This week I worked to put Grassy Creek together. It took about four sessions of sewing to get all the blocks and sashings together. There was a little fudging and smudging, to get the sashing string blocks to fit. In hind sight I should have squared those pieces up before using them. Some of them were ½ inch too long, which was easy enough to fix with the addition of an extra wide seam. This quilt has a lot going on. I decided not to do string borders, but 1 ½ inch mixed squares. As I was putting away the left over fabrics from the top, I cut a 2 inch wide strip from each. I probably need more neutrals, but it’s a start. I have a piece of left over backing fabric that is the perfect green for the inner border too. Also I “found” the perfect backing at Joann’s yesterday. They had a sale with a 20% off coupon, 3 yards of 108 ” wide fabric for $28.00. I did curbside pick-up for the win.
I’m down to the last row of the Hydrangea quilt. I should finish it today, and bind it this weekend. I want to get a few more baby/crib quilts done to post on Etsy. The quilt that has been getting the most hits lately, is a simple blue and white double Irish Chain baby quilt. Etsy has a way that vendors can send coupons to people who have/leave an item in their carts, to spur them into buying it. Sometimes I wonder if people leave it in their carts intentionally to get such a discount. I don’t give any additional discounts, as I feel my prices are low enough, and I offer free shipping. It is a good thing that I don’t have to support myself on the Etsy income. I’m lucky that it pays for itself.
I have the Halloween figs month 8 to do, and I am getting so close to finishing the Cat, the Holiday Snow Village block kit should be here next week too. I need to get the appliqué done on the first block though. The weather has been so nice the past few days, I planted some Pansy plants in my fence planters, no flowers yet though.
One, One, One, Twenty, Twenty-One. Its a Monday, my DH says every day has been like a Monday, Ground Hog day (the movie) like. I like Mondays, it is my “free” day. It used to be because the kids would go back to school, DH went to work, and the barn was closed. Nothing to do but sew, maybe some house work, but stuff I wanted to do uninterrupted. Now some of the kids are across the country doing their thing, DH is working from home, and the barn is closed (as usual). Not much has changed, I don’t have to chauffeur to and from schools though, so that gives me a few more hours in the day. I guess a bit of the parenting/care giving has lessened and DH finally figured out that I am not going to make him three meals a day. So yeah, it’s my favorite day of the week.
I’ve been diligently working on the Grassy Creek mystery quilt. It isn’t a mystery anymore, the reveal was last Friday. I kinda like it, but something about the gray predominance bugs me. I think there is not enough balance, there should be more green/red/gold/orange. The little pieces of color get swallowed up by the gray. This is my opinion though, I think the design and setting of the blocks is visually pleasing, I like the geometry of it. I think I may change the outer border, change the strings to 1″ finished squares of all the colors. I’ll finish it though and it’ll look nice on the guest room bed.
I do have a finish this week, I finally got the neck line done on the Neive sweater I have been working (or not) on all this year. I got the yarn, a silk cotton blend, last year at the Stitches West knitting show, along with the pattern. Its a Coco knits pattern, she has some very versatile sweater/wrap patterns that I like. Sweaters that are usually made in one piece, or out of a “different” fiber (not wool). I have made a few for gifts, but this is the first one I made for me. I haven’t tried it on yet, but it looks pretty good on the floor ;). No stitches show this year, I will have to start a project I bought last year. There is a Debra Gerhard sweater pattern I got called “When Twilight Falls”. It is made with a variegated yarn and a solid, I think I bought the same ones pictured in the sample. I’ll have to find it, after I finish the hat, oh, and start working on the wedding shawl again.
Not me
I made a little progress on the scratchy hat, the puppy stole the project and ran around the house with it. The cake of yarn was a jumbled mess as you can imagine. It took me about an hour to un-knot/nest it, luckily for the puppy, the knitting was untouched. He’s at the tween stage of his life, everything is a game of keep away, and he is not to be trusted out of sight. There was counter surfing this weekend too.
I feel like I’m in the home stretch of the Cat Head project. I am on the second page, the neck is a bit easier with longer runs of X’s and small blocks of color. The Face was making me crazy with all the confetti stitches. I am really looking forward to starting the Pet All the Dogs sampler. Letting the variegated floss do all the shading work, will be a welcome change.
I didn’t get much quilting done, I stitched another row of Hydrangeas and was starting the third row, when I turned my back on the machine. The cup foot got stuck under the edge and stitched in place for a bit and then the tension of the working robotics popped the clamp that holds the machine to the cable. I looked over at it and stopped it, ugh, it took about twenty minutes to remove the stitches. I just shut everything down at that point, and left it. There may be a small hole, but it’s on the edge of the border, so fixable. Maybe I’ll look at it later today.
First Monday in 2021. I had a productive weekend, I don’t know if it was because the weather was rainy and cold, or I was actually inspired to sew and finish stuff. Not that I haven’t been sewing stuff lately, maybe because I had a few things that could be finished. I made the string blocks for the Grassy Creek clue. I made a foray into deep stash and found lots of grays, too bad my neutral stash isn’t that deep anymore. I am starting to think that this quilt will be mostly grays with pops of the other colors. Looking back at the yardage requirements, 5 Yards of grays, yeah, I think I should have read that more closely. But, I have more gray than I thought and the only gray based quilts I have made are Gravity and the Meeting of the Geese. I have to adjust my mental picture of this quilt.
I got the Thicket 3 quilt quilted and bound. I think it took longer to get it on the frame and the digital design set up than it took to actually quilt it. The design is called modern rounded diamonds, it probably could be a little more dense, but I wanted the quilt to be drape-y and soft. The Santa hat quilt is also bound and waiting for a photo shoot. I want to stage it in front of the tree, and if I’m feeling especially, um photographically inspired, I’ll dig out the other Christmas quilts and refresh their listings too.
Other starts this weekend were a hat and a puzzle. I gifted myself two puzzles this year, a 2000 piece Thomas Kinkade one called ‘Santa’s – something’ and the ‘Festival of Quilts’ one with 7 Bonnie Hunter quilts featured. The Santa puzzle is really difficult, Kinkade may say he’s a painter of light, but I think this means he actually makes everything else in his paintings dark. I have to work on this with two overhead lights and natural sunlight. I got the border done, and I am working on the cottage and center. I think I may have to sort the rest of the pieces by color, especially the sky and snow areas. The hat yarn and pattern was an impulse purchase from Bare Naked Wools. I am on their mailing list, and the do have nice patterns, mostly to show off their yarns, which are solids of natural colors with some dyed reds, greens, and blues. The yarn is called Stone Soup, I think because it contains a bunch of different fibers:
DESCRIPTION
Stone Soup DKStone soup is a unique blend of rambouillet, columbia, lincoln, navajo-churro, alpaca, silk, bamboo, tencel, bison, and llama, which offers exotic color, tweedy texture, and crisp stitch definition. This fiber blend is 95% produced and entirely spun in America.
Sounds good, right? And it is really soft and bouncy and a pretty oatmeal color. My issue is the plethora of tiny sticks, seed hulls and grassy bits in it. It makes it almost itchy, I definitely would not want cowl or close to the body sweater out of it. When I fist started the hat, I was picking the bits out, but they just keep popping up. I’m going to finish the hat, wash it and see how it goes from there. I wanted to gift it to a friend at the end of the month, but who would want to wear a hat that was so scratchy?
I made a little progress on the Cat cross stitch, I am trying to catch all the missing stitches, the random one stitches. They take a while to stitch, threading, anchoring, stitching, anchoring and clipping. But I confess to changing a few, to similar colors, as they were close enough to jump too. Looking forward to finishing this. I had to buy some interfacing at Joanns yesterday, so I perused the stitchery category and found a clip on magnifier for the hoop. I would eventually like to get one that clips on to the Ott light I have, but I haven’t seen any that would work. I could get a new Ott light, but mine is still working well after 20 years, I ordered a new bulb for it too.
My job(s) for today are to get another row quilted on the Hydrangea quilt and get the top pieced for the Jungle fabric quilt. First I have to go to the dentist for a consultation, my first time out and about since last year.
One last thing, I am making a mental effort not to make lists of UFOs, fabric and yarn purchases, stash busting or yarn use for this coming year. I think I’m going to do something easier like “loose weight” for a New Year resolution 😏
I bought this jungle animal print early last year thinking would be a good feature fabric for a baby quilt. I started to pull solid scraps that matched it from my solid stash. Then I remembered a quilt idea had seen recently at See Kim Sew , she calls it a Low Volume Baby Quilt. Its pretty, with grays and a splash of color that coordinates with the print on the backing. I thought about replicating it, but then I remembered my gray stash fabrics are in a holding pattern for Grassy Creek. I decided to just do a “Postcards from Sweden” front – assorted bright HSTs and the print on the backing. I used the accuquilt to cut all the triangles, I needed about 300, and chain pieced them together. Now they are covering the design wall, waiting for shuffling and balancing.
I got the Holiday Square BOM block done. It was a little fiddly, I really had to pay attention to the wood graining on the fabric. I don’t like the way the embellishments that came with the block look. They are inkjet printed, and just look flat, a bit blurry. I’m also not a big fan of raw edge appliqué with wonder-under. It reminds me of the raw edge that we used to do in the 80’s, when it was held on to the background with puffy paint (shudder). I am going to add my own embellishments with embroidery and turned edge appliqué. I also have a whole bunch of snow flake buttons that I bought for a different quilt project and didn’t use. I did finish the Halloween figs block the other night too.
I recently watched a few Floss Tube videos about total coverage Cross stitching. I am fascinated by this technique of working on the diagonal and “parking” the threads while using a different color. I have spent some time looking at Heaven and Earth Designs a lot of time, dreaming about making one of their designs. But in real life, I doubt I would finish one of their beautiful masterpieces. I have to finish the Cat first, and then the Teresa Kogut sampler is next. The ‘Pet all the Dogs’ sampler that started the resurgence of the cross stitching around here.
The 6th Clue for Grassy Creek was released today, lots of gray and neutrals, sigh. I am caught up with the clues though, so maybe these will be the last of the gray. We finished using the gold, and a lot of green and red, we shall see. I’m thinking one or two more clues, maybe some more sub-blocks. I need to dig through the stash to find some more variety for the string blocks.
The borders are done on the Farm Charm #1 quilt top. The fabric was delivered on Saturday, and sewn on Sunday. I also completed clue 4 of the Grassy Creek Mystery quilt. I am having some trouble with the gray and neutral combo. It is dull, and this time of the year I am craving color, warm colors, bright colors. Maybe that’s why it seems like more work. I finished the hungry animal alphabet quilt today, it is bright and cheerful. I think I have a tossed alphabet letters pantograph that would work to quilt it with.
This week I also want to get the Holiday Snow village BOM done. The new/next one will be here in two weeks, so I want to get moving on that one. I did get a bit more appliqué done on the Halloween Figs quilt block. As I get more of the cross stitch done on Bright eyes, I take a break and appliqué another petal – only seven more to go. The cat head pattern is pretty intense at times, it is hard to get any bit of rhythm going. Too much start, stop, change color, loose place, find place and make a stitch. I am working with a post it note and multiple markers, but still get lost. I have even tried leaving needles threaded and picking the threads up as I go, but some of the stitches are too far apart, or the threads get tangled (annoying). I have loosened my personal “neat backside stitching rules” a bit for this project. I will take up to a 1/4 inch jump stitch, if it’ll save me from tying off and re-starting a thread. I am making progress though.
Yesterday I buckled down and made the little nine patches for clue 5 of Grassy Creek. I ended up cutting too many strips, but I did get a lot of variety, wouldn’t you know it though, one set of matching pieces. I still have to make the flying geese and the red pieces, but its only Wednesday, so there is time.
I was reading a few blogs today and started following a blog hop about New Years Stitching Resolutions. Carla at Creatin’ in the Sticks got it together. Lots of good intentions and ideas for the new year to be read about. Me, I think I am going to keep on keeping on. I may come up with a “word” for 2021, but long term goals aren’t my thing, I am more of a day by day minded person.
Touch of Grey 