sewing

Trying not to lose my scissors

 , ,

My sewing space is in our bedroom. There’s a table with my two machines which doubles as my cutting table (hooray for Ikea and height adjustable tables!), and there’s the ironing board on the other side of the room. While this leaves me some open space for pin basting quilts or playing with colors and fabrics while planning a project, it means I bounce back and forth between the machines and the ironing board a lot. I have one pair of fabric scissors. They are forever not where I am. There are lots of solutions to the problem: buy more …

quilts

Sew.Quilt.Give. Update

 ,

Sew.Quilt.Give., the online quilting bee I participate in, is back for another year of charity quilting. January’s blocks were based on this tutorial from In Color Order. Look familiar? I’ve made this block before. This month’s bee leader has asked for brights, so I hope these will blend nicely with all the other blocks. I did use prints, but they are of the tone-on-tone variety, so they almost read as solids. Also, I don’t think the orange is quite this aggressive in reality; orange is tricky to photograph well, I think. While we’re talk SQG, I’m attaching the binding to …

crochet

Two Shawls

 ,

Do people even wear shawls these days? Like, in public? My mom had (still has?) a white shawl which I remember she sometimes wore to church on Easter Sunday. But despite the many shawls I can find on Ravelry (I’m on Ravelry, but it’s pretty pointless following me since I don’t queue or show off projects there) and in books, I can’t think of a single time I’ve been out and about and have noticed someone wearing a shawl like it was no big thing. The kid I saw wearing his fuzzy team blanket on the way to watch a …

sewing

Making the Pledge

 

I really fell off the stashbusting wagon by the end of last year. I don’t recall that I made any formal pledge to not buy more fabric; maybe that’s why I didn’t make it. I’d like to blame something other than myself and either my lack of self-control or my ability to talk myself into anything fabric-related, but I’d only be doing it to make myself feel better. It wasn’t the discount’s fault. It was only doing what it was supposed to do (get people to buy fabric)… I’m the responsible one who can not eat the chocolate and not …

quilts

A Most Epic Quilt Project

 ,

Ok, that’s a bit grandiose of a title. But wow, this project got big! This is the quilt top for last March for Sew.Quilt.Give. March was my month to request block contributions. I asked for square-in-square blocks in a range of sizes with the vague idea that I could float them on point in a spacious background. I’d this quilt from Canton Village Quiltworks in mind, with a touch of this one and this one. Next time, I really need to bust out the graph paper and turn those vague ideas into something concrete. I started off putting a creamy …

Art

A Knot for the New Year

 

I haven’t drawn a knot in years, but today it seemed like the thing to do. I had to go back to my reference book (Celtic Design: Knotwork by Aiden Meehan) to remind myself how the knot was supposed to wind itself around the guiding grid. This knot is done on a grid done by Mr. Meehan, so while I’ve drawn this one, it’s copied from one of his designs. Maybe there will be more knots (of the artistic variety) this year?