by Nancy
You are looking at a picture of my first-ever grommets! I am now the proud owner of grommet pliers, and I have successfully placed several grommets in a tote bag that I’m making from Sew and Go Totes by Kristine Poor. They aren’t complicated to do but do require quite a bit of hand strength to squeeze the pliers. Have any other Crackpots worked with grommets?
by Nancy
Ann’s friend Lorene gave me a commission this summer to make some crochet food that she would use as baby gifts for nieces and nephews. It was quite an order, and now it’s all done:
5 apples
5 carrots
5 asparagus
5 ice cream cones
5 ears of corn
5 “grocery” bags
1 cheeseburger (for Lorene herself!)
by Nancy
Today I finished my quilted tote bag, which I think all or almost all Crackpots saw during All Together Week. I had lots of the flowered fabric, which I love, left over from making the applique table runner, so I decided to use it to make this bag. It’s from the book Sew and Go Totes by Kristine Poor. The author is an engineer, so the instructions are very clear. This is the most complicated bag I’ve attempted (though it’s still pretty simple) to date, and it turned out great! And I only had to buy some solid black fabric for the lining and a little stiff Pellon craft interfacing that goes in the handles. The stars form 3 separate pockets on the front and 3 on the back. Now I only have a small amount of the flowered fabric left, so I’ll have to get very creative with how I use that…
by Nancy
Here is my applique table runner that I’ve been working on for a while. I hand quilted around the applique and machine quilted the borders in the ditch. All I have left to do is to blind stitch the binding to the back. I love the fabric and colors, and it looks great in our green dining room!
by Nancy
Here’s some of the crochet food I’ve made lately for a friend of my mom’s, who has requested 5 sets of various crochet foods for baby gifts, as well as a cheeseburger for herself!
by Nancy
Well, I’m very relieved to hear that I was not responsible for nearly crashing the blog! While I’m waiting to hear if anyone else wants to weigh in on the options for Crackpot Quilting Day, I thought I’d post a picture of the placemats I’ve been making. I got the focus fabric at Fields a while ago. The pattern is free from the JoAnn’s website. Unlike other placemats I’ve made, this one doesn’t have binding around the edge. Instead, you layer the top, batting, and a piece of muslin and quilt that. Then, you place the quilted top and real backing right sides together and sew around them except for a hole for turning it right side out. The result is slightly thicker than other placemats I’ve made. It may have been slightly faster because I didn’t have to do binding. Overall, I’m pleased, though I think my general preference is for a standard binding for placemats.
by Nancy
Only a week and a half until All Together Week – yay! It seems that quite a few Crackpots are involved with painting projects (!), so I’ve taken it upon myself to sort through the comments and try to come up with a good project for the Crackpot Quilting Day. First of all, it seems that Crackpots are flexible – no one insisted on one thing or another – everyone just wanted to get together and sew. There was a preference for a collaborative quilt top rather than individual projects and a preference for standard piecing rather than paper piecing. So, here are a few possibilities I’ve come up with so far:
Friendship Star Block
It’s nice and easy – just squares and half square triangles, so I think we could make quite a few. I think it would look good with bright, small-scale prints for the stars and a light background fabric. I probably have enough of a background fabric so that we could use the same one throughout.
Snowball Nine Patch
I found this one while browsing around and thought it looked cool. Still pretty easy, though it might require a bit more planning if we want the square from the 9 patch to match the snowball that is touching it.
Spinner
This block is from Bonnie Hunter’s Addicted to Scraps column in the March/April ’10 issue of Quiltmaker. They have a picture of how it would look together with other blocks if you vary the color of the central star but keep the whites and reds.
Batik Scramble
Ok, this one is a little hard to explain, and unfortunately I don’t have a visual aid for it. (Have I mentioned how much I dislike the new Quiltmaker website? It’s impossible to find any useful information. Aargh! But I digress…) The pattern is Batik Scramble from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ’09. But I would change it to make it Scrappy Rainbows Scramble. If you have a picture of the quilt, what you would do is turn the even numbered rows over so that they go the same way as the odd numbered rows and look like rainbows. Then you’d do one row of red, then orange, yellow, etc. If you don’t have a magazine to look at, suffice to say it would involve 5″ squares of scraps in ROYGBIV colors and 2.5″ squares of background fabric and a flip and stitch technique.
Double 4 Patch on Point
Imagine the block on the left on point, with a variety of colors for the small squares. There’s a quilt pattern called Wonder Baby from Sweet and Simple Baby Quilts by Mary Hickey, which some people may have noticed at Fields. It’s the quilt on the cover of the book, so you can get a glimpse of it here.
I have checked the book out from the library and have the complete pattern. I think it looks cute and fun.
Little Sister
This is from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ’01 for those who go that far back.
It’s 9 patch blocks
on point, and the effect is similar to Wonder Baby.
Ok, Crackpots, that’s all I have time for. What looks good?
P.S. To the Creator of the Blog – I hope you are impressed by my Posting of Pictures from Other Sites and Linking skills. I’m mightily impressed with myself. 🙂
The past few weekends I worked on a crackpot project that has been long in coming – painting my bedroom. I bought my condo 5 years ago, and all the painted surfaces (walls and ceilings) have been a color I refer to as Contractor Beige the entire time. I’d been planning on painting my bedroom blue for most of those 5 years. The beautiful blue skies and buildings we saw in Morocco finally pushed me over the edge.
Here’s the result:
Some thoughts on painting…
I still need to do some touch-up work (blue spots on the ceiling – whoops!). But that can wait.
As promised, here are two photos of my Korean tissue box cover. As you can see it is designed for the large rectangular boxes of tissues, not the boutique boxes. It could easily be modified to fit the small rectangular boxes. Or quite probably almost any box you have in mind. Within reason.
Here is the cover in use:
And here it is without the tissues. Just a simple rectangle. Well, OK, it is embellished with those cool Asian knots, but those are not essential.
by Nancy
It’s about a month until All Together Week – yay! What would crackpots like to do this year? The traditional making of blocks for a charity or Project Linus quilt or top? What pattern? I like the past year’s Project Linus kites, but I’m open to anything. Or do we want to do something different? Everyone get together and sew on our current projects? A workshop by Marty on making little zippered bags? A workshop by me on making a reusable shopping tote?
What do all of you think?
