 and it's still raining! I apologize to all residents of central Virginia. I knew it was bad luck to wash 2 cars on the same day and here's my punishment. Before I explain this photo know that our house is perched , basically, on a cliff so that grassy edge you see there is actually a drop and I'm taking this photo from the second story. So there's absolutely no chance of water getting anywhere near our house. The black line should be the edge of our property but you can see here why we call that area the flood plain.  Here's one edge of the property. Both side property lines are basically drainage ditches that are often dry. Not today! We actually have a waterfall. I actually hate drenching steady rainstorms like this. It reminds me too much of the rain that we got in 1972 from Hurricane Agnes when our neighborhood was flooded. It rained heavy and for hours. There were fears of the dam breaking so they had to open the flood gates and it surely flooded. We got 2 - 3 feet of water in our basement and an entire beach full of sand dumped in our backyard. What was a little 15 foot wide creek behind our house turned into a river about 200 yards wide. It was miserable and I have hated steady heavy rainfall ever since. I can't sleep through it, I have to wear earplugs. It's the reason that I always will try to live on a hill. Give me a thunderstorm any day. I sleep like a baby during thunderstorms. Plus we have satellite internet and TV and it's been hit and miss for 2 days. I was finally able to get in to do this post. The weather should be clearing up later today. Virginia is definitely not in a drought this year. Chris, my personal climatologist, says that we have received about 160% of our annual average rainfall this year. I believe it because the yard has been a mud pit all year. I'm glad my hobbies are mostly inside!  Yesterday was dyeing day so I didn't get a ton of time at my hobbies but now that the quilt is done I'm back to the crochet. Let me just say again that I LOVE this Lion Brand Mandala Ombre yard. I'm almost at the end of the first of 4 balls. I'll be able to put a border on this one.  Here's my first Spirograph design on the floor cloths. I've done more but it was raining too hard to go out and get photos. More to come on this project.
My main goal today is to get the last 2 veterans quilts quilted. We have quilt club sewing days tomorrow and Saturday so I'll take the finished veteran quilts to the owners for binding. Most of them will be at sewing tomorrow or the meeting Tuesday. Yesterday it was beautiful outside and was a perfect day for my shooting lesson. For those of you who know clay shooting, yesterday was a BIG day. I've finally gotten where I can do report pairs. Woohoo! I came home and got back to my sample floor cloth. I wanted to get this one done so I can work on the real ones this weekend.  So first I added a last element. I'm not thrilled with this. It needs something else and I'd love to add some color. It needs to be be transparent color and all I have to work with is Tuskiniko Ink. It would be great if I could finally use this stuff for something!  I had to test it first to see how it would work with the polyurethane and you can see from this sample that the ink isn't going to work at all. So back to figure something else out.  I decided to add dots! I like it. Next I will turn under the hem and glue it in place.  It will finish off at about 24" x 36" and this cropped photo give you and idea of how it will look. Not too bad for a sample!
I also made progress on the next 2 veterans quilts and am halfway down the second side of the binding on Kim's quilt. I didn't accomplish a lot yesterday. The morning was exercise and chores and the afternoon was training to be an elections officer. I've been wanting to do this for a while and with covid and this particular elections I figured that they might need more staff. They are doubling staff on our county precincts this year! They have had early voting going on for a couple of week. With that and absentee ballots, about 20% of our registered voters have voted already. Should be an interesting day on November 3.  I did have a little time yesterday morning to work on the practice floor mat. I learned that for the real floor cloths that I want semi-gloss or satin finish paint so that the pen will mover more smoothly. This paint was eggshell and it's a little grabby for the giant black Sharpie that I'm using. But I still LLOOOOOVVEE how it's looking! Much of these edges will be folded under so some of the design will be cut off. That's exactly the effect that I wanted.  I've been taking some free online classes in the evenings. I'm on a Jane Austin class now (don't love the lecturer but it's still interesting). While listening I do get in some crochet. I finished the body of this blanket and now I have these bits of yarn left over to possibly add to the border. Usually when I make blankets with the Mandala yarn I use it all in the body of the blanket but as I got toward the end of the first ball I realized that this blanket was going to be proportionally too long or too narrow, depending on your perspective. I decided to stop with the yellow in the center and to wind off the oranges and red. I don't know how it will look to add these colors to the border but I'm going to give it a try. If I don't like it I can undo it. I started with SC of the fuchsia and HDC of the yellow. Next I'll add the gold and then orange. If I don't like it I can undo it back to the yellow and call that row the finish. We'll see.  In other crochet news my friend sent me this pic of her grandson with his blanket that I made earlier this year. This baby is only 2 weeks old and never had the typical raw newborn look. He cam out looking a month old!
Today is dyeing day and I feel more stash packs coming on!  The quilt labels for both quilts are done! There was a time crunch because I needed both quilts ready for delivery Saturday. This one was a lot harder than it looks! It took a lot of tries to find a good wheel combination for the ears and then to set up alignment marks on the wheels and the paper so that the ears would be mostly symmetrical. I'm pretty pleased though and I know that this will lead to more experiments with layering spirograph elements.  This one really doesn't have anything to do with the quilt design or theme. It has everything to do with my desire to play with a different set of gears.  I've had this set for a while but haven't really started to explore the possibilities with them. You can see on the left the pieces that I out together for this label. I just needed a little project to kick start my exploration of these and that's going to start happening soon.  In the evenings I've been making quick progress on this blanket. This is the last round of hearts so there's only the border left to do. I think 2 skeins of Hobby Lobby I Love This Yarn is going to just enough to finish this blanket.
I will be away from the blog for the next week. Usually when I take a break I schedule out some posts, even if they are just giveaways. But we're heading off for a family vacation, something all of us probably need about now. I've decided to give myself a break from everything - home, business and quilting. I'll post a fabulous Customer Gem tomorrow and then I'll be back May 25. 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 decided to start off the new year but finishing up the puppy quilt with the label. My plan was to give it to her today when she visits but that plan has changed a bit. I was visiting a quilt buddy yesterday and she asked if I was bringing the puppy quilt to show-and-tell. I had completely forgotten my obligation to show my quilts at club meetings first! My friend will have to wait a week or so before she receives her quilt, but she will get to see it today when she visits.  I used to do very simple printed labels that I created in Powerpoint. They took less than an hour to design and print. Then my sister-in-law taught me to Zentangle and then I found Wild Gears and my label-making turned into one more hobby. You can see the labels that I've made in my Zentangle gallery. Anyway....Wild Gears has a set called Strange Shapes and it has a gear that looks like a dog bone and I had to use that as the base for the label for this quilt. I always start by practicing with different gears to pick the pattern that I want. I settled on the blue one.  The next step is to print the wording. I generally spend way too much time here playing with fonts and searching for new fonts on the web. But, for once, I kept it simple. I keep the file open on my computer in case I mess up the drawing and have to print another.  I was good this time and got the drawing right on the first try! No fancy pen here. This is my favorite black pen from Dollar General. The base gear is the dog bone and the traveling gear is a triangle. Usually I'd stop here but then I remembered that I might have a stamp I could add. I headed to the basement to search through the bins of stamping supplies.  My memory is not totally shot. I did have a dog paw stamp!  My ink pad is a little old but I just went back and inked in the print with a fine point Sharpie to get them totally black.  Now I'm happy. The next step was to photocopy the label to pre-treated fabric. I use Bubble jet Set on Pimatex for my printable fabric. I usually prepare 2 yards or more at a time so I have a stack or printer sheets ready to go.  I line my labels by fusing a piece of white fabric to the back and then turn the edges against the lining. That blocks the backing fabric color from showing through. This is ready to be stitched on today or tomorrow.
 The most important thing I needed to accomplish the past 2 days was to get this label done and stitched on the quilt. I always wash the quilt before I add the label so that the label won't be baggy the first time it's washed. That's a risk with labels as big as the ones that I make.  While I had everything out I made the label for the Groovy quilt too. I'm still slowly progressing on the binding. I have plenty of time. This one doesn't have to be finished until December 1 but I want it done before we leave for Thanksgiving.
I'm also pecking away at the Christmas postcards. I might have some photos to share tomorrow. This past weekend Chris and I took off for a few days of hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a great trip and I'll share a few photos at the end of the post. But before we left my latest (and final) order of Wild Gears arrived! These floor cloths that I'm going to make are getting REALLY expensive! I'm going to have to find something else to draw on when that project is done. I wanted even bigger drawings so I bought the Enormous Hoops, Oval and Ruler. These photos are from the Wild Gears website because my sets are spread out all over the cutting table right now.  Since I was already spending the money I also got the Modular Gear set and the 3-way Connector Set. You can build custom shapes and tracks for the gears. Or as Mom says, "It's the Wild Gears Hot Wheels track." I can't wait to play with this! But I did play with the ruler, ovals and enormous rings a bit. Here are some of the designs that I was playing with before we left. Keep in mind that these are practice pieces using Crayola markers on newsprint. The ultimate project is to do the good designs using a fat black Sharpie marker on a painted floorcloth. Well, on 3 floorcloths!  We had a great trip to the Blue Ridge Parkway. We left Thursday and returned Sunday. We live so close that we had plenty of time to hike on Thursday and Sunday too. The first thing that struck us was the amount of tree damage along the parkway and in the forest. There were trees, limbs and branches down everywhere. We talked to a Park Ranger Thursday that told us they had a big ice event in November that has taken months to clean up. We saw several trees like this on trails. Nature will fix it.  There were fields of Mayapple. We have these in our yard and, thanks to the Ranger, I now know what they are.
We hiked 14.4 miles in 4 days and that was pretty good since it rained Friday and we only got in a 1.2 mile hike that day. We enjoyed lots of waterfalls.  We stayed on the mountain so we would have a great view and this place did not disappoint! After driving in the rain Friday we were rewarded with this when we got back to base. The weather was perfect the rest of the trip.  I even hauled myself out of bed early enough one morning to see the sun rise over the mountains. Then I went back to bed.
We were both exhausted when we got home last night but Chris still couldn't sleep because he watch Game of Thrones.  I can't put down the Wild Gears! In fact I ordered 3 more sets this week. There's an Enormous set and Ovals and I got both of those plus one other set that I didn't already have. I want the Enormous and Ovals for my floor cloths and I'm still playing around with large designs for them. But I've also been thinking about drawing on fabric so that I might make a quilt. I had a stack of yellow scraps on the table so I've been experimenting with them. Over the past week or so I've been drawing designs all over the fabric and yesterday cut them up into postcards.  I had not intended to make anything with the practice pieces but as I was looking at them I figured that adding a few crystals might make them fancy enough to be acceptable for postcards. On this card you can see that I was also experimenting with doing designs in layers. I did a big design first in a light ink for some background lines and then added the smaller motifs in red and brown ink.  In a couple of hours I had 9 more postcards! Between birthdays, get well greetings and Airbnb guests I go through these really quickly.
Chris and I are taking a little vacation starting today. usually I prepare a lot of posts while I'm away but I simply ran out of time to do that this time. So you won't be hearing from me until next Thursday or Friday. I may be posting on Instagram (vickisews) and Facebook if you follow me there because I will have access to a sewing machine and some Wild Gears while I'm away. I'll leave you with the latest Wild Gears designs that I've drawn up in preparation for the kitchen floor cloths. They look a little ragged with the markers I'm using so just imagine them done in black Sharpie. See you next week!
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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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