Close Quilting

The Shirt Stripe Boxes quilt came off the machine and is ready for binding just as soon as my regular workhorse machine gets back from having its much-needed maintenance at the shop.  I love the close-set quilting on this; together with the extra-smooth shirting fabrics, it gives the quilt a crisp, modern, beach house-like feel.

I used a light blue polyester thread (usually it's all cotton for me, but this turned out well).  You can see the pattern best on the dark squares.

The sheen of the poly thread makes an interesting effect even on the back.  The closeness of the quilting does make the overall quilt a bit flatter and stiffer, but it works here.

I've sorted my scraps of fabric into three tubs.  Left to right they are "Tinies", strips, and "Vintage-y".  This is in addition to the fat quarters that are more neatly organized in my cupboard.  I thought I would cut out strips from these three bins for the Framed In Quilt featured recently on Moda Bake Shop.  My recipe is "blue" and the background will be some white I had leftover from a large quilt backing.

Anything with blue in it will qualify, regardless of variations in fabric style and weight.  Now I just want to get my machine back so I can start piecing.  There are still many quilts' worth of scraps, and I haven't even dug into my fat quarters.

A Finished Project, an Enhanced Stash, and a Pig Roast

I rediscovered an old project (circa 2008) while excavating the craft room.  This is a rug made with yarn cut from old t-shirts.  The pattern is Trinity, based on the basic log-cabin square blanket knitting pattern (really a method rather than a pattern).  I had put it away because working with the 1" wide strips of cotton fabric on size 15 needles is not as relaxing as other kinds of knitting, but it was 85% finished.  Or, I decided it just needed a little extra push to finish it, so I did.  And I put the other balls of t-yarn in a pretty basket until I'm foolhardy enough to start another rug.  So the kids' bathroom has a new, very knobbly, bathmat and my forearms and wrists are sore.

Memorial Day sales added this to my stash (because everyone knows that the first step to using up a lot of scraps is to buy more fabric to use as backgrounds and blenders, right?).  Solid cottons, 1 1/2 yard each of the colors and 4 yards of white, and 1 yard each of the ginghams.  I really do plan to make some scrappy quilts with them.  Plus, they are very "now" colors and most of my stash is very "not now." 
 We just came back from a Memorial Day pig roast.  What a neat idea for party hosts with lots more energy than we have!  They had a whole pig stuffed with more pork roasts, rubbed with all sorts of yummy seasonings, wrapped in lots of heavy duty foil and chicken wire and slow-roasted overnight in a pit on their property.  Then they brought it over to the Grange hall they had rented on a pickup truck, unwrapped it and served it there, along with a choice of barbecue sauces and the potluck dishes everyone else brought.  And the weather was even nice (mid 60's and partly sunny)!

Gardening in the Northwest

The first thing you need to know about gardening in the Pacific Northwest, if you don't live here, is that summer doesn't come until after the 4th of July.  There is about a month delay compared to the rest of the country: right now it feels like what most of the country experienced in April. The first thing you need to know about our garden in particular, is that Steve does almost all of the work, and we both tend to favor plants that can fend for themselves.  In this climate and with our lifestyle, it's nice when things that grow like weeds are actually attractive in their own right.  That's our raised brick flowerbed above (built on the old shed or barn foundation, we think) with daisies crowding out the lilies and iris and sage, backed by vast quantities of forget-me-nots and the raspberry patch, then the apple trees.

Peas, zucchini, lettuce and spinach, and some tomatoes.  This isn't the best spot for tomatoes: between the back of the raised bed and the 60-foot high Japanese cedars, it's pretty shady.  But that's okay, tomatoes don't do great anywhere in the Northwest, except for cherry tomatoes.  Note more forget-me-nots in the background and some volunteer mustard greens.

The back of the garage is the sunniest spot for tomatoes and peppers.  Steve has put in a little walkway so you can get to the stuff by the garage.  More forget-me-nots (it is Memorial Day weekend, after all), foxglove, and iris.

Grandma and Grandpa's coyote from Arizona is probably wondering why he's surrounded by oregano and wallflowers.  Oregano is something that grows as a weed in our yard.  Want some? Come on over.  Lemon balm, too.

I think there are forget-me-nots in every shot.  If you have to have weeds, make sure they're pretty ones!  This is the kitchen garden, by the side patio.  Also shady, but handy for herbs and salad greens.  Also trying some tomatoes there.  If they don't do well, we're also members of a CSA run by some friends who take their gardening more seriously.
Our other plants are growing well: Primigenitus received his SAT scores yesterday, and they are sufficient to make us optimistic about his acceptance at any reasonable institution of higher education.  Secundus, while remaining the buff athletic one with a penchant for video games, brought his verbal reasoning and vocabulary scores up by 2 stanines on the standardized tests he took.  Tertia is going to Third President for middle school, and that is, on reflection, a real answer to prayer, even if we don't have all the details worked out yet.  Quarta is quite the crafty young lady - I'll have to blog about her first quilt soon.

The Allure of Red and Aqua

I have been noticing a new-to-me color combination a lot on the quilt blogs: red and aqua.  For years I had a subscription to at least one quilt magazine so I could keep up with these trends, but I've been simplifying, or trying to, the last few years and I've also been focusing more on knitting instead.  I was surprised by how much I immediately loved this color combination and wanted to do a quilt in it.

It's also appealing when you add in some sweet pinks to the mix.  That helps temper the aqua skull and crossbones a bit, maybe.

Now, I'm not really an aqua person.  I never thought I was, anyway.  Too close to teal, which is about the only color I don't love.  (I won't say I don't like it, but I'm not terribly likely to use it much). But it's been growing very trendy in recent years and, as trends have a way of doing, aqua has been growing on me subtly without my being aware of it.  I decided to lay out a possible grouping of fabrics from my newly reorganized stash, figuring I probably wouldn't find much aqua.  Ironically, I had a harder time finding true red, because of my red Chinese Lanterns quilt from a few years back.

So, I'd have to buy more red, which I can't do because I have absolutely no more room for fabric in my sewing corner until I make about 5 scrap quilts to use up what I've got.  In fact, I could probably make a monochromatic quilt similar to the above in blue, green, pink, purple, orange, and yellow, and then we could talk about fabric shopping.

You can see some more inspiring examples of the red and aqua color combo here.  I really do like the idea.

Bought a new vacuum cleaner this week.  It's the one on the left.  The old one has lost its mojo, and some of its attachments.  The new one is supposed to be especially good at picking up pet hair, and it comes with a special attachment you can use for grooming your pet during shedding season:

<Snort!> You just try that on any self-respecting cat!

Finished Pimpelliese

Okay, this shawl has a strange name.  But it was fun to knit.  Plenty of garter stitch and a fairly easy lace edging on every row.  As a bonus, the side-to-side construction meant I could use pretty much every bit of my handspun and hand-dyed Polwarth yarn.

The trick is to divide your yarn into two equal balls (I don't have a scale, so I roughly measured the yardage as I wound it onto my swift). Then when you reach the end of one ball, you stop doing increases and start doing decreases.  I used about 420 yards altogether.

It's a happy shawl and I should really wash and block it.  The yarn was lovely to work with from the spinning through the knitting.

Coming Up for Air

Okay, the last few days have been a bit of a frenzy.  It's my aunt's fault really.  She shared a link to the Moda Bake Shop's Framed in Quilt, which I loved, because of course I love scrappy quilts.  This quilt was designed by Little Miss Shabby, whose site I also visited and loved.  So I put both in my blogreader to follow (you can do that when you have a blog, it's very fun.  I think you can do it even without a blog, but I haven't figured out how yet).  That was how I found out about the "Giveaway Day" at Sew Mama Sew, which is when hundreds of blogs get together to have a big blog party and give stuff away.  I have spent every last free moment of my time for the last two days visiting blogs to see what they're giving away and putting "pick me pick me!" type comments to try to win some of their fabulous loot.  It's inspiring to see how many other fun blogs there are out there.  I'll be excitedly watching my inbox to see if I won anything.

Of course, what I was supposed to be doing for the last few days was not trying to win new stuff, but to slim down my old stuff.  The stack of craft stuff to clean and organize has moved away from the wall and is now spread out through the family room.  Yarn is organized, some quilt projects are organized, but I just discovered a moth infestation in some of my older spinning fiber and a stack of cards and letters from my wedding (19th anniversary is later this year).  I have numerous plastic bins but some are missing lids, and I have some random lids with no bins.  I keep getting sidetracked with archeological finds like my rug hooking and that triangle rag rug I was knitting at least 3 years ago.  I'm going to finish it, by gum! And of course, the kids need my attention every few minutes and I have to teach school every morning.

Now that I know about it, the Sew Mama Sew giveaway day will be something I want to participate in next time around.  Too bad that I wasn't ready for it this time, because I could make up several nice prize packages - scraps that I'm not in love with anymore, leftover cuts of fabric from quilts, some vintage things I've picked up here and there, extra balls of yarn, quilting magazines and books.  It will be fun!  I'll have to figure out how to run the "random number generator" thingy they talk about to choose winning comments, and I'll probably have to recruit tech help to set it up, but I can do it.  And now, I'm off to do more cleaning.  Steve is coming back from business travel tomorrow and it would be nice if he could walk through the family room.

Defining the Blog, part 2

So, last post I revealed to you what you had probably figured out already.  The blog will be eclectic.  I know that some people can blog and stick to one subject.  I will not be doing that.  I will, however, be in the running for the world's only blog about knitting, quilting, teaching Latin, and book reviews.  I love all of those things and will probably be alternating my blogtime between them.  So far in my blog history, I have not yet run out of book reviews that I want to do.  And if I blogged about every knitting pattern in my Ravelry queue, I could focus on that for about 4 years without missing a day or repeating a pattern.  Or every quilt pattern I have tagged for inspiration among my books and magazines.  I could work my way through Latin tutorials and share with you the accumulated wisdom of 11 years of teaching an ancient language.

But I refuse to limit myself.  I could dabble in political discussion, housekeeping tips, favorite recipes, history and current events, and of course philosophy and theology.  There are always family photos and humorous stories to share. 

Lack of attention span, you say?  Jill of all trades, master of none?  "A little learning is a dangerous thing"?  Most probably.  But if I had a single specialty and stuck to it exclusively, I would be a university professor and not a blogger, and I'd be having a whole lot less fun.

If you're just here for the quilt, it's called (appropriately enough for this entry) "Windmills of My Mind" and is my own design.  I was inspired by an article in Quilter's Newsletter Magazine (before it changed its name and defied punctuation rules -- March 2005 #370) called "Big Block, Little Block" about creating transparencies with two different sized variations of the same block pattern.  I figured that if two different sizes were good, three would be better, or at least a whole lot more interesting.  It was interesting piecing, all right.  I narrowly escaped being driven insane by the permutations of different colors to get the layering effect.  Enjoy -- it's one of my favorite quilts.

I just found out today about the website sewmamasew, which is organizing a giveaway day on several craft blogs.  Check it out... the blogs usually require you to leave a comment to enter for their giveaway, and it's open for another 24 hours or so.