get made before the beach but I'm going to make these fish up because I know my brother would love them. The others I will set aside to work on whenever I need something quick and easy to fill in between projects. These will probably add to my own collections.
Clearly, I've got plenty to keep me occupied for the next few days.  Is done! I really love this quilt and I'm happy to know that it's going to one of our veterans. This quilt is all scrappy. The gray fabrics are leftover from previous veterans quilt backs and the colors are all from my hand dyed scrap bin. I tend to periodically cut my scrap bin contents with my Accuquilt Go. I already had a big stack of 4" HST pieces when I got the idea for this quilt.  This quilt wasn't my idea and, unfortunately, I don't remember where I got the idea. But it's a simple quilt. This is the block.
The secret to this quilt is that it's all the same block but alternating blocks are turned upside down.  I worked up the EQ file in 2 different shades of gray so you can see the block layout.
Cool, isn't it? I may need to make another of these.  Saturday I was totally focused on getting the quilt top done and I finished it right before lunch. My camera would do the magic reshaping thing this time. It kept wanting to crop to the inner black border. You'll have to just look at this skewed version. I don't know when I'll get around to quilting it. I need to dye a backing first but it will be done before August for sure. It will finish about 75 x 85.  After lunch I went for a walk to the other side (sound side) of the island and found a lovely little park with a hiking trail. At one corner there was a pier that provided a beautiful view of the sound.  You can even walk right off the pier into the water for a swim.  On the way back I came across my first beach bunny..... After my walk I was about to pack up my sewing stuff but started thinking about what to do with the leftover bits. I really don't want to add these to my stash.  Within an hour I had a table runner. I think there's just enough fabric left to make a hanging sleeve for the quilt. I have to go back to Hobby Lobby this week and get some more of the red fabric for binding for both projects.  We packed up and headed home Sunday morning. I spotted this house on the way out. I bet some really nice people live here!
I have so much dyeing to do this week and will get to start a new crochet garment project. But the most important project is the bear that I'll be making from a vintage quilt. That has to be done by Thursday!  The miracle isn't about finishing my quilt. The miracle is that I woke up early enough to see the sunrise! This NEVER happens. I'm not an early morning girl but yesterday something woke me and I'm glad it did.  I spent most of my creative time yesterday working on the quilt and I made great progress. I only have 3 borders left to do and there's no reason I can't get them done today. There's a 2" black, 1" orange and 6" print. No block piecing required. I also learned that my new cell phone camera has a wonderful trick. I took this photo with the quilt on the floor and me standing above at an angle. The camera popped up a yellow rhomboid outlining the quilt so, just for fun, I clicked that to see what would happen. This happened! This little feature is going to save me a lot of editing time in the future! Today is our last day and my goal is to finish this quilt top and take a walk.  Off and on, all week, I've been working on the baby quilt. It was all I had to work on last night and I'm close to the body of the blanket being done. Then I just have to do the border. FYI, this is an awful photo. The blanket is white.  Here's a close up of the stitch pattern. Kim and I have also spent a lot of time looking for my next crochet garment project. I think I have it narrowed down to a couple of projects. I'll figure it out when I get home and can peruse the yarn options.  The weather word for yesterday and today is WINDY which you can see from the surf. When I went for my walk I walked into the wind so that the walk back would be easier. I walked farther than I planned because I wanted to see the wind surfers that were way ahead of me. I haven't decided it I admire them or if I think they were crazy. Maybe both!
We're leaving tomorrow so I'll have a final update Monday. It's been a great week. We've both relaxed a lot and have had a great week finishing procrastination projects.  I was so close to finishing the sweater that I just had to power through and get it done yesterday. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. It fits well and I know I will use it a lot next fall and winter. It's too late to use it now because this is a very warm sweater. Here are a few notes: Pattern is a YouTube tutorial from LaDria LaVey. The hexi cardi is very popular right now and there are dozens of version on YouTube and other sources but I thought hers was a little more stylish than some of the others. The yarn is Jeans from Lion Brand. It's a 4 weight acrylic and very soft. It's a little splitty and this dark mottled colorway is a little hard to see stitches. I tried a couple of other patterns with this yarn first but got frustrated trying to see stitches. A granny style cardi was a perfect solution. I used a J-6mm hook. I made a number of adjustments as I went along to alter for size and sleeve length. With this pattern, changes are easy to do on the fly.  The front edge has bobbles and I used my trim stitches to draw the front edge up a little. Again, it was easy to adjust on the fly. Now I can go home this weekend and look through my little stash of garment yarn and pick something new to make. While here, I have the baby quilt to get back to.  But that's not all! I also made some good progress on the firefighter quilt. The pinwheel borders are together. I need to do some measuring and make some coping borders so that these will fit. It was late enough last night when I finished these that I thought it was a little late to be doing math. This will be my project for today.  But it wasn't all inside work. I didn't take as long a walk yesterday but we did get out for a walk on the beach once and went out other times just to feel the sand. It was warmer, about 70 but the wind has really kicked up. For exercise, it was yoga day. Today it's supposed to be about 72 with pretty high winds. I am planning for a long walk in between quilt sewing sessions.
It was a great day!  Yesterday we had a high of 69 but not so much sun. It still made for a more pleasant walk. I headed east this time toward the pier. It was about an hour to the piece and back. There were lots of shore birds and gulls out today. I love watching the fast moving shore birds on the surf. I was a little surprised that my camera caught this one as well as it did because it was really booking.  If this guy looks annoyed it's because he should be. There were 3 young women on the beach who thought it would be a good idea to offer one of the gulls a chip. Of course about 15 of them flew in, scared the women and they screamed and chased the gulls away. This one landed right in front of me without a snack. He was indignant.  It was a great sewing and crochet day as well. I got all of the pinwheel blocks made so today I will cut the background pieces for the pinwheel border. After the pinwheels there will be a narrow black border and a narrow orange border before the last border of the fabric at the top. It's coming together nicely I think.  The hexagon sweater is making great progress! I got the back seam done and wove in a couple dozen ends and I've started the bottom hem. I am going to really love this sweater and look forward to wearing it in the fall. I know I'm a little lates to wear it this season.
I would say that I'm confident that I can finish both of these before I leave Sunday but I don't want to jinx myself. So I'll just say that it's possible to finish both of these before Sunday. |
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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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