Crackpot Quilters’ Blog

By Ann

Like Rebecca, I have been remiss in my blogging, but unlike Rebecca, I have also been remiss in my quilting/crafting/sewing activities. When the Crackpots Converged in July, I decided that that had to change. There are just too many projects I want to work on – Jim’s quilt, last summer’s Crackpot rainbow quilt, working on improving my piecing accuracy, playing with placemats and pillowcases…. But of higher priority than all of that was Aprons.  The ones I had acquired when we remodeled the kitchen 10+ years ago were – ummm – wearing thin. Two had been discarded and the third had ties that were down to a few hardy threads. A crisis was imminent! So, I got to work, and here are the results:

The one on the left is the old apron with the almost-gone ties, which I replaced. With the original fabric. If you look closely, you can see that the ties are significantly less faded than the skirt. The middle one is made using the pattern for the Arrowhead Block from Quiltmaker Nov/Dec 2010 (http://www.quiltmaker.com/patterns/details.html?idx=12909). It’s a very cool block to piece and I had fun making it. The third apron is made from a lovely pear fabric that I found at Fields while shopping with Marty a while ago.

As Crackpots know, my aprons are all enhanced with a button-on hand towel (sold commercially as a wash cloth) so that I don’t have to commit the unpardonable sin of wiping my hands on my apron. (My mother bright me up right.) Unfortunately, that means making buttonholes. Eeeeep! I have alway found buttonholes to be very scary. And I had to make a lot, liked 16!! But at least I got lots of practice,  and I think I have now, not exactly mastered them, but at least I don’t find them to be quite so scary. Here’s the whole blessed lot of them and even a close up of one showing that some of them were not too bad.

And finally, here are the aprons with their attached hand towels.

By Nancy

Here it is, my broccoli!  It’s the first time I’ve grown it, and I’m quite pleased with its progress.  My square foot garden is doing very well.  We’ve been eating lettuce and spinach, though the spinach is quite unimpressed with our sudden switch from cool to HOT.  Spinach may prove to be a better fall crop in our climate.  The basil is coming along, and the 5 different kinds of tomatoes seem happy.  Only the green onions are looking a little wimpy, but they are a package of seeds from 2009 that I just found lying around the house and decided I’d go ahead and plant, so I won’t be heartbroken if nothing comes of them. 

In other news, school is out is 20 minutes.  Quilting and crocheting progress will slow down in about 20 minutes, too!

by Nancy

Here are my crochet squares for April. This is the 12″ square, called Lace Petals Square by Chris Simon.

I didn’t do the 6″ square that was chosen for April for the Crochet-Along. It looked kind of complicated and confusing, so instead, I did Centered Square by Jan Eaton from 200 Crochet Blocks. And, I crocheted them together, using the slip stitch together in the outside loops only method, described here, which I like a lot!

by Nancy

We had nice, dry weather on Saturday, so I was able to get the last plants in my garden. And here it is! It’s a 4′ by 4′ square, planted in the method described in Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. It’s a really good method for me because the soil in our yard in lousy, and I like having just a small area to plant. Today for lunch I ate a salad of spinach and lettuce harvested from the garden – delicious! In addition to spinach and two varieties of lettuce, I planted green onions, basil, several kinds of tomatoes, bell peppers, and broccoli.

by Nancy

Sorry that the second picture is somewhat blurry, and that it’s already May and I’m just now getting around to posting this, but here are my March Crochet-Along blocks. Except that I’ve decided to narrow my colors for the project down to just purple, yellow, and white, so I may re-do the yellow-pink-yellow small squares and make them purple-yellow-purple in contrast to the other yellow-purple-yellow small squares.  Aah, the creative process…

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be transferring this domain, and the other domains that I own or manage, from GoDaddy.com to a different registrar in the next few days.  There’s a thing having to do with DNS propagation that has to happen in this process, so the blog may disappear for a day or so and then reappear.

Fear not! It should reappear just fine eventually.  I’m not changing hosts, just registrars.  I’ve been really uncomfortable with GoDaddy for a long time, but transferring domain registration is a real pain in the neck, so I’ve just held my nose and stuck with it, but they finally went over the line recently and I’m moving to a different company. Wish me luck!

Remember the Midwestern Blizzard of February 1 and 2, 2011? What would you have done in that blizzard?

What would you have done if you opened your front door on February 2 to find this?

Or if you pushed the snow off your back steps and looked across your courtyard toward your garage and found this?

Or if you trudged around the block and into your garage and opened the door to look across your courtyard from the other direction and you saw this?

If there were snowdrifts taller than you, what would you do? If you were She Who Shall Not Be Named, you’d get your snow shovel and twenty (20) minutes later you’d see this:

And this:

Her name must be Superwoman!

And if you were the mother of Superwoman, what would you do? You’d print the photos on fabric and make them into a wall hanging for Superwoman’s birthday present.

Happy Birthday, Superwoman!

Woo-Hoo! I found my underwear. Woo-Hoo! Fifteen months later. Twenty-five miles from home.

A couple of friends told me they’d seen my underwear. And they told me where they’d seen it. So I decided to find it myself.

And here it is.

It’s hard to see in this photo (more about that adventure later), but this is the beaded bra I made and donated for an auction that raised money for mammograms for uninsured or under-insured women. The bra cups are covered with flower, leaf and butterfly beads. The sides and back are covered with pink fabric. I named the bra “Garden of Hope.”

It’s hanging in the fitting room of Dockside Clothing in Grand Haven, Michigan. I believe the store owner must have purchased it at the auction.

Taking the picture was itself an adventure. I walked into the store and told the clerk that I understood there was a beaded bra in the fitting room and that I was the person who made the bra. She did a double take. I guess I don’t look like the highly embellished undergarment type.

At lunch a friend had shown me how to take a picture with my relatively new phone. (See what happened to the old one here.) So I took the photo with my phone. Then the issue was what to do with it. Apparently my $20 not-very-smart phone and my $5 a month plan do not permit me to send email or to download info from the phone. So I texted it to my daughter-in-law’s smart phone and she emailed it back to me. I think I should be able to take better photos with the phone, but the instruction book is not too clear. I’ll have to experiment.

But when I get back to Grand Haven next month, I’ll take a real camera and get a better picture.

by Nancy

Christmas in February? Why not? 🙂 I’ve been having fun doing a little scrappy piecing here and there with some of my leftover Christmas fabrics. I’m using the pattern for Spinner from Bonnie Hunter’s Addicted to Scraps column in the March/April ’10 issue of Quiltmaker. My version is a little less scrappy – I’m only using one light fabric for the background instead of a light and a dark. (By the way, I’ve been reading and enjoying Bonnie’s blog. She’s a lot braver than I am with color choices and scrapiness, and I am inspired by her quilts!) My hope is to make enough stars for a Christmas lap quilt for next Christmas season. When I took this picture a few weeks ago, I only had 3 blocks, but now I’m up to 12. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to post an updated picture soon!

Update February 22, 2010: I’m up to 16 stars now!