Friday night, good dinner & wine with my sister & her mister

  Saturday morning, tea (in my favourite but cracked mug) & a magazine on the deck

  Sunday, quilt mending on the couch

It’s Wednesday and I’m still thinking about last weekend. Nothing major, just a whole lot of not-working (mostly — I checked email once, bad me) and plenty of great, big expanses of chill-time. It was perfect. I bought that magazine during that week of almost-vacation in August, but I didn’t actually pick it up until this weekend, when I spent a luscious hour with it on the deck on Saturday morning. Magazines are a weird little indulgence for me — I hardly ever buy them, and when I do, I tend to lose patience with them in a hurry. A quick flip-through, ahh look at the lovely pictures, and then it’s on to something else. Compare that to a book, with which I can spend hours upon hours, all strung together. So, reading that issue of Blueprint, cover to cover, was nice, in an unexpected, uncharacteristic sort of way. And the quilt mending was successful too. We bought that quilt (from a store! I know!) a couple of years ago and have managed to wear it out well, with relentless machine-washing and drying. It was clean-linen time this weekend and I had visions of opening up the washing machine to an unraveled mess, tufts of batting everywhere, bits of threadbare cotton stuck to the drum (a bit melodramatic, perhaps). I knew I’d have to mend all those tiny unraveling seams before committing this quilt to the washing machine one more time, so that’s what I did on Sunday. It went well. The mended bits are sprinkled unevenly and quite obviously all over the quilt, but whatever, I’m telling myself that I don’t care. It will probably nag at me long enough to finally get me working on a quilt for our bed (the mister has been asking for one for ages), and that can only be a good thing.

Hope you’re all having a good week, my sweets!

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.

Back to the birds this past weekend. You might recall that I made the first set of “birds on a wire” out of bright cotton prints, and while I liked them well enough, I went for more of a folksy feel with these fellas. I think the combination of wool fabric and vintage cotton bits did the trick. Here they are hanging in the corner of my studio minutes before they were boxed up and dropped in the mail (click for a decent-sized image!):

This bunch is headed to Seattle for Plush You II. I’ve got a few more in the works for the shop, stay tuned! Having said that, this is probably a good time to mention that I set up a mailing list over on the shop site if you’d like to be notified when fresh goodies get posted. I’ve got 5 lonely souls on the list at the moment and they might like some company. Just sayin’.

Anyway, my last day of work to-day, I’m staring down 10-days off (I said 8 before, but that’s because I forgot our long weekend next week. Wheeee!) and the course description couldn’t have been posted at a better time because the next 10 days are going to be solid, nose-to-the-grindstone, no-messing-around. I’m going to take a few moments to-morrow to plan out a schedule for myself, something along the lines of: 9.30 am – 3 pm work, half hour for lunch somewhere in there, break at 3.30, craft for a bit until the mister gets home. Hey, I guess that’s it, The Plan.

I’m throwing crafting in to provide a bit of variety and some sanitymaking (as opposed to crazymaking, another non-word that I enjoy) and also so that I don’t fall drastically behind on a few softie committments I’ve made. Including, Plush You II, thank you Kristen for posting and emailing about it, and thank you Fiona for starting your submissions now, thereby making me realize that now is not early at all, but just in time!

Also, a new coffeehouse has opened right in our neighbourhood (yes, that’s what they’ve called themselves, “somethingorother coffeehouse”, because “coffeehouse” is trendier by far than “coffee shop”, you know) so the mister and I have a date to investigate it this weekend. He’s interested in good coffee, I’m interested in free WiFi. If all goes well, I might have a new place to get work done, 9.30 am – 3 pm next week. Hip hip!

Unrelated to birds and beads altogether is this: I’ve updated the about page and guess what? It’s now interactive! Tell me what you’d like to know and I’ll post the answer, right there on the page. Doesn’t that sound like fun? You know it does! More details here.

Hip hip!

So, clearly the universe is speaking to me, and I am nothing if not a good listener. I tried to talk the mister into a bird-watching weekend, but he would have none of it (me: “hey, how would you feel about a bird-watching weekend?” Him: “you’re kidding, right?”), so I decided to pay homage to the birds the only way I know how: with fabric! (click for a larger image!). In truth, I’ve had a hankering to make a mobile lately (that brewing idea I mentioned yesterday? This is it), so these birds-on-a-string just made sense. I dipped into some of my favourite fabric & ribbon scraps for these birds and there are plenty more scraps seeking similar purpose so I think I’ll make a few more of these, in varying lengths. I might even add a couple of bright beads on the string between the birds – what do you think?

I hope the birds are pleased with me.

*Bless you, Flickr; without you I wouldn’t know the names of half of the winged creatures I’ve seen lately!

For two of the best mothers I know: a kitten for the mister’s mum and quilted placemats (inspired by this fantastic post) for my mum. And a happy belated Mother’s Day to all the other mums out there!

I have an epic post in the works, a post parading all the wonderful mail that has landed on my doorstep over the past few weeks. It’s such a monster, in fact, that I think I might break it up into multiple posts (the mail has been that good). Anticipate!

I’m ashamed to admit it but it took a dream (!) for me to figure out the very simple, very common sense method for sewing two rectangular pieces of fabric together, described here. Gah! So, anyway, these card holders are up for grabs in the shop, and I’ll keep sewing them until I have another inspirational sewing dream (which I’m really hoping will be about curtains or slip covers or something else I need to learn how to make!).

I had originally intended to send Glory off to live with a friend’s little girl, but on second thought realized that she isn’t old enough for her yet, so Glory is now looking for a home.

Part of the impetus to get back to my sewing machine is Plush You II , a plush exhibit at Schmancy Toys in Seattle, in which I am participating. I have to admit, I signed up for somewhat selfish reasons — to prod myself into action, force the creative juices to flow, push the envelope and try new things, and to work at getting better at making stuffed things that I like and of which I am proud. I’m far from there yet, but I think I’m starting down the right road.