On the topic of eating locally: it’s now strawberry season in my yard, and my mostly-organic technique of “plant and ignore” is working well. This is one of my first pickings of the year, from last weekend. Now I’m getting more berries at a time – plenty to keep one berry-lover satisfied on a daily basis. The strawberries are not super sweet – I haven’t yet tried adding sugar yet since adding milk or yogurt provides some sweetness, enough for eating them with cereal.
Here’s my current progress on my birthday present from my parents – Hanne Falkenberg’s Mermaid jacket. The pattern is available only as a kit. I’m doing colorway #3, which is lovely turquoise/sage/sea blue.
I’m done with the body:
(I learned that knitting applied I-cord bindoff and watching the Stanley Cup finals are just not terribly compatible activities; the edging along the front went a lot faster yesterday morning when I wasn’t trying to keep track of 3 knitting needles and a hockey puck at the same time)
The yellow yarn at the armholes is what I used to mark increases/decreases (I could probably take those out now). Marking each increase/decrease as I went was extremely helpful since the instructions for the second half of the body are basically “now do the same thing as you just did, only in reverse”.
I have just started on the first sleeve, but I’m going to take a break from that this afternoon to work on quilting a baby quilt I’m making for some friends who have a boy due next month. I kept with the family baby quilt tradition of arriving at the baby shower with the top and backing completed but not sandwiched or quilted.
It’s done, it’s done, it’s done, Done, DONE!!!! And a full 96 hours before the deadline!!
“It”, of course, is the quilt for our first Hungarian grandchild, little Blanka, whom we will be visiting next week. We leave for the airport around noon on Monday, so that was the hard and fast deadline.
True to form, I managed to make considerable work for myself by deciding after I had outline-quilted the hot-air balloons, that the ideal quilting pattern for the cloud fabric surrounding the balloons was clam shell quilting, now know to Crackpots as cloud quilting. I was correct – the quilting really enhances the clouds, at least in my opinion, but cloud quilting involves curves, lots and lots and lots of them as can be seen in the following photos.
But it was not as bad as I had feared, and I finished the quilting on Monday, a full week before departure. On Tues. around noon, I put in the last machine stitch. That evening, I hand stitched half the binding to the backing, and I stitched the other half on Wed. evening. Thursday morning I washed and dried it, and it was totally finished by noon. As I write this, it is packed in a large plastic baggie along with the wedding quilt for Judy, our Hungarian daughter, and appropriate wrapping materials in the carry-on bag that I will use to transport it to Hungary.
YAY!!! HOORAY!!!!!
When we get back from the trip, I will start on the quilt for Judy and Peter’s little boy, due in the summer, and for which I have already purchased fabric.
Here is the quilt for our first Hungarian grandchild, Blanka, ready for basting.
And here is a photo showing the backing fabric. The print is tiny pastel hearts. The plan is to finish it in time for our next trip to Hungary in early May. If all else fails, I figure I can stitch the label on the plane!
I think I am the only Crackpot to make the block for which Rebecca provided us with fabric at Thanksgiving. We all got the same fabrics and were challenged to make the same block, the cover block from the March/April “Quiltmaker.” The object is to see how many different variants we Crackpots can come up with. I pieced my block during our last visit to the Cute Little House. It was so much fun that I am thinking about doing a second one, making it as different as I can from this one. Of course, since we are all supposed to make our blocks independently, I probably should be keeping my effort a secret. But I can’t. So either take a quick look and then try to forget what you see, or avert your eyes now. Here it is:
Fellow Crackpots:
I write with potentially unfortunate news. The fabulous company that hosts the Crackpot Quilters’ Blog, Laughing Squid web hosting, has announced that on March 24, they will be upgrading one of the pieces of software on which this blog runs (PHP, for anyone who’s interested). This is a necessary upgrade, as the old version isn’t secure and needs to be replaced.
Unfortunately, this means that another piece of software on which this blog runs (WordPress, the actual blog program) will need to be upgraded as well, and this is something that I’m responsible for doing, not the hosting company. I actually should have done it a year ago or more, but I’ve had a few other projects in the hopper (as it were) and never got around to it.
I’m quite sure that I don’t have the time or mental energy right now to upgrade WordPress, much less to have it done by March 24, and I honestly don’t know when I will have the time. (Sometime after our taxes are done, we’ve found daycare for James, and the semester’s over, is my guess.)
I have no idea what will happen to the blog when the upgrade takes place in a week and a bit. It’s possible that it will still function just fine, though I think that’s unlikely. I doubt highly that it will vanish into the aether, though I will try to find time to make a backup just in case. My guess is that posting, commenting, etc. won’t work, but that whatever’s here will still be accessible. We’ll just have to wait and see.
My apologies for this: the blog has been far more successful than I dared hope when I started it, and nearly all of the credit goes to the rest of you, for posting and commenting and keeping it going. I really don’t want to let it slide into obscurity, so I’ll see what I can do once I clear a few things off my plate. Thanks for your patience!
pssst, Rebecca: wanna mess around with a WordPress installation? I think I can set you up a user account on the hosting plan if you want…
A small, but enthusiastic, group from the Fiber Arts Guild met here on Wednesday night. This is what caused the most comment.
Pretty cool that the artistic folks appreciate the chairs we love! OK, one of them grew up in Norway…
It’s been a while, but I finally finished two more projects for the online class. Both of these are made of paper towel fabric. First, the vase, which followed the directions for the class project. (Except for a minor measurement error. Duh! Don’t use rulers after 8:30 p.m.)
Damp paper towels are dyed/painted, and then left to dry. After they are dry, the dyed towels are torn and the torn bits are fused to muslin. The muslin is then fused to a felt base. Then it is stitched in a grid to make sure everything holds together and to add some texture. A cotton lining is fused to a heavy-duty interfacing (Pellon 72), and the paper towel fabric is lightly fused to the other side of the interfacing. The edges of the vase sides are covered with a satin stitch. Each of the sides is stitched to the triangular base with a wide zigzag. Then the vase sides are hand stitched together. The last step is adding the beads. Deciding exactly what I wanted to do about the beads was what took the longest. I had to put some marbles in the bottom of the vase so the weight of the beads wouldn’t pull the it over.
This paper towel fabric has quite an interesting texture so I decided to try to make a box of my own design. After determining the shape, I followed the same procedure as with the orange vase and created the outer box.
This is the outside of the box before I stitched the sides together.
This is the inside of the box before I stitched the sides together.
I wanted to have an inner tray so I glued some supports on the corners after I stitched the sides together. Here is a view of all the pieces from the top.
Showing the tray:
From the side:
Another fun project!
For the past month I have been taking an online class through www.joggles.com. It is Mixed Media Surface Design for the Textile Artist. Sue Bleiweiss is the instructor for this class (www.suebleiweiss.com, www.fibreandstitch.com). It has been way too much fun!
The class focuses on using fabric, paper, paint, and all sorts of embellishments to create fabric for other projects. We’ve used tissue paper, pattern paper, paper towels, mulberry bark, paper bags, and silk hankies (unspun silk) to make fabric to use for a vase, little books, a box, and a portfolio. The class has given me the confidence to try some materials I have read about.
I wasn’t sure how I would like the online format, but I am very pleased. Class members are sent a new lesson to download each week. The directions are quite clear, and there are lots of pictures. Sue Bleiweiss is available to answer email questions for the most part of every day. I’ve also enjoyed the online forum where class members share their experiences and post photos of their work, but this is optional, and not everyone participates. The written lessons work well for me because I’m a “read the directions to learn†person. If you were a “watch the demonstration†person, I’m not sure it would work as well. I also like the extended time to ponder my options. I can spend time rooting around in my stash (or perpetrating an Economic Stimulus Package at one of the local craft or fabric stores) to find exactly what I want to use.
I’m pretty sure I’m not an artist, but some of the people in the class are. It has been fun to look at their blogs and websites.
This is the mulberry bark concertina. The bark came dyed purple with a little jade green. Because my piece was about 3″ by 15″, I needed to modify the size somewhat. First I soaked the bark in warm water for a few minutes. Then I could pull it apart and stretch it a little. After it dried, I decided it needed a little more intense color. So I used some Dye-Na-Flow and Lumiere. I added a little Pearl Ex for extra sparkle.
I wasn’t crazy about the color combination of my light blue felt and the purple and jade mulberry bark. So I fused some tissue paper to the felt and further doctored it up by stamping some iridescent paint on top. I then used a diagonal running stitch and some silk embroidery floss to stitch the bark to the felt. I used that same floss to use the buttonhole stitch to hold the outside cover to the inside cover.
The cord is about 8 strands of fairly thin fiber zigzagged together with three colors of metallic thread. One thing I did was to separate some silver floss before twisting it in with the other fibers. I liked that effect. In retrospect, I probably did not need to spend half an hour choosing the precise fibers to go in the cord and I did not need to use any silk floss. The subtleties don’t show. But I’m pleased with the overall effect.
The silk cocoons seemed a little large for the book so I used beads on the end of the cord.
The hardest part of the whole process was finding where my box of sewing machine needles was hiding. AARGH! It was in with fusibles under the Misty Fuse. So much for the ill-fated effort at straightening up the sewing room after 8:00 p.m.