Sophie’s quilt

May 2nd, 2009

My crafty life hasn’t been too exciting for a while due to the rest of my life using up all of my mental and physical energy (I suppose I can’t complain too much, since it’s the non-crafty partof my life that gives me money to buy things like yarn). There has been lots of sock-knitting, but nothing that requires pattern-reading or much counting.

I have, however, finished a baby quilt that has been years in the making. A few years ago I drove to Duluth for my friend L.’s wedding. On the way, I stopped at the Norske Nook for some delicious pie. Located conveniently nearby was a quilt store, where I adored the bird and yellow stripey fabric and decided to buy some and save it for a baby quilt for the baby I knew L. and her husband J. wanted to have at some point in the future. Sophie was born in January, and I’ve finally finished and mailed the quilt.

Sophie's quilt

Sophie's quilt

Here’s a close-up, with the extremely cozy and soft striped flannel backing.

Sophie's qult with backing

Sophie's quilt with backing

Here’s what I’m up to now…

April 28th, 2009

So, after thinking for quite a while about what to do for my second boy baby quilt for early June, I was finally struck with inspiration. My idea was to do sort of a combination of these two quilt patterns from Quiltmaker:

The one on the left is Turtle Twirl from the September/October ’08 issue, and the one on the right is Rickrack Regatta from the most recent (May/June ’09) issue.

I have this cute sailboat fabric, which I got on sale ages ago, which I thought would be great in place of the turtle print.

So, I changed the turtle to the sailboat from Rickrack Regatta (and added a second sail) here:

Then, I made the checkerboard part white and red:

So far, I’m very pleased with how it’s turning out. The next step is to attach the sailboat print borders. More to come when that’s done…

Latest Baby Quilt Top and Accessory

April 18th, 2009


Here’s what I’ve been up to most recently: a baby quilt for friends of ours who are expecting their second boy in early June. Their older son turned 2 in January and loves trucks (who doesn’t?), so I made him a matching pillowcase. The theme fabric was given to me a while ago by Marty.

Now I’m looking for inspiration for another boy baby quilt for other friends of ours who are also expecting a boy in early June!

Last Projects (for now at least)

April 5th, 2009

Howdy all! Been a while since I’ve posted, eh? Well, here are a couple of Finished Objects that are floating around our house these days. First off, we have a blatant ripoff of a project that Rebecca did last fall. Remember when I went to the craft store and came home with yarn and needles? Well, this is what happened:

This was intended as a Christmas present for Chris, but that didn’t exactly work out. And now we’re almost into the time of year when it won’t be necessary (except for the snow that’s forecast for next week….) so I’m saving it as a Christmas present for next year. And that’s why this post is password-protected!

And then, we have a project that I’ve been fiddling with for at least two years now, which started when I couldn’t find a set of potholders that matched the image in my head. Really, I just wanted blue potholders, to contrast nicely with our yellow kitchen, but not plain blue, I wanted something interesting, but just couldn’t find it. “Well gosh,” I said to my pre-motherhood self, “I’ll just make them myself!” And armed with some lovely fabric and a felted thriftstore sweater as batting, I made these:

Which took forever and a day to finish, because there was always one more thing to get done. But I attached the hanging loops (cheapy keychain rings, because I don’t know when I’m going to get to Joann’s to get proper loop things) this afternoon. You can’t really see it in the picture, but the glove has a patch over the thumb that covers up where I didn’t leave enough seam allowance when assembling the glove, and part of the batting is sticking out. That was one more thing to do! But they’re done now and they look quite nice.

Now, about this “last projects” thing: I’ve disassembled my sewing/quilting/crafting station in my study for the time being, and packed away all my fabric, my sewing machine, etc. in bins in the basement. James likes to play in my study and I just couldn’t keep him out of all the dangerous materials, and materials that weren’t dangerous but were carefully organized (like fabric). There just isn’t enough out-of-reach storage in that room.

Plus, having all those Unfinished Objects sitting around silently mocking me from the corners of my room was starting to get to me. So I put them all away, and thereby gave myself permission to not worry about them for a while. I figure that in one to three years, James will be old enough that I’ll be able to get them back out again. I’d really hoped to be able to keep working on projects off and on while James was small, but it’s just not working out that way, so it’s easier to just pack it all away and come back to it later.

(As a consolation prize, I’m getting myself this desk, in white, from IKEA, which I’ve been wanting for years. Now I have an excuse to buy it – it’s childproof office storage!)

Two New Pillowcases

March 6th, 2009

Wow, we haven’t had any new posts for a whole month!

I have been working on a project which has to be kept secret from at least one Crackpot, so I’m unable to post any pictures of it.

But I took a break yesterday to make more pillowcases for my two favorite football fans. The first one is Andrew’s, done in regular cotton. I was trying to find a brown or white solid to use for the cuff but just couldn’t find the right brown. Then, I took Andrew with me to look for it at Hobby Lobby, and he insisted that he wanted this turquoise. I tried and tried to convince him that it didn’t match, but that was completely unimportant to him. So, I gave in and let him have the color he wanted. And it did turn out fine, and he loves it.

The second one is Nicholas’, made from a flannel print I found at JoAnn’s. I’m getting quite good at pillowcases now – I think it really does take only the 30 minutes the instructions say it should!

We hope this looks like Vori

February 3rd, 2009

That’s “Vori” with an umlaut over the “o.” That makes the “o” sound like the “eu” in the French “leur.” In case that helps. “Vori” is short for “voros,” with umlauts over both “o’s”, which is Hungarian for “red.” As you can see, Vori is a very unusual color for a cat. His people are Borika and Andras, the parents of our new Hungarian son-in-law, Peter. Like all proper cats, Vori runs the household. So when we visited him and his people last May, the thought occurred to me that it would be fun to try a cross stitch rendering of him as a Christmas present for Borika and Andras. Years ago I worked a cross stitch kit of just the eyes of five different breeds of cats, and I figured I could adapt one of those cats to look like Vori. I chose the Persian cat since Vori has long fur and inserted the eyes of a different cat that were (I hope) close to Vori’s yellow-green eyes. Of course, I was working from memory without even a photo to help me, so I am hoping that I came close with the colors.
Since custom framing is ridiculously expensive, my plan was just to have a mat cut for the needlework and then to buy an inexpensive 5×7 frame for it. But when I was selecting a mat at the frame shop, the framer and I both felt that the 5×7 frame detracted from the interesting long, narrow dimensions of the needlework. (It is about 1.5″ x 5.25″.) And then she told me that she could make a frame with leftover short pieces of frame for very little more than a pre-made frame. So this is what I ended up with.

Now my problem is that I like it so much that I am finding it hard to give away!

P.S. I actually wrote this post sometime before Christmas and never posted it. I discovered in in the drafts folder on the blog when I was working on my mystery quilt post. So here it is.

Yikes! It’s a quilt top!

February 3rd, 2009

In fact, it’s the Mystery Quilt, instructions for which were published in Quiltmaker beginning in the Jan/Feb 2007 issue. Crackpots may remember that Cathy started all this with her post in Nov., 2006 when she announced that she was planning to work on the mystery quilt and showed us her palette. Then I joined in. As I said way back then, I generally think mystery quilts are dumb. Why commit yourself to a whole lot of work on a project when you don’t know what you will end up with? But Cathy suckered me in. I thought – and still think – that it would be cool to have two Crackpots work on the same quilt and see how different they would be when finished. If you go back to our earlier posts, you will see that Cathy and I did indeed come up with very different blocks using the same instructions but our own unique choices of fabric. But the posts, and the efforts, petered out with the last post being from Cathy in July 2007. Cathy had the very good excuse of a certain adorable small James for putting her mystery quilt on the back burner, but I have none, except, of course, of having the responsibility of being grandmother to the aforementioned James.
But then shortly after Christmas, as I was planning and packing for a visit to the Cute Little House, I was looking through my various quilting UFOs trying to decide what I wanted to take with me to work on and I came across the plastic shoe box with the bits and pieces and fabrics for the mystery quilt. Despite higher priority projects, something in it called to me, and I took it along. Soon I was hooked. And here you see the result. I like it!!
Now all I have to do is layer and quilt it. It will be machine quilted in the ditch and shadow quilted. I’m not about to take on the task of learning free-motion quilting to quilt it as recommended in Quiltmaker. The current plan is to hang it over the couch in the Cute Little House. I just hope I can keep up the momentum.

Tulip Applique

January 27th, 2009

Here is the tulip applique that I started about a year and a half ago as my first attempt at hand applique. I was inspired by the Tulip Time quilt show both to try hand applique and to make something to enter in the show the following year. Of course, that year has come and gone. I finished the tulips pretty quickly, but it took me a while to get around to putting the squares together with the borders and setting triangles. Then, about a month ago, I finally put the layers together and got it ready for hand quilting. I haven’t done much hand quilting for a while, due to the 5 and almost 7 year old time constraints in my life. But it’s been fun to get back to it, on a manageable scale. I’m outline quilting the tulips, which you may be able to see faintly here:

Then, the plan is to do a tulip pattern to fill the setting squares, which is a little more visible here:

This may take a while, so it may not make this year’s quilt show, but there’s always 2010!

Second Pillowcase

January 16th, 2009

Here’s Andrew’s pillowcase along with a picture of the happy owner. He chose one of the fabrics Helene sent me for Christmas. It was a little smaller than the pillowcase pattern called for, so I made the red cuff part bigger. He’s very pleased with it!

Flannel Pillowcases

January 13th, 2009

My current crackpot project is making pillowcases for Nicholas and Andrew. Nicholas picked out this flannel fabric himself. This was my first pillowcase, and I found it to be quite easy! It really took only about 30 minutes, just as the directions from Field’s promised. There was some leftover fabric, so Blanket Bear got his own matching pillow. Here are the happy pillow owners:

Now I’m working on Andrew’s pillowcase. I’ll post pictures when it’s done!