Holiday Card 2007

If I were to tell you what I’ve been busying myself with recently, the list would look something like this:

• baking: can’t say, it’s a surprise
• knitting: can’t say, it’s a surprise
• sewing: can’t say, it’s a surprise
• crafting: can’t say, it’s a surprise

And so on, &c. It’s a wonder anyone out there in craftblogland has anything to talk about in the month of December. Of course, I’m hardly prolific in the craft department these days, if I was I suppose I could keep the gift-crafting to myself and share the non-gift crafting with you. Ha, fat chance there’s any non-gift crafting going on! Anyway, the holiday card I made this year is about all I can share by way of craftiness, even though the glue is barely dry, nevermind that none have been written or posted. It’s not a palette you’d probably expect from a holiday card (the card itself, nor the setting above), but I’m crazy about blue, brown, and orange at the moment. That orange watering can in the background? Won it at the library party a couple of days ago. Along with an assortment of other orangey backyard goodies. A little something to help me take my mind of winter and start dreaming of spring and summer. So lovely! So, anyway, back to the card: it’s your typical craft store creation, really, and not what I had in mind for this year’s card at all. But as soon as I spotted the bird-shaped craft punch in the store, I knew what had to be done. I picked up the alphabet stamps (in the shape of typewriter keys! Who could resist?), got out the blank, ivory cards, some scrap paper bits, and set to work. I’m pleased with it.

Some other newsy bits and links:

• I have a new nephew! His name is Zach, he was born 3 weeks ago, and I am absolutely in love with him. I can’t go 2 days without seeing him, truly. I’d post a picture but I have to get permission from his parents first (I keep forgetting to ask!).
• I survived an earthquake! OK, it’s somewhat old news, and probably a bit alarmist for a minor-ish quake in California, but still. It was my first!
• My Ravelry invite came in a few weeks ago! Here’s my sparsely-populated profile. Go ahead and friend me, it might encourage me to actually spend some time beefing up my projects & stash info. I have to admit, it’s the stash cataloguing on the site that really intrigues me (librarian much?)
• I went to Alabama last week for a quickie conference. I saw very little of it, the highlight being a drive past the U.S. Space & Rocket Center, twice (from the airport, to the airport). Wish I had time to go in.
• Time Management for Creative People, a free e-book that is in my to-read file.
• If you work with Photoshop or Illustrator you might like this collection of brushes, patterns, fonts, etc. I nabbed this off someone’s blog and forgot whose, sorry.
• My parents gave us a crockpot this year and the onset of winter has seen me scouring the interwebs for good crockpot recipes. Got any? Here’s one I can’t wait to try.
• We saw Feist last week and she was even more brilliant than I expected. The Great Lake Swimmers opened for her and they were pretty brilliant too. Folksy with a lot of nice instrumental work, and a lead singer with an absolutely haunting voice.

There, I think we’re all caught up now.

Thank you for your kind words about the quilt! I promised a post about quilting thoughts & lessons learned, so hopefully some of this will be helpful to you. I must admit though, this is as much for me as it is for you, because these are all things I need to commit to memory for my next quilting adventure!

• Quilting is my most favourite thing at the moment. Everything about it works for me — choosing the fabric, piecing the quilt top, arranging the blocks, hand-quilting, and even blindstitching the binding! I would marry quilting if I could.
• Notice how I didn’t include cutting out the templates and ironing (er, sorry, “pressing”) in that list? Yes, well, those are the caveats. Cutting out the templates was a major bore because when you’ve got your fabric all washed, ironed, and ready to go, the last thing you want to do is mess around with paper, scissors, cardstock, and glue. But when you’re working from a pattern, there’s no getting around it, is there? And then there’s the pressing. I learned that every time you stitch two pieces of fabric together, you must press the seams, regardless of how much you may detest ironing. I forced myself to do both the template-cutting and the ironing this time, and I’ll probably force myself to do it next time, too. While I can take my quilting lumps, I won’t do it without complaining.
• Once you’re done with the quilting, and once you’ve trimmed your quit and squared up the corners, it’s on to the binding. I followed the directions from Denyse Schmidt’s book down to the letter (the instructions are available here in PDF) and I took Kim’s advice and used the blindstitching technique described at the bottom of this page. All in all, I was completely delighted by the binding & blindstitching! I expected to be out of patience and ready-for-this-thing-to-be-done-already by that point, but I wasn’t, and hand-stitching the binding didn’t take as long as I thought it would (maybe 4 hours, total?). Of course, the process is a total treat when things fall nicely into place, and the quilt in front of you looks like the one in the pattern (my corners were in fact mitred and my stitches ended up being completely invisible!).
• You don’t have to understand every instruction to pull it off successfully & get your quilt to look like the one in the pattern. To wit: the instructions for mitred corners. If you’re familiar with the process, you know that when you’re sewing on the binding to the front of the quilt, when you get to a corner you have to fold your binding first to the right, then to the left, then pin in place. I followed those instructions totally on faith because I simply could not visualize how a couple of folds would get me a nice, square, mitred corner, but they did. Faith-based quilting!
• The one bit of instruction I didn’t follow? Drawing lines on the quilt top. Since I was working with a tight deadline, and since it took me 45 minutes to use my ruler and fabric pencil to dutifully draw parallel lines on the first block, I realized that something had to give (45 minutes x 25 blocks = more time than I had!). The grid pattern allowed me to pretty much eyeball the lines and while some aren’t completely parallel, they were parallel enough for me!

I will probably add to this post as I think of more. If you have any quilting tips or lessons learned, let us know in the comments!

Here’s a little something that I’ve been keeping from you: my very first finished object of 2007! I had hoped it would be my last finished object of 2006, but it took about 16 hours too long to make the deadline. Astute readers might recall me dropping blatantly unsubtle hints about being consumed by a mystery project, and I know you’ve all been mighty puzzled about what it might be (hah!), so wonder no more! My parents celebrated their 35th anniversary on December 27th and this quilt was a gift to them from me & the mister, and my sister & her mister.

For any quilters who might be reading, here are some details:

• The pattern is “What a Bunch of Squares” from Denyse Schmidt’s excellent book.
• I machine-pieced the quilt top and did the quilting by hand.
• It took me precisely 30 days to complete, start to finish (and when I say start, I mean cutting-out-templates-start). When I wasn’t at work, or marking assignments, or doing other holiday-prep, I was working on the quilt. Activity definitely intensified once Christmas was over — I must have spent 16 hours a day on the couch during that final week, quilting and eating cookies and drinking tea. Not a bad way to spend the holidays!
• I used two different beiges and a variety of dark reds/burnt oranges. Here’s a picture of the fabric right out of the store.
• I followed every bit of instruction, down to the very last detail. I’m usually no good at that, I’m the sort of crafter who looks at patterns for “ideas”, then I ad lib as I go along. This time, the finished product was too important, and I acknowledged early on that I have too little quilting experience to make it up as I went, so I sucked that book clean of all instructions and diagrams. And it was worth it.
• All pictures, from start to finish, are in a photoset on Flickr.

More quilting thoughts & lessons learned coming soon. Welcome, aught-seven! So happy to see you.

I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Etsy. Have you visited lately? They’ve recently redesigned and I think they’ve upped the server mojo behind the scenes because everything is loading a lot faster, which is a welcome change. And I can’t get enough of the shop-by-colour option (librarian aside: wouldn’t it be nice if library OPACs were as pretty and functional as Etsy? And, what’s this? Controlled vocabulary and tags working well in tandem? Brilliant!). If you’re looking to buy handmade this holiday season, or if you’re just in the mood for some crafty eye-candy, here are a few of my favourite Etsy shops:

• discomedusa designs
• goshdarnknit
• port2port press
• mommycoddle
• Queenthings (closed at the moment but keep an eye on this one!)
• Soule Mama
• The Black Apple
• Katrina Kaye (just bought one of her recycled army bags – fabulous!)
• Imogen
• Aunty Cookie

Me? I clean up the studio! It’s been in a terrible state for weeks (here, have a look) with books piled all about, evidence of projects-in-progress littering both work surfaces, and about a metric tonne of fabric scraps, ribbon ends, and thread covering the floor. I’ve spent the last couple of hours doing some much needed organization, putting things away, sweeping up the floor, and wiping down the tables. Why? Because I’m starting on a bit of a craft project that’s going to require a couple of hours of studio-time everyday for the next few weeks. I’ve been planning this project for months and now that I finally have some time to devote to it (as well as a deadline – the best possible motivator), I can’t wait to actually plunge in! More soon.

I waffled for ages on what to do for Christmas cards this year. Potato stamping? Cut-outs? What about glitter? Should there be glitter involved? Then I started rifling through my fabric scraps box and decided on little christmas trees sewn on to cards. Quick and minimal, I like them. More pictures here.

Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m in a bit of a rut with the softies. I’m still very fond of the general design (wool/felt bodies, felt faces, cotton/button embelishments), but I feel like they are lacking a certain something. Clothes, maybe? I’m not very handy with the sewing machine when it comes to miniature clothing (I adore the details on dolls like Hillary’s, but the actual sewing is a bit fussy for me), so I’m thinking of having a go at little knits. Scarves shouldn’t be a problem, maybe hats too, although I can’t say I’m thrilled about knitting little sweaters! Will keep you posted, but for now, all this is to say that it’s been a bit of a wretched weekend and a decidely grumpy Monday. Don’t let me put a damper on your spirits though, especially all you south-of-the-border types. Happy long weekend to you!

This week’s Illustration Friday theme: daring

I’ve had this fellow drawn since last Friday and every night this week I’ve gone home with the intention of adding some colour to him. With all the hardcore, deadline-driven crafting that has been going on lately (more about that soon), I haven’t had the chance, so this morning, in an 11th hour attempt to redeem his honour, I scanned him into Photoshop and coloured him in there. I think I am addicted. (And I’m already having ludicrous dreams of Adobe Illustrator. Boy howdy).