Monthly Archives: December 2015

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My daughter picked out this crazy frog fabric on a summer shopping trip. I knew that I'd use it to make The Nelle dress, by Brownie Goose. I have made the BG Lazy Susan a couple times and wanted to try a different pattern. I will certainly be making more of these. The Nelle went together very quickly (though it would have been faster if I could have found my rolled hem foot for my machine!). I look forward to playing around with adding trim or using more than one fabric next time I make this dress. Perhaps it's finally time to cut up my coveted Tula purple raccoons to make her a dress. It's more likely I'll pick something else for the next one, but maybe the one after that. ;-)

This isn't exactly a winter dress, but we're in California, so throw on some leggings and a sweater and she could wear this now. It's also big enough that it will still fit her in Spring/Summer. To be honest, I kinda want one in my size (though maybe not this fabric). ;-)

I think this is a great beginner pattern with just one piece of elastic in casing and nothing too picky to fiddle with.

Thanks for visiting!

I'm linking up to Adrienne's 2015 Q4 Finish Along post. See all my Q4 goals here.

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Continuing in my usual method of working on a little of this and a little of that, there is a lot on my sewing table at the moment. But more excitingly, I finished and gave two garments and one king sized quilt for Hanukkah last week! I'll be showing you those finishes in separate posts over the next week, but here's some of the in progress stuff I'm working on. As of this past Sunday I had seven finished quilt tops (ranging from twin sized down to a mini/doll quilt) that need to be quilted and finished. I showed them off in a periscope broadcast that you can watch on replay here. I'm hoping to show you five of the quilts finished by the end of this month, including the two largest ones. ;-)

 

The first one I want to finish is a Christmas Tree table topper that will be a gift for my mom. At this point it is quilted with some simple loops on the trees and just needs to have the label and binding attached.

 

The next one I started quilting this week is the safari animals cuddle quilt. When my son made his first quilt I cut out these 35 squares to make my own quilt alongside him, but my daughter (age 2.5 at the time) insisted on making her own pattern (since she was watching her brother make his pattern with his quilt blocks). It was pieced months ago, and I've finally started quilting it. She's made it clear that she will be claiming this quilt when it's done. I've opted to go with graffiti quilting on this one, which I've only done on mini quilts so far. Here's the first section of pink on pink quilting. The yellow sections will be quilted in yellow and the safari blocks will be quilted in turquoise. The green backing fabric will contrast all of these which I think will make for a fun look. So far, 5 blocks down, 30 to go.

 

I'm behind on my November do. Good Stitches bee blocks, because I decided to try something all fancy and tricky and stuff. We were instructed to make improv symbol blocks. It's not going super smoothly, but here's what I've got at the moment for my second block. I'm replacing the upper right portion in the first photo where I attempted some improv curved piecing (what was I thinking!?). That upper portion in the lower picture is the beginning of redoing that section (with no curves!). I imagine you can see what I'm going for. Now to keep my fingers crossed that it will all come together as planned.

 

Thanks for visiting. What are you working on this week?

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Sometimes life gets in the way of our plans and goals. I took six weeks off of blogging from mid-October to the end of November. It was unintentional. When I got close to posting again I was surprised it had been that long. I'd been sewing. But something had had to give. And blogging was one of the somethings.

Today is my Dad's birthday. Two years ago, on his birthday he was diagnosed with cancer. He would have been 66 today, but he lost his battle with cancer on October 27th of this year.

The past two years have been very hard emotionally. Many hours have been spent discussing death, dying, and cancer with my now 3 1/2 and 5 1/2 year old children. That is an exhausting task. I feared how I would help my small children through their first experience with death and with the loss of their grandfather.

His health was a roller coaster, up and down over the last year and a half of his life. In the bad times, I watched him in pain, physically and emotionally. In the good times, he was back on his bicycle, where he loved to be.

I found out about the cancer diagnosis right about when I was working to launch my blog. The news shocked me and delayed my blogging plans. My first post featured a quilt I made for my dad when I found out about the cancer. It was what I could do. At a time that I couldn't even talk to my siblings about it because they didn't know yet. I could throw myself into quilting and make something for him. That's one of the things that quilting does for me. It provides comfort in times that are hard. While the quilt was given to Dad, that quilt was more for me that it was for him.

 

This project is the first project that I started after my dad passed away. An improv quilt had been on my bucket list, but I wasn't intending to start anything new before the new year. Somehow in that lost space of having lost my father, I did what I knew would comfort me. I started a new quilt. I cut out fabric. And I did it without a ruler. It was liberating. It gave me a place to spend time thinking of him while I worked on this project. It's healthy to grieve. But I think it's also healthy to not let grieving overwhelm you. As life went back to normal in the sense of my day-to-day routines, this project gives me a break from the routine. I don't know when I will finish it, but as I work on it I will be reminded of him. And again, this quilt is for me. I hope the process of making it gives me the space to process all the feelings I'm having. I hope that once this quilt is done I will be able to look back and think that things are somehow just a little bit easier. Right now things are still feeling very hard.

I haven't really done a lot of improv, mostly just a few bee blocks. And when I "improv" I usually still use a ruler and 90 degree angles. This project was born from my own set of adaptations to Sherri Lynn Wood's Floating Squares score, from her book The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters. I really enjoyed hearing her speak months ago and bought the book when it came out. As a perfectionist, rule-follower I really appreciate that her improv has some guidelines. In practice, I am enjoying it all just going together, without the picky worry of perfect points or perfect seam allowances. I guess the true test will be how much I love it when it's done.

I know Sherri presses her seams any which way... I was struck by the slide she showed us of the back of one of her projects. As a press-seams-open-er I thought it was complete madness. You can see here that I tried desperately to stick with pressing seams open. That middle seams was just wonky enough for that to not be happening there. I've darted in a couple places and I've pressed seams how the fabric wants them to be pressed. I can definitely see how important this flexibility would be in a project that had more curved piecing. I'm already seeing that the longer my seams get the more likely something is a bit amiss.

For those of you who are familiar with Floating Squares, one of the adaptations I've made was how many different fabrics I'm using. Seven. While I love the look of the basic three fabric versions, I wanted to work from my stash, and the larger cuts of fabric just weren't speaking to me so a number of my chosen fabrics are from half yard cuts. I have a vague notion that I'm working in three zones; these are parts of zone one.

I'm a bit of a blender addict. I don't buy much in the way of multicolored prints, and when I do, I find it hard to use them. I decided to use the stripe fabric as my filler fabric, and cut my squares from the blenders and bicycle print. I'm trying not to overthink the selection of pieces to put together and I'm enjoying the process.

I think one of the challenges of improv is knowing when you're done. In my case, when I run out of fabrics, I think I'll be done. I have no idea how big the quilt will end up being. That feels so weird and backwards. The solid black will be used in another zone of the quilt. Since I want some of my fabrics from the other two zones to cross into the zone with the black, I've started making some units with the black. And true to form, I'll likely jump back and forth between the three zones so I don't get bored. There's a rough vision in my mind. Time will tell if this is going to come out as I'm envisioning it.

Thanks for visiting.