Olympic Yoke Wrap-up

This is the Olympic knitting project I chose.  It is the yoke portion only of a Drops free pattern, knit from three different colors of yarn from thrifted sweaters and some white from my handspun.  I love love love the color combination, even though I was skeptical at first.  The rest of the sweater will be knit from the chest downwards: I just came back from Knit Night at Starbucks, where I picked up the stitches from the provisional chain cast-on.  They are all on the needle now; I need to count them up and do some basic figuring for how to do the dividing for sleeves and body.  Then the plan is to have the chocolate brown be the main color, with little green speckles.  I might work the pink and white back in at the wrists and the waist, I'm not sure yet.  I do love colorwork.

Unfortunately, since it's not a finished project I still can't count yardage used.  And since I haven't finished anything in the quilting hobby either in 2014, once again a week has passed without a single thing that I can enter into my Stash Report.  That's zero yards of quilting fabric and zero yards of knitting yarn, in or out, in 2014.  I've never had such a long spell with no finishes to show since I've been actively blogging and counting my stash usage.  At least I'm not increasing my stash.  But I need to have some kind of burst of productivity, if only for my own self-esteem.  Finish something before the end of February!

Design Wall and Stash Update

For Design Wall Monday over at Patchwork Times, I'm doing that thing I do when I really have made virtually NO progress on any quilt for 2 weeks... I'm letting my Mother-in-law's quilts take center stage.  I pinned a few of them for her last week.

This one is just charming.  It looks like that Granny Square pattern that was wildly popular, but not quite.

And this one is incredible.  It has Drunkard's Path units and 4-patches, and I know my photo is not so great, but she managed to get a really great color progression, without ever having a design wall or large bed to lay it out.  In fact, she says she doesn't even remember much about working on it.  I aspire someday to have enough quilting time so that my quilts all run together in my mind.  I am definitely not there yet.  Still working on that same  Country Stars project that's been up all summer.

The reason I've been neglecting all sewing projects is currently the plum tree.  See this post for a roundup of recipes to make with plums when your plum tree is killing itself with over-productivity.

Daniel checking the sugar and alcohol content of his plum wine.

He also revived the long-neglected sourdough starter and mixed up a batch of bread dough.  Fermentation abounds in our kitchen.

My Saturday's canning: plum-orange jam and plum chutney, along with a gallon bag of dehydrated plums (2 dehydrator loads so far).  I'll be making more jam and maybe a plum cake today.

Stash Report:

Bless me, quilt ladies, for I have definitely fallen off the "stash no fabric" wagon this week.  And I was doing so well, too!  Here's the story of how it happened: There was an estate sale that Steve and I swung by early Friday morning on our way to Treat Vancouver to order cupcakes for Quarta's birthday party: but people were lined up waiting and they weren't opening the doors for a few more minutes, so I said, "Let's just skip this one... they never have anything I like at estate sales around here, like quilting fabric."  So we did.  Then Michelle came on Saturday morning to get some plums, and she said, "There's an estate sale you should really check out... they have lots of quilting fabric!"  And of course it was the same one.  So I forgot about it again until I was driving the kids to the library Saturday afternoon and then stopped.  Quilting fabric still filled the shelves of the sewing room, and was $2 a yard.  I picked out reds first, because I've used a lot of reds in the last few years, and then some neutrals and a navy.  It all came to 20.5 yards.

I really like that red paisley.  I could have bought an awful lot more fabric if I didn't have natural Scottishness working for me, and the knowledge that the kids would not wait forever.  Then a guy was sitting behind me where I was looking over my fabric and he asked, "how much do you think that bin of scraps is worth?"  I assumed he was the husband of one of the other shoppers at first and I hedged with, "It depends on what you wanted to do with it and what kind of quilts you like to make, and how many scraps you already had."  Or something like that.  Then he said, "No, how much is it worth to YOU? Including the bin?" and I realized he wanted me to name my price for the whole big bin.  I said $5 and he put a strip of masking tape over the bin with $5 on it, and the lady working the sale carried it down for me and it ended up in my car.

There are an awful lot of scraps in there... many strips of solid colors, some novelty fabrics, about 4 or 5 half-cut quilt projects, some of them half-pieced.  Some prepared bindings, some leftover bits of binding, some dressmaking scraps and poly-cotton broadcloth, some scraps of batting.  But most of it is scrap-quilt quality and I will have fun sorting through it, eventually.  I gave some of the partly-pieced projects to Quarta to finish.

Enough 9-patches for at least a lap-quilt.  Quarta likes the purples and jewel-tones more than I do, so it will be fun for her.

But the upshot is that I am now in negative numbers for my stash report, and I will need to finish some projects to get out of this hole.  I'm not even going to count the scrap bin, just the actual yardage I purchased.  Fortunately I am soon to finish a top and use some backing I purchased, so maybe I will get back into the black next week.

But it was an epic estate sale!

Fabric:

Fabric used this week: 0 yards

Fabric used year to date: 41 yards
Added this week: 21 yards
Added year to date: 49 yards
Net used for 2013: -8 yards

Knitting yarn:

Yarn used this week: 0 yards
Yarn used year to date: 6550 yards.
Yarn added this week: 0 yards (I did ply my silk but haven't measured it yet)
Yarn added year to date: 5800 yards
Net used for 2013: 750 yards

Rummaging

It had been awhile since I had a good rummage.  Sometimes the primal need strikes, and I betake myself to the Goodwill Outlet where they sell the things that didn't sell at all the other Goodwill stores in bins, by the pound.  I have been reading Bonnie K. Hunter's books, Scraps and Shirttails I and II, in which she describes reclaiming shirts, cutting them up for their fabric, and turning the fabric into scrappy quilts.  It's not like I haven't made many quilts this way before, but last year, I put myself on a fabric and fiber diet and didn't buy much of anything.  So I was way overdue.

I bought 12.9 pounds, at $1.39 per.  That worked out to $19.44.  There were 19 100% cotton shirts, a pair of Levis for Secundus, a t-shirt for Tertia, a tweedy sweater to unravel for the yarn, and an oven mitt.  Steve and Secundus each claimed two, to actually wear.  I'm wearing a 5th one.  The above are the ones that will definitely be cut up for fabric.  Below are the ones that I'll let Daniel see if he wants first.

Here is the oven mitt... it's not just any oven mitt, it's a hand-appliqued souvenir oven mitt from someone's trip to someplace in Latin America.  You just never know what you're going to find when you rummage in the bins.  Isn't it pretty?

Some of the tags from the Goodwill stores were still on a few of the shirts.  If they had sold for asking price, just those 5 shirts would have sold for $43.  But I think the regular Goodwill stores overprice their shirts.  Karma works out in the by-the-pound bins, though.  Have I mentioned the time I found an Alice Starmore sweater?  Or the souvenir Irish Aran?  Or the semi-vintage, unfinished quilt top?  Yes, it sometimes does the soul good to rummage and come away with bags of useful and pretty raw materials and clothing FOR LESS THAN $20.00!  It was worth the aching shoulders and close encounters with lingering unpleasant smells.

I may need to rewatch this video on How to "De-Bone" a Shirt before tackling all those shirts.

Meanwhile, I made some more crumbs blocks:

I have almost enough to start seaming up the top.

Tour de Fleece, day 4

As before, Day 4's picture is of Day 3's spinning.  I now have 4 full bobbins, and most of the 5th is full.  I have 5 8-oz. bumps of superwash wool, each from a different dyelot.  My goal is to begin plying either tonight or tomorrow; there will be 3 plies, one always one of the 2 "true" oranges, and one always one of the 2  more experimental, far-ranging oranges.  The one on the bottom of this picture (it was supposed to be the right, why did the picture flip like that?!) is more brown with some spots of undyed fiber to dilute it further, and the one I'm spinning now has blackish/grayish bits in it.  So I should probably take careful notes of the different combinations in the plied yarn.  But my basic color recipe is to have lots of variation, in a controlled way.

I went on a thrift store shopping expedition last Saturday, and found a lot of neat stuff.  The plate is Delft, half price at Goodwill ($2.50!)  A dress for Quarta, a length of chambray for the quilt stash, a sweater to unravel, a couple of Redwall books for my prize box, an old volume of Horace in Latin, a vintage P.G. Wodehouse novel, Yoga book, a replacement for the Immortal Poems of the English Language book I had to bury awhile back, and a black Speedo swimsuit for me, in a size I don't like to think about.  This was to replace my Land's End swimsuit that vanished into the ether along with Tertia's and Quarta's sometime after Spring break.  (Sadness, because it cost $90 and looked half decent on me.  Maybe I will do lots of Yoga and Pilates and then look good in a swimsuit again.)

We have two teenage boys in the house who need practice driving, and I am finding it to be quite nerve-wracking.  The girls are both having swim lessons, and then will have another 2-week session starting next week as well.  The roof is patched but the drywall has not been, yet, and we will probably have to wait another week until the girls' closet is usable.

I think I'm going to relax and spin for the rest of the evening.

Finished Traveling Companion Shawl

My 5th shawl in the 12 shawls in 2012 Ravelry challenge is finished: The Traveling Companion Shawl.

Quarta helped me model it.  550 yards of vintage Indiecita Alpaca in fingering weight.  It counts as the first "large" shawl of over 500 yards, of two total required for the challenge.  Not that there is a prize, but I'm a play-by-the-rules kind of girl.  And then there is the fact that I don't wear shawls much, but we don't worry about that.  Because the knitting is the fun part.  Yay!

And here is Quarta's latest creation: an entirely edible re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party.  There were audible gasps of amazement from the other 4th graders when I carried it into her classroom.  She did it all herself; I only helped get the brownies out of the pans and I came up with the idea of cutting a slot in the Twizzlers to hold the Necco wafer heads.  I think there was some concern that it would need to be refrigerated over the weekend before it's consumed, but I figure frosting from a can probably has enough preservatives in it, don't you?

WIP Wednesday: Brought to you by the W.C.T.U.

Here's a little finished project - Quarta's first latch hook kit.  I made it into a pillow this week.  It had been cluttering up my sewing area so it was good to get it done.  It's by no means beautifully finished, but it's finished.  Yay!

Farmer's Wife Quilt block #98 - Waterwheel. 

Block #99 - W.C.T.U.  This one makes me tear up a little.  My late grandmother and her family were active in the W.C.T.U. in rural Ohio, and I have only fond associations with her despite the fact that I know some who like to poke fun at the temperance movement.  I did some research and the Women's Christian Temperance Union was associated with a white ribbon opposing violence against women, and quilts associated with them were frequently blue and white.  The white ribbon was a traditional bow, not the more modern "awareness" loop, and this block composed this way looks a little like the bow on the W.C.T.U. logo.  I think the white and solid blue are both scraps from my grandma, and the flower print looks like something she would have loved.

Block #100 (woo hoo!) - Weathervane.  I needed more golds and purples and I like the way these look together, with the gray looking like the iron of the weathervane.  I noticed I constructed this block a little differently than the book, but I'm also referring to Maggie Malone's 1001 Patchwork Designs book.  It just seemed sensible to do it this way.  I used fast-45's for the corners around the house-shaped patches, so there was no template cutting.

Startitis has struck.  I need to start on my UFO for March (a bag which actually hasn't been started yet), and I just finished my 3rd shawl for 2012 so of course I needed to figure out what to start next in knitting.  I tentatively chose Maluka and some yellow sock yarn from my stash.  And I decided to dye some ugly tan cashmere laceweight I had in my stash of reclaimed sweater yarn, with the idea that it could be used for one of the 2 "large" (= 500 meters or more shawls) required for the 12-in-12 challenge .

I kettle-dyed it with almost an entire jar of Wilton's black, burgundy, about half a jar of red red and a dab of rose.  I was going for that almost impossible to capture black-cherry red that so many of my friends are knitting now.

This is well over 1000 yards of 100% cashmere laceweight.  It was cold this morning and a few crunchy ice crystals had formed on the bottom of the hanks, but it's warmed up now.   The smaller skein on the right is the one with lots of knots that I threw in at the end to sop up extra dye, and I almost like it more than the main ones.  I may lose some yardage because of slight felting, but it's really easy to spit-splice ends of this yarn together.  And I have a hard time imagining ever knitting more than 1000 yards of a shawl.

This photo is not accurate for the darkness, but it shows a little of the variation of color.  I'm going to have fun picking out a large shawl to attempt with my very own custom-dyed luxury yarn that I got at the thrift store for under $2.  And you should have seen my students' faces when I explained my hands were red because "I was dyeing yesterday."

I did some spinning yesterday evening and made some progress on the Wensleydale laceweight I dyed last summer.  The trouble with spinning laceweight is that it takes forever to fill a bobbin.  I spun about an hour altogether and maybe did a quarter bobbin. 
I should really create a list of WIPs - that way I can be more accountable week to week.

• Aunt Maggie's Quilt - binding 25% done
• Farmer's Wife Quilt - made 3 blocks this week, 11 to go
• March UFO knitting bag - not started but I'm thinking about it
• knitting Oslo Walk shawl (3 of 12) - finished, awaiting blocking
• knitting argyle-fest - no progress
• knitting cotton bath rug - about 1/3 done with center
• knitting On Your Toes sweater - downgraded to UFO, no progress for months, oops
• knitting Maluka - just cast on, no pics yet
• spinning blue Wensleydale - about 25% done

goals for next WIP Wednesday:

• finish Aunt Maggie's binding
• start boxer shorts
• cut out pattern for March bag

I have to give myself homework, and it helps to have a list.  I am my mother's daughter.

Check out the other WIPs at Freshly Pieced.

More of Grandma's China

I've written before about how much I love my grandmother's old china pattern and am always on the lookout for it at thrift stores.  Thanks to Ace Hardware having the pantry moth trap I needed yesterday, I had time to swing by Goodwill before picking up Primigenitus from his violin lesson, and here's what I found -- a lovely sugar bowl (no lid) for $2.99.  I think it's probably from Johnson Brothers, "Saxony" because I have a couple other pieces very like it, but all it says on the bottom is "Made in England."  Grandma's original dishes were Wood & Sons "Blue Fjord" but I think the pattern is somewhat generic to many manufacturers.  I always love when I find something in that pattern.

WIP Wednesday #3: Flirting with the Farmer

So, this is my third Wednesday of linking up over to Freshly Pieced, and it's keeping me sewing even while the Tour de Fleece is going on. 

First, a finished product this week, from Carla's Pants into Capris tutorial, for my 11yo daughter (blogname Tertia.)  I really like this method for converting thriftstore purchases to fit her special frame: it doesn't require a traditional hem on the jeans material with all the bulk, and it allows me to show off some of my fun fabrics to encase the hem.  Super easy.  And the embroideries I cut off the bottom I converted into an extra pocket and a cute applique. 

I used my darning foot and dark blue thread and followed the light blue embroidery stitching inside and out, so it should stay on.  You can't even see the stitching here, but with washing the edges of the applique will fray a little.

I'm very succeptible to suggestion; for a few weeks now I've been watching the progress of the Farmer's Wife Quilt Along on Lee's and Elizabeth's blogs, and thinking about how much fun those little 6" blocks would be.  Well, I looked in 3 stores and the library without finding the book, but then I thought to myself, "If I can't use my 20+ years of quilting experience to figure out how to piece those little blocks, do not think I have wit to lie straight in my bed." (paraphrasing Maria in Twelfth Night there).

Yesterday I was a bit distracted and made a bunch of blocks.  I'm going scrappy -- how could I not? -- and trying to use at least one vintage, thrifted, or upcycled fabric in each block.  In fact, fabrics in these 1st 4 blocks are all from one or more of those categories.  Counterclockwise from the bottom, they are

1. Attic windows
2. Autumn tints
3. Basket
4. Basketweave

I also did 5. Batwing, in pink and blue, and 6. Big Dipper in greens.

Technically, I'm not a Farmer's Wife but more of a girlfriend.  For one thing, I'm not using the book and I'm not using templates unless I absolutely have to. For another, the official Quilt Along is hosted on Flickr, and I've completely forgotten how to use my Flickr account and I was almost to my limit of 200 pictures anyway.  So we'll see where this goes.  It's a good chance to keep my basic piecing and block analysis skills fresh, and play with my scraps.  I can hardly ignore the chance to do a block sampler, I love them so much.

Side by side, here is my lesson learned this week.  My first attempt at Big Dipper used a homespun plaid and what looks like a loose-weave brushed cotton from some kids' bedding.  I used my standard technique for quarter-square triangles: cut squares 1.25 inches larger than finished size, draw diagonal lines on the backs, stitch 1/4 inch on both sides of one diagonal, cut apart, press to the dark side, put the resulting HSTs together right sides facing, stitch 1/4" on both sides of the other diagonal, cut apart and you have 2 identical hourglass units.  Familiar enough to most quilters, right?  But the loosely woven materials I tried to use in the first block warped and stretched out of shape when I pressed them.  I can only imagine how badly they would have stretched if I had actually cut the bias edges of the triangles before sewing.  (Not to mention the color choices... I like scrappy and thrifty, but there are limits!) I used the identical method with more tightly-woven, traditional quilt-weight cottons and I was happy with the result.

Thrift store shopping

Last Saturday I went with a group of ladies on a thrift store tour of Portland.  Here's the stack of sheets I picked up.  I know, I said I wasn't going to buy any new fabric until I had my current mess under control.  Well, you see the loophole I left myself... these sheets aren't new.  I've started following the Vintage Sheet blog and there are so many possibilities for them.  And they're pretty, too.  I've started toying with the idea of opening an Etsy shop -- a new sewing machine won't buy itself for me, and summer break would be the time to set a shop up if it's going to happen at all.  I might cut them into fat quarters and sell them as bundles, or keep some to use as quilt backings.  I just got back from a combined trip to the Goodwill Outlet store and Costco and have another small bag full of sheets (no pictures yet).

On the Saturday trip I also picked up a few shirts solely for their potential quilting fabric.  And a few things for myself and my family to wear, of course!

I also found a tweed wool sweater to unravel for the yarn.  I'll post pictures of that sometime soon maybe.

Today I came across a lovely roundup of some fun quilting blogs from quiltershome magazine... check them out!

Blue Onion - Recreating Grandma's china collection, one piece at a time

My most recent thrift store find was pretty special.  Since I was a little girl I have loved the combination of blue and white in kitchens, all because of Grandma.  This pattern is called Blue Onion and it looks exactly like the cannister set she had.  I think my sister has it now.  I only found the Flour and Sugar cannisters at Salvation Army, and they both have cracks on the lids, but for $6.00 total (half-price sale) I'm really happy with them. 

The Blue Onion pattern has been copied many times, and I look for it every time I'm at a thrift store.  I inherited what was left of Grandma's everyday "Blue Fjord" pattern by Wood & Sons, if I can get the picture to post (Ides of March apparently makes our internet connection even slower):

Three dinner plates, 4 dessert plates, 7 bowls, and 4 little bowls perfect for small servings of strawberries.  I think Sarah got the teacups.  Over the years I've added to the collection from Salvation Army, Goodwill, and Value Village:

Two cup and saucers and two bread-and-butter plates from Johnson Brothers - "Saxony."  One saucer and one bread-and-butter from J.G. Meakin - "Blue Nordic."  But the Flour and Sugar cannisters... that was really cool.