by Nancy
It was another scrappy Saturday here, and I continued working with blue scraps as part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I’ve made quite a few more 3 inch rail fence blocks:
I also started sewing my 2.5 inch squares together to make a 10 inch (finished size) square. My thought is a scrappy, dark quilt that can be used at soccer games to stay warm.
by Nancy
A blog I like to read, So Scrappy, has a Rainbow Scrap Challenge, where each month you are encouraged to piece something with a particular color of scraps. May is blue – bright blue. So, I spent a little time with my 1.5″ strips of bright blue scraps this afternoon. I don’t have a specific plan for these 3″ rail fence blocks yet, but I’m thinking maybe something along the lines of this pattern from Red Pepper Quilts:
by Nancy
As some of you may know, March 14 (3-14) is Pi Day. We were on spring break that day, so when we returned to school on March 18, we held a belated Pi Day celebration in my Challenge Math group. Among the activities were writing about pi, making pi bracelets,
making circular pi collages,
and doing math problems involving pi. The kids had a great time, and because of special schedules and shortened classes due to state-wide reading testing, we ended up having almost an entire pi week. Lots of fun!
My second sewing project of the new year was another tailored wool jacket. I finished it in January. The fabric is an olive green wool twill from the depths of the cedar chest. There are tiny bits of tan and rust in the twill. They’re not visible from a distance, but they give the fabric some depth. I think this kind of very pronounced twill is called cavalry twill. I ignored the part of the pattern that said, “Not suitable for obvious diagonals.”
As with the gray jacket below, alterations were the major work of this project. There is not a single piece in this jacket that is made from the original pattern. That includes things such as the collar and the collar stand. I made two non-fitting changes to the pattern. First, I decided that the collar was too large for a short person so I decreased the depth of the collar. I did this by making a 1/4 inch fold lengthwise in the collar pattern. Then I straightened the cutting line from the neck edge to the collar point. If I had just cut off 1/4 inch from the outer edge of the collar, the collar point would have been farther from the lapel edge. The other thing I did was to change the way the undercollar was cut. The pattern called for it to be cut in one piece on the bias. To keep the bias direction the same at both collar points, I cut the under collar in two pieces, with a seam at the center back. I cut the interfacing for the undercollar the same way.
The front, undercollar and collar stand were interfaced with fusible Armo Weft. All the other pieced were underlined with French Fuse. The back stay is poly cotton. The shoulder pads are four layers of poly fleece and the sleeve heads are lamb’s wool. As with the gray jacket, the roll line was not marked. So I had to make my own. It is taped with twill tape.
This pattern called for a sort of crescent moon-shaped collar stand that went from one roll line around the back to the other roll line. It does not show at all. The pattern called for the upper (inner) side (toward the body) to be interfaced. That did not make sense to me. The under (outer) collar stand is the part that holds up the collar and keeps it from collapsing onto the jacket back as the collar is folded back. So I interfaced the under (outer) part of the collar stand.
The pattern also called for the darts to be topstitched. Since I didn’t want to emphasize them, I omitted the topstitching.
The jacket was lined with a poly charmeuse. The pattern and color look nice with the wool, but that stuff was nasty ugly frustrating not as nice to sew with as the wool. I’ve been spoiled by the wool.
Here is the pattern. It’s from 1998.
Look at the tall, thin models. I do not look like that. But I think my photographer was kneeling down so the lower part of my body looks a little larger than it does when I look in the mirror. After all, my eyes are higher than the, er, lower part of my body.
by Nancy
On a happier note than my last post, I finished machine sewing the binding onto my flower placemats. I just looked back and realized that I never posted a picture of them, so here they are without the binding:
There are 6 of them, 2 in each color way. I have hand-stitched the binding to the back of 2 of them so far and plan to work on the rest of them tomorrow at Quilting Ladies. Here’s a look at one finished placemat:
Since that was done, I used some of my scraps to piece these blocks. The block is called Plaid and is 10″. (It’s the September 15 block for those who have the perpetual quilt block calendar.) It uses 2.5″ squares and 2.5″ by 4.5″ rectangles, and since a lot of my scraps are those sizes, it’s a good one for me. No definite plans for their use yet – just playing with fabric.
This gray jacket is my first sewing project for 2013. It’s a tailored jacket with a shawl collar and sleeve vents, and it’s fully lined. The gray wool tweed fabric had been in the cedar chest for a while.
Here are the sleeve vents.
I hadn’t made a tailored jacket for a while so I needed some reference materials. The Bishop Method book is from 1959. It’s the same book (but not the same copy) that my mother used when she took a tailoring course and made a gray suit for me in 1959 or 1960. There’s lots of valuable information in that book. The other books are newer, and they show methods for using fusible interfacing. That’s primarily what I used.
The fronts, including the undercollar, were interfaced with Armo Weft. All the other pieces were underlined with French Fuse. The chest reinforcement is French Fuse. The back stay is made of poly cotton. I made the shoulder pads from poly fleece, making my own pattern so they would fit this jacket. The sleeve heads are made of lambswool that must have come from my mother’s stash. The lining is polyester.
The pattern is from 1989. Check out those shoulders!
One resource I did not have available was my favorite alterations book. Someone else checked it out of the library. The nerve! I’m third on the reserve list. As a result I was left on my own to make the many, many, many alterations. I made two muslins. Of course, I shortened the jacket and the sleeves. I lowered the back neck seam, adjusted the collar to match, narrowed the shoulders and the upper back, enlarged the biceps, and enlarged the waist and hips. By the time I was finished with all that and more, I had to draw a pattern for the lining.
And in keeping with the retro nature of this project, it was sewn entirely on my 1964 Singer. The Baby Lock was temporarily indisposed but has recovered by now.
This was a challenging, but very satisfying, project. I enjoyed re-learning lots of tailoring techniques.
by Cathy
So, flush from the completion of a longstanding UFO, I decided to take Nancy’s advice and work on something for me — in this case, an even more longstanding UFO, the famous Quiltmaker Mystery Quilt. (Which Ann finished so long ago that it now hangs on the wall in her cottage. Overachiever.)
When last we checked, my version of the Mystery Quilt stood here.
Then, a baby intervened, which gave me a convenient mechanism for tracking how long it had been since I worked on the project. Five and a half years later, I finally dug it out of the Crafty Closet to see what state I’d left it in, and discovered that it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared.
I’ve spent the last two weeks in a flurry of quilting (aided by a young man’s desire to build with Legos in my study, which is handy), and I’ve been able to complete the Log Cabin-izing of the four smaller blocks, as shown below (the white envelope in the middle is so that I could do some color correction in Photoshop);
They’re beautiful, don’t you think? I’m so proud of myself for getting so much done in such a short period of time!
They’re also a full quarter-inch too small in both dimensions.
Argh! ArgharghargharghARGH.
I don’t have enough fabric to make the outer strips a quarter-inch larger, and that would look pretty weird anyway. So, I’m going to take each one apart and re-sew them with ever-so-slightly-smaller seam allowances, and hope I can do better. Tune in again in, well, a few weeks or a month or two. 🙁
by Nancy
How did I not notice before now??? That’s what I keep asking myself. I was getting ready for the next-to-last step on my Granny Square Crochet Vest when I noticed this enormous problem:
The front pieces, one of which you see above on the left, are not the same height as the back piece, seen on the right. This is very, very bad. And somehow I managed not to notice until now. I looked back at the instructions and determined that yes, indeed, I had followed them and they are wrong. They instruct you to make the front pieces 6 squares tall and the back piece 8 squares tall, and that is exactly what I did. Not only that, but I was very disciplined about weaving in my ends as I went, so it’s even harder to disconnect the back squares from each other. Sigh. This is kind of how my week has been in a nutshell.
So, while watching gymnastics on TV this afternoon, I took the first steps in the undoing process for the back. I don’t think it will be finished any time soon. At least the front two pieces match each other…
by Cathy
I posted a little while back when I’d finished the top for this quilt, but now it’s completely done!
(Shown here with the feet of the intended recipient.)
It really is all scraps — which led to some, er, creative piecing choices for the backing:
And here it is, deployed so that some stuffies can take a nap:
Now the question is: what should I work on next?
by Nancy
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m not entirely satisfied with the start of my Granny Stripes blanket. So, I started looking around for some other possibilities. First, I tried this Ripple Pattern:
Very nice! Next, I tried Granny Stripes:
Also very nice!
I really liked the combination of granny squares and ripples in the Granny Stripes blanket, and about this time I found this on Pinterest (which, by the way, can be highly addictive):
I absolutely love this!!! Aren’t the colors amazing? I tried finding the source but couldn’t come up with anything. So, I used it for inspiration and came up with this:
This just might be what I’m looking for…