So Much Sewing

I know it's been forever and a day since I last posted, and much of that period stemmed directly from the lack of sewing time. Between February and early May, I'm not sure if I sewed a stitch. Finishing a dissertation will do that to you. But the dissertation is done and defended, and I've enjoyed a nice chunk of relatively open-ended time. Thus May has been, err, was (it's June today, woah), a wonderfully sewing-filled month.

One of the first things I did was make a long-planned wedding gift for Joel and Sibyl. They got married in September which was a lot of months ago, but I had zero time to make things back then. I did have time to purchase fabric, however, and I picked out some fun fabric for cloth napkins that also formed the basis of the color scheme and aesthetic of a table runner. At one point, my mom wondered what I was going to make for them, since I had already given Joel a quilt.

Joel and I were roommates back in the day, including the days in which he began dating Sibyl, and we spent a lot of time enjoying good food (not to mention our stunning ability to polish off whle jars of pickles and olives in one setting). Quality napkins and a table runner for Joel's super awesome craftsman-style table (which he found at a yard sale and was already in the apartment when I arrived) fit the bill.
 

Handily, Joel was in Ann Arbor for work this week, which meant that I not only got to give his wedding present to him in person but we got to take some fantastic parking lot pictures. Who doesn't need a few cars in their crafty photos? As it turns out, one of the awesome things about making gifts for people with whom you lived is that it's pretty easy to nail their aesthetic -- a task made even easier when you have quite similar taste. So the table runner has two sides, the little bits and bobs side and the chunks of cool fabric side. Both are intended to work well in the neat green kitchen J+S have in Seattle.

Initially I was a little uncertain about how to quilt this, given those tiny bits and a lot of negative space. I opted for undulating free-hand echo curves which I love. I used several shades of gray, blue/aqua, and black. While I could pretend that this was a design decision, made to reflect nature and the Pacific Northwest, the truth of the matter is that I ran out of both the medium gray and aqua while quilting and thus needed to add in more and more colors. Happenstance for the win.

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A Midweek Peek

A Confession: as a somewhat lazy laundress, I often find that an imminent need to do laundry offers an incentive to finish a quilt. Otherwise, it might take a while for that quilt to get all soft and crumbly from the washer/dryer rumble.

The blocks above emerged from a desire to use the neutral striped Marimekko print, of which I had some but not a lot, and for which I was uncertain about coordinating colors. So it's a very neutral quilt. Not my usual color scheme, but a pleasant experiment with paper-piecing (of my own devising, though perhaps there are comparable blocks out there in pattern-land).

The quilt is ready to send off to its new owner. But I need to take pictures, and this -3 nonsense to which I awoke this morning (cozy under flannel sheets, several quilts, and a down comforter) has not exactly inspired a photo shoot. According to my weather app, it's 10 degrees warmer now, at a whopping 7, which might be sufficient enough for some whole-quilt shots outside.

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The Baby at the Bachelor Party

{I'm taking this opportunity to do a little #latergram style blogging. This post is brought to you by August 2013...}

Apparently not everyone has gender-inclusive bachelor parties, complete with the attendance of a baby (neither mine nor the bachelor's, for the record). At least, that's what Jenny and I gleaned when we served as chief participants in Joel's bachelor weekend. We got a lot of odd looks when we told people what we were doing. Which mostly involved gallivanting in a park, eating really good food, imbibing delicious drinks, going to a spa, attending live theatre, eating amazing cookies, and hanging out.

Did I mention the cookies? They're amazing.

I took this opportunity to multi-task and give Elody her baby quilt. Improvisationally-pieced with (mostly) Modern Meadow prints plus a little magenta and yellow for pizazz, this quilt came together quickly over a couple days. Lots of vertical movement and negative space, just how I like my quilts.

And Elody seemed pretty content as well, even as we wrapped her and unwrapped her for our high-class on-the-couch photo shoot. The back has 2 prints, both with lots of blues and purples. It's all straight-line quilting, at random intervals. I can't really remember why I chose to quilt it like that, but I like it.

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Summer in San Francisco: A Quilt

The grass was wet and I needed to take pictures of the quilt. I toted it around with me as I ran errands, attended a party, and went about my weekend business. As I was returning home, I noticed this abandoned auto garage and decided to take advantage of its industrial chic driveway to take pictures. I assume everyone walking and driving by thought I was nuts (it's on the edge of a neighborhood, along a busy road, so there were plenty of people available to gawk). What you can't see, or can't see well, in this image, is the barbed wire above the "no parking" sign. Alas I forgot the towels and other means of circumventing barbed wire (you learn a lot from watching crime procedurals...Burn Notice is particularly effective for acquiring such knowledge). Ah well. Back to the quilt.

This started as low-volume play with triangles, a riff on the March weather that tacked between gray and gray. I rummaged through my scrap bin and stash and plucked out a variety of solid, almost-solid, and light prints, and cut away. The light gray, green, and blue solids became powerfully saturated (context: it matters, as we historians like to repeat, over and over and over again), but watching the whites and creams duke it out as the rows came together was equally fun.

One of the best aspects of random layouts is the fact that mistakenly sewing a row in the wrong order doesn't matter. I might have done that. Possibly twice.

The green and blue tree print (Marimekko) needed to go on the back, or rather needed to be displayed in large quantities and thus needed a spot of honor on the back. That represented one of the first decisions I made in planning this quilt. I had no idea what would join it until I needed a back and started mixing and matching options. I'm pretty sure the remnant triangles are my favorite part of the back. Until my eyes linger on the coral-orange stripe and I like it best. It's so hard to choose among awesome design elements, but handily I don't actually have to actually make a decision. I like the back a lot, that's all.

 

The diamond quilting--offset by what is a little more than 1/4" inch but less than 3/8" of an inch (5/16", it would seem)--pleases me greatly. Especially on the back where it stands out and looks very quilty. The binding comes from an ombre Marimekko remnant that shuffles between grey-blue and deep green. At one point I know I had a fabulous name for this quilt, but my brain has siphoned it off to somewhere presently irretrievable; as a result, I shall dub it Summer in San Francisco, for that's where it will lodge, and the colors are, in a way, quite reflective of delightfully chilly SF summers.

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Diamond Derby

It snowed--snowed!--here yesterday. Grrr. But that reminded me that I last took pictures of a quilt in the snow. Thankfully, that snow was in February, where snow belongs.

 

I started playing with diamonds in December, sketching out a few different options. Just because. I didn't know who would get this quilt, and just felt the urge to play a bit. The final sketch became the plan, albeit one that swerved when sewing the blocks together. I forgot where I had placed the blue block, but I don't think that slight switch mattered much.

A lot of my favorite oranges and aquas leapt from the scrap bin into this quilt (they're very active, those scraps). In an attempt to keep the strips straight, I paper-pieced the diamonds. This turned out to be handy less for the strips and more for the background as I had very little charcoal painter's canvas to spare and needed to piece together scraps which were easier to handle when paper-pieced.

The back: some fun black and white and aqua and orange prints. I used straight-line quilting, some vaguely standardized distance apart. Maybe an inch? It's hard to recall such details from February which is perhaps why I should have posted this earlier. Oh well, should you seek to emulate it, pick a distance and enjoy! One of the best parts of finishing Diamond Derby (which I just named now, should you have momentarily wondered) was that I got to give it to Yasmeen (or, really, her awesome parents) in person. The post office usually delivers quilts for me, which is a nice service and all, but it's way more fun to watch people unfold quilts.

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Step-by-Step

120 6.5" squares waiting to be turned into a quilt. A commissioned wedding quilt for a couple getting married in December. The instructions were wonderfully simple: come up with a quilt for a couple whose apartment has a cream/brown/green color scheme. I toyed with several ideas for the quilt, mostly thinking about wide improv pieced curves, a larger version of this challah cover in a different color scheme. But then I saw Felicity's Sea Glass on Sand quilt, I quickly formed a new plan.

I dug into my collection of solid neutrals, added a few more from my (local) quilt shop Pink Castle Fabrics, and started cutting. Moda Snow dominates, as I had some yardage of it, but the pile also includes Moda Porcelain, Kona Snow/Putty/Oyster/Parchment, Fig Tree Cream, and unlabeled neutrals from my scrap bin. I had more shades of green and fewer shades of brown than I expected (or realized). But a sufficient spread to keep the corners interesting. I considered mixing in some prints, but I like the look of all solids.

I'm still considering adding in a few punch of mulberry (shot cotton, that is). I plucked three squares from the pile before trimming so I can play with the layout and change my mind, rip out some seams, and insert a few dots of difference. I usually dread trimming and squaring blocks. But a few episodes of Dexter (I'm still on Season 5) made the work less tedious. The blocks are trimmed and ready for my design floor. Once I sweep and vacuum said floor, anyways.

p.s. In anticipation of Pink Castle Fabrics' move into a new brick and mortar space, everything in the shop is 25% off through the end of October, with the code MOVING. Depending on when you place your order, I might just get the chance to cut and package it for you.

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The Accidental Living Room Quilt

Making things for myself is paralyzing. How do I decide on a design or choose fabric when I'm not going to design something I dislike or buy fabric that is unappealing? And how do I pick the perfect palette for the living room I already live in? Admittedly, the (super comfortable) gold couch is perhaps not the item I would select from a store, but free, old-in-the-best-sort-of-way, and did I mention amazingly comfortable rocks (thanks grandparents for making some great furniture purchases back in the day).

Two springs ago I was temporarily living in DC. I toted a small portion of my stash with me (sanity protection) and resolved to make stuff within the parameters of what I brought. That small stash included 2 charm packs of Kate Spain's Central Park line, and a lot of solids. I challenged myself to make a big quilt with those charm packs, and by adding a lot of solids, I succeeded.

I followed no particular format in laying out the fabric. I probably tried to avoid setting the same fabrics next to one another, making it not totally random, and I may have adjusted squares as I sewed them together. To be honest, I don't really remember how I did it all that clearly. I do recall wishing I had used green instead of yellow as the most significant solid at one point, but having already cut out  lots of yellow squares, well, no change was in the works. Unlike most of the quilts I make, this one had no intended recipient. As a result, when I finished the quilt top I had no need or incentive to finish it quickly, and it sat on a shelf for months.

Last winter I decided I needed to move this project from the unfinished pile to the finished one. I dug into my stash to find fabric to back it, and decided to use the Alexander Henry Birdsong as the primary backing. Then I added coordinating fabric to make it big enough to fit the front, quilted it 1/4" lines offset from the seams, and bound it. I washed it and wondered to whom I should give it. It sat on a chair in my living room, waiting to move on to its new home.

Summer faded into fall, and one night I wanted to burrow under a quilt while reading on the couch. Rather than dig up a blanket from the closet, I grabbed the one sitting on the chair. I wouldn't have expected the pale yellow to work with the gold couch but, in a way, it does. It's not exactly the design or colors I would have picked for my living room, but it works. The binding isn't my favorite shade of green, but it doesn't really matter. It's a lot easier to let a quilt find a home in my living room than design one specifically for it. So much less pressure, so much more pleasurable.

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A Few Snippets

Literal Snippets.

And more figurative ones. I spent the weekend with many of the lovely ladies of the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild. Lots of sewing, lots of delicious food, and lots of laughter. I finished a few quilts, including my lingering do.Good Stitches quilt from March, and I started some new ones, including one that uses the star block above. Well, actually, the star block above is a little hack from pattern testing since, to be honest, I'm not the best at fully following quilt directions. I just can't resist a little tweak here and there. Luckily, Debbie was patient with my insatiable need to modify, adapt, alter, and improvise.

In addition to some starts and finishes, I also joined the Instagram bandwagon (you can find me there as two_hippos). At the end of June, my brother convinced me (or rather, the math of family plans convinced me) it was time to upgrade to a phone that could do more than allow me to talk to people (that is the purpose of phones, right?). I'm slowly learning the different things aside from connect my voice to other people's voices that said phone can, in fact, do. I'm a little resistant because I'm trying to avoid feeling tethered to it, but I admit I do like instagram and its fancy filters and whatnot.

Final snippet: Washi dress. In-progress. Major thanks to Rae and Karen for patiently guiding the quilting sort into garment-making.

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Batting & Basting

I keep scraps: fabric scraps, flannel scraps, batting scraps. I've become a little more ruthless over the years, only keeping scraps of a reasonable (to me) size and flannel/batting pieces that I could realistically use. I was ready to baste a quilt with what I thought was a sufficiently large piece o' batting, only to find out that it was a touch too slim. At which point I not only remembered my bag of batting pieces but also that it's possible to fuse batting pieces together. Well, fuse via sewing machine, not heat. That zig-zag stitch will nicely unite batting in a seam that needs no pressing and therefore has no extra bulk. It was super easy to do. And provided me with just the right size of batting.

At which point I moved onto basting. I am going to let you in on a big secret: I break all the rules of basting. I do not tape anything to the floor. In fact, if I'm basting a big quilt, I don't have enough floor space to lay everything out and keep it all smooth. So I've developed a trademark lazy two.hippos method (patent pending, of course). First I iron the batting and the backing. This gets everything all smooth and keeps the two pieces together (fabric "sticks" to batting as it is, this just gets it into place nicely). Then I lay it on the floor, sometimes draped partially over the area rug (bottom left) that has nowhere else to go. Then I place the top on the batting, arrange it just so, and pick a spot to start pinning. In the case above, I started from the side you can no longer see, opposite the end you can (does that make any sense?)

Depending on the design of the front and the back as well as how much extra room I have to work with (because, shhh, I don't always make the batting 2" wider and longer and the backing 4" wider and longer. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don't), I start pinning from the middle or from a corner. (If you need the corner to stay just so, it's best to start there and work outward in a fan pattern). Then I start pinning. I purposefully don't tape anything so I can move things around and smooth out potential puckers as I work. I find this adaptive method much better than having things taped down and accidentally pinning puckers. It's not that no puckers ever form this way but rather that if and when they do, I'm more likely to feel them and fix them as I go. I will often reach under the quilt to feel and shift the backing. Much easier to do this when there's no tape in the way. And, when space (or lack thereof) demands it, I start rolling the quilt up to get the remainder of the quilt sitting evenly on the floor to finish. also, this creates a nice buffer for your knees, which usually want some cushion by this point in basting. I should note that rolling works only if you start pinning from one side rather than the middle.

And with that, happy leap day! I'm flying back to Michigan today. Woot.

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A Starry Night

I find Christmas a delightful time to quilt. I'm usually home alone (albeit often with a loaner dog), the neighbors' lights are twinkling, the street is quiet, and I spread out the fabric and get to work (or play). This weekend was no different, and I finished the interlocking stars quilt I recently started. It's not quite what I imagined since I ran out of the royal blue background fabric. I tried a few options, including sewing together all sorts of tiny cut-off triangles to "make" more fabric. But in the end, I decided that a rearranged layout offered the best solution, more seam-ripping notwithstanding. I'll show the full quilt once I've washed it and given it to its new owner.

I also started a whole new project. It's very new for me: templates, curved piecing, applique. And, as much as I actually like winter, it's a very summery fabric palette. Which is fun and bright and makes me smile. Which is a good thing because standing at the ironing board and attempting to iron curves does not make me smile. Ever. There was no smiling while ironing last night. Except possibly when I was watching Bones and laughing at some delightfully ridiculous scenes. The key to tedious chores is definitely internet TV.

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A Different Tack

I distinctly remember receiving this royal blue solid in the mail. I bought it from JCaroline Creative when during her final fabric sale. I bought it because it was a great price and blue and solid, all of which made me think I would find a way to use it well. It only took several years for me to identify how I needed to use it. And suddenly, I needed to use it. To drop all other projects and start one anew. To create a few interlocking stars -- or as many as I could with 1 yard of fabric.

These interlocking stars seem to be trending but, to be honest, when I first started seeing them I found them overwhelming. Not because they were hard to make (they aren't) but because I found full quilts of them visually overstimulating, too much for my eyes to take in. But then I saw this image of Elizabeth's quilt in progress and I realized -- in the most obvious sort of way -- that negative space was the answer. I could make a few stars into a whole quilt, or rather, I am making a few stars into a whole quilt. There's a minor issue of needing just a touch more solid blue than I have, but I'm working on a creative solution to that dilemma.

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Yes, Virginia, She Can Sew

It's taken awhile, but I finally used my sewing machine and started putting together the October do Good Stitches bee quilt. I played with a lot of ideas about how to use all the blocks (mostly in my head). I knew I didn't want to just sew all the blocks together as I thought it would be too busy.

I contemplated uneven rows or rows unevenly spaced, but ultimately decided to make 5 big blocks of 4 stars each. I'm going to sash each of the big blocks and hopefully create some floating big blocks. I may get a little improvisational as I sash. Since I now have 5 big blocks, I'm going to use 4 on the front and 1 on the back.

Having now seen all the awesome blocks that my group sent me, I have to confess that I love the solids (none of which I made) the most. Maybe I'm just in a solids-place, loving solids anyways. But there's something about the crispness of the blocks that really appeals to me. Don't get me wrong, I still like the others; I'm just lauding simplicity at the moment.

After I had sewn the blocks together and was arranging them to take pictures, I realized that this block looks pretty damn cool when set on point. I briefly considered ripping out the blocks and remaking the quilt on point with white blocks in between each star block. But then I recognized the insanity and opted to file that layout away for another time.

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Line It Up

A picture of a few white lines on white fabric is probably not the most spectacular picture ever. Actually, it's probably going to win some photography awards soon. For something like "most boring picture ever taken and not erased." Because, really, it's not showing much. But that's sort of the point, at least so far as the quilting goes. That whole disappear-into-the-background quilting thing. For what quilt, you might wonder. I was wondering too, since it had been a while since I'd really sat down and sewed something.

Way back when, by which I mean over two months ago, I showed a few peeks of a quilt I started for me. Should you not remember the glory that was that post, you can find it here. [For those of you who only know me through the interwebz and aren't used to a mildly sarcastic two hippos, well, here's a glimpse at the real-life sardonic two hippos.] Anyhooo.....this big pile o' quilt has been staring at me (when it wasn't buried under lots of other fabric), pleading with its non-existent eyes to be quilted. The problem was that it's huge, or huge for me. It's a full-size quilt and that's a fair amount of fabric to stuff through my machine. Which led to the "how to quilt it, like it, and not go crazy conundrum." For a brief moment in time, immediately after I basted it at the September SE Michigan Crafters Meetup, I thought I would do big circles. Then I tried to do one big circle and failed. It looked like a lumpy potato.

Which led me to bring it home, wait a while to rip out the lumpy potato, and then decide on a new tack: straight lines. Once I finally sat down and started sewing, straight lines were my new best friends. I did a few at irregular intervals across the entire quilt top just to get started, and then filled in at more irregular intervals until I felt it was sufficiently quilted. It took about 5 bobbins and 5 episodes of Body of Proof and then it was done. Just like that. Snap and done.

Once it has sufficiently crinkled in the dryer and I enlist the aid of some poor unwitting friend, I'll get a picture of my new quilt. That's right, my new quilt. It's staying in casa two hippos, in the bedroom de two hippos, to be precise.

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Items Complete and Not-So-Complete

A week ago Sunday I pulled out the "Sukkah kit" out of the garage, stared at the pieces, and started building. About an hour later, I had the basic structure and walls put together, admittedly a tad awry (that's what happens when you fly solo on building things and then get a little lazy: the doorway was a little crooked, but that affected neither structural integrity nor useability. Aesthetics, yes, but I was too lazy to do any more than mumble about that). What is this "sukkah" thing? Well, some of my friends have taken to calling it my "fort," which works, although I'm not sure it would do me much good in the face of marauding enemies. At its most basic, a sukkah is a temporary dwelling that commemorates the transient shelter used by the Israelites in the desert. But Sukkot, the 7-day festival for which we build the Sukkah, is also a harvest festival, and a joyous one at that. So there are decorations and parties and general merriment.

At one point I thought I'd make a reusable fabric chain, sort of like Malka did. But time got the best of me, and paper chains it was. My friend Katie and I made the chains yesterday, just in time for our afternoon Sukkah party. We used pretty paper, though. And hung red lanterns and decorated tables with gourds and put out lots of food. The weather even cooperated, as the gloomy morning turned into a lovely, sunny fall afternoon.

The not-made fabric chains had company in the not-finished project department. I also thought about--and even started--a mini-quilt or table runner or something. But that was not to be as I pieced the top but got no further. But that's ok because I have another plan in mind for this flimsy and I think I might even like the new idea better than the old one.

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Stitch by Stitch

Right after college, I moved to Portland, Oregon, where I lived with a good friend from college and three other guys. My mom's friends were very concerned about this living arrangement, since we didn't know the guys ahead of time and the bedroom doors did not have deadbolts, the horrors. All of these guys became very good friends -- what can I say, we had good taste in and excellent gut instincts about housemates -- and also exposed us to a lot of Japanese. In its original incarnation, the house consisted of 5 guys who created a burger chain had gone to college together and spent 2 years in Japan together through the JET program. The house was on iteration number 4 or 5 or so by the time we arrived, but there were still 3 Japanese speakers and us, the 2 non-Japanese speakers. Sometimes dinner table conversations would shift into Japanese and my friend was fond of translating these indecipherable-to-us exchanges as "our housemates who can't speak Japanese are the best ever. They are fascinating, amazing people. They rock." Etc., etc. Occasionally being left out of conversations, notwithstanding, I spent 2 years learning a lot about Japanese culture (and bikes -- I could tell you a lot about Shimano components for a while there).

As I returned to my in-progress Sashiko (Japanese embroidery) experiment, I remembered that one of my former housemates had a sashiko quilt, a gift from his host mom when he lived in Japan. It was beautiful, and I can't imagine how long it took to make. Traditionally, sashiko is blue and white, often white thread on blue fabric.  The two colors convey simplicity even as the designs look complicated. The trick to sashiko, it turns out, is breaking complicated designs into single lines. So over here in my corner of the world, I'm working on the paint-by-numbers version in which I'm following a pre-made pattern; apparently it is made with washable ink so that I can pretend I designed it all myself. As you can see from above, the technique starts with sewing diagonal lines individually.

However, I am preternaturally incapable of precisely following directions. In this case, I have an excuse:  they're in Japanese, so obviously I can't simply read and execute. I'm pretty good at reading pictures (that same college friend with whom I lived in Portland once wrote a paper on the linguistics of Ikea's non-verbal instructions), which is how I managed to follow the one important instruction of sewing diagonal lines instead of, say, circles, which is how my eyes first read the pattern. But I completely ignored acquiring a sashiko needle or using sashiko thread or even sticking to one color of thread.

I decided to use 4 colors of thread, though I've only made my way into 2 thus far. Before I purchased my kit, I looked at this pillow and thought that the multi-color version would be fun. I still think that, though I'm less convinced that my decision to use embroidery floss (colors, lots of colors!) was wise. Embroidery floss has multiple strands that easily come apart, which is mostly an issue in threading it, especially since the needle I'm using is on the small side. I'm pretty good at threading needles, but this takes me at least 4 tries each time. A lesson learned, I suppose. I'm determined to finish this little handsewing project, ideally in the next couple of weeks. Assuming I do, however,  I have no idea what I'll use it for. A pillow? A pouch? A wall hanging?

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