Accomplishments and Nail Biting

I'm feeling rather accomplished today, despite the fact that I have yet to even venture near a sewing machine today. So why do I feel like I'm just about at the top of a mountain?

Well, we've made our first steps towards Christmas decorating around the house. We went to Papa Noel and bought our tree yesterday, a nice fat Fraser Fir which will fit nicely in our house. My brother even seems to have brought out a number of our boxes from the attic. Yay No. 1!

As of right now, I'm also almost entirely done with my Christmas shopping. The only person I still actually need to procure something for is my dad, and as soon as I can get an Amazon search in with my mom that should be all taken care of. Yay No. 2!!

And finally, I got Tiffany's quilt in the mail today! Yay No. 3! This is, however, where the nail biting comes in.
This quilt has a decent number of firsts built into it. It's the first quilt where I bought all the materials involved, the first one I've ever made for someone else (full size that is, I did make a wall hanging for a friend's birthday), and the first one I've ever put in the mail (please don't lose it please don't lose it).
The guy helping me out at the post office asked about how much it would be worth if I needed to insure it and I kind of blanked on how to explain to him how much it can cost to make a quilt. With any luck, the extra couple of bucks I paid for insurance on the package won't be needed.

Here's to hoping the quilt arrives safely in Louisiana. :D

Knock Knock - Your Strippers Have Arrived! - NaBloPoMo Day 21

There's a threesome of ladies in our strip club who always announce their presence with this phrase. Not that my mum and I hear it that often, since we're usually some of the last to arrive at the store on a given Strip Club day.

The third Saturday of every month, one of our favorite semi-local quilt shops hosts a Strip Club day. Jeanne, the owner of the shop, puts together a collection of fabrics and cuts them into a jelly roll for each of the ladies who signs up. Before we collectively Ooo and Aaah over the pattern for a particular month, we have a group show and tell of the projects we've all been working on.
This month, our show and tell turned out a lot more interesting than often happens. A much smaller fraction of the ladies decided to make last month's Dear Jane quilt, partially because of the reproduction fabrics themselves and partially because of the pattern Jeanne had picked out. Two ladies besides Jeanne made the intended quilt, one with a neat, fairly busy background fabric and the other with a lovely piano keys border. Two further used the Dear Jane roll with patterns from previous months and another two used the intended pattern but made their quilts with bright, colorful jelly rolls that completely changed the effect of the pattern. I would show y'all pictures, but then again I'm a silly person who forgets to actually take any.

I will however show y'all pictures of our completed strip quilts at some point in the future. ^_^

Design Wall Experiments - NaBloPoMo Day 16

We all have our favorite part of the quilting process. Picking the fabric, cutting it up, making our blocks, arranging the blocks, sewing on borders, or quilting it all together, but there is only one part of that process that brings together everyone in my house.
Yes, even the non-quilting boys, and that's playtime on the design wall.

Our particular setup is less of the wall, more of the almost freestanding bit of fabric on a frame that the younger cats love to play around. It leans against our perpetually unused fireplace in various states of togetherness, surrounded by chairs and the remains of previously planned out projects. I think currently there's the unused block from my Yellow Brick Road and some of Mom's computer design experiment printouts.

So say I'm laying out a quilt on the wall. Sometimes it's an individual process, but more often, on both my quilts and my mom's, it's a group endeavor. Mom and I take turns moving blocks, experimenting with their positions and changing the whole thing round at least twice, if not more.
Then Dad wanders over on a break from poem writing and makes a comment about a particular chunk. While we're trying to figure out exactly what it is he's trying to say, Post or Mira decide to just go ahead and start changing the bottom row of the quilt. And my brother...
Well, my brother has to be asked for his opinion most of the time, but when the recipient is one of his friends he is willing to get up from his computer and give it.

Maybe it's the experimental part of it. The chance to find new and different combinations, simply by rotating a few little blocks. All the pictures in today's post are close ups of some of my less than successful experiments, the ones that I got a condensed view of on my camera and ended up not liking so much. Pretty, but not right and interesting, but still slightly off.
I wonder what results I'll get in my next design wall experiment. ^_^

One Hundred and Twenty - NaBloPoMo Day 10

Different fabrics, that is. I've gotten everything cut, counted through them again, and as of right now, I'm pretty sure that's how many different Oriental fabrics are going into the quilt I'm starting for my cousin Katheryn.

It's this quilt here, Japanese Yen, from one of the books we picked up on our shop hopping over the summer.
It will be getting a better name, one that's not entirely redundant (no one else uses yen, silly book author), but the part about this particular quilt that currently amuses me is definitely the number of fabrics used in it.

The entire book is about making quilts from scraps of varying sizes, but in all honesty, I really don't have anywhere near that many scraps yet. So instead I went to my collection of Oriental fabrics, made mostly out of fat quarters, and cut a piece from almost every one.

Yep, almost. Hence my amusement. I cut from 120 different fabrics, and still have more that I didn't even touch for this project. Granted, a lot of them are quite close to being solids, and therefore wouldn't work as well in this quilt, but they're still gorgeous bits of cotton that I can't wait to use in other projects.

Time to get to half-square-triangle-ing so I can get things up on the design wall. ^_^

What's the Japanese word for ladder? - Blogger's Quilt Festival

Welcome internet travelers! I hope you're enjoying this online quilt festival, organized by the fabulous Amy of Amy's Creative Side. I'm ridiculously new to the online quilting community, but I thought I'd introduce myself with a quilt I recently made for a friend of mine.

Blame it on my grandma. Not just this quilt, the whole thing really. The story of how she got me hooked on fabric is one for another time, but the story of this quilt starts with her, and with boredom.

We go up to Washington a lot for special occasions, but once my cousin's wedding festivities were over this past May, my mom and I decided to stay with my grandma for an extended visit and sent the boys home to get a bit of work done. Unfortunately, after a few days of staying at her home doing nothing, I got bored. Very bored.
  

My marker-ed plan

 So I started planning. I copied classic patterns out of my grandma's books, I confiscated her graph paper and some markers, and I planned. Mostly I thought about a very in-depth project for another time, but I also started thinking about a Jacob's Ladder for my former roommate Tiffany, who's getting ready to move to New York and pursue a theater career.

Oddly enough, without even trying to make it so, the (mostly Oriental) fabrics I ended up picking out for the quilt match my markered plan almost perfectly.  Weird.

I put the quilt together once I got back to Texas, first at home in between trips to Austin, and then in Austin, in between trips home. It's been sitting at the front of the house for a couple of months, waiting to have its picture taken, but it's just about time to send it off now.

I absolutely love these fabrics - a pale yellow ridiculously small check, a blue/green bamboo, a purple wood grain, and the fabulous red Oriental from which all the other colors were derived. Plus, I was able to find the same print in a different color wave for the back!

I hope y'all are enjoying the Blogger's Quilt Festival, and I hope you come back to visit some time in the future. Happy quilting!

PS> If any of you have helpful tips for getting color spots out of a quilt, I would dearly appreciate the advice. Despite the fact that I pre-washed all my fabrics, when I went to wash the completed quilt, hoping to get as much cat hair out of it as possible, I ended up with blue/green/purple spots on a fair portion of the quilt. Help please!

> NaBloPoMo Day 1 Complete :D

Binding Queen

You can cut, you can press, making the finishing touch
See that quilt, watch that seam, dig in the Binding Queen!

After multiple sessions of work, marking my diagonals before the weekend, sewing a tube, cutting the strips, and pressing them over last night, and then finally today attaching each one to its respective quilt, I have fully completed my mom's birthday present.






And I feel like a Binding Queen.

I made the bindings for my previous quilts, but for the most part they were only completed after consulting with my mom or with one of her guide books. But no more! 
Fully completed, fully on my own, and all for quilts made by by mum for other people. Well, we're probably going to keep her rainbow quilt for ourselves, mostly because of a few bits funkiness in the border areas, but it technically could be given to someone else.

And to further make this seem like even more of an accomplishment, everything worked. There wasn't a single thing that went wrong. My bindings have gotten to the point of just working wonderfully.  ^_^


Which in large part is due to this wonderfully nifty Binding Tool we have. What is the most annoying part of sewing a binding onto a quilt? The final step!
So you've sewn almost all the way around your quilt with few difficulties, but find yourself stumped by how to join your two ends together.
Enter the binding tool. With its lovely instructions as a guide, your bindings will always come together perfectly flat and untwisting. You'll never have to kind of fudge the fixings again! Hooray!


Oh hey, and while I'm at my endorsements, here's what's going on in other necks of the woods.

Micki over at Irish Muses is having an AccuQuilt GO Cutter Giveaway, but more importantly, she's my first follower! *mind is boggled* I have a follower! I might need to ramble in a slightly more comprehensible fashion now. She'll be picking a winner on Nov. 5, so head over there while there's still time and check out the quilts she's making with her new friend Colleen (the cutter)!

Micki isn't the only one doing a giveaway either. Sue at Alderwood Quilts has a GO of her own to give to a lucky winner. She's been posting quite a few helpful cutter tips as well, so even if you don't win hers when she draws numbers on Nov. 1, you can find out all you'll need to know to use one!

And last but not least in the giveaway train is Sarah of Confessions of a Fabric Addict . She is adopting a birthday tradition from the folk of the Shire and having a giveaway for her birthday on Friday. Anyone who can frame a quilting post with Tolkien gets a shiny gold star in my book. Two people will win charm packs of delightful fabrics, and if you're lucky, you might even become her 200th follower, inciting her to start another giveaway!


To start and end this post with a song, or at least something that involved songs, here's a picture taken during Saturday's game in Austin. My first day with the Longhorn Alumni Band was a rousing success, despite the football team's rather awkward lack of skill, and I will definitely be going back next year.

From the Alumni Band seats at the very top of Darrel K. Royal Stadium, it's the Longhorn Band! Oh, and the team's entering as well. But look at that skyline!

The Best Birthday Presents...

...are often ones from the heart. Or so I've heard. To me though, one of the most important elements of a birthday present is the element of surprise. It's just not the same when the recipient knows exactly what they're receiving (as is the case with most of the gifts my mom will be receiving in a couple of days).


Fortunately, the other night, I had a lightbulb of brilliance go off in my mind. What's something I can do for my mom, something no one else in our family would think of (let alone attempt), and most importantly something that will really not stretch my current lack of funds?

Bindings!!

That's right. I'm going to make and attach bindings on five of my mom's quilts, the ones that have been sitting around the house only that single step away from being finished completely.
Three of these are belated wedding presents for friends and family members who have gotten married over the past year. One is a baby quilt for a former coworker (the baby was born over the summer) and the last is the only one that we are going to be keeping for ourselves. 

It's around 1600  inches of bias, double-fold bindings. Time to get to work!

UFO Addiction

I think I might have a problem. Or at least will likely have a problem at some point in the future.

I love to start projects. Finding fabrics, designing blocks, getting bits cut and ready to go-it’s addicting. But I don’t necessarily like so much to finish my projects. There’s a certain point where the excitement starts to fizzle out, leaving me with very little desire to continue on, and I hit it from my very first quilting project.

Three years ago, my mom came home from a class about making a Six-Hour Quilt. She quickly (although not as quickly as their title suggests) turned one out in bright, happy colors and sent it off to one of my cousins for his new daughter. It seemed like an easy enough project, so I thought I’d create one to take with me on long band trips. I chose cotton fabrics for one side, a few UT fabrics paired with music notes and an amazing sousaphone fabric, and pastel flannels for the other. I got everything cut, laid it all out, and started sewing.

And then I just stopped. Partly because it was by then the end of the summer break, time to return to college life in Austin, but also because I partially got bored with it. It wasn’t until two and a half years later (by which point I didn’t really have any more long band trips to take the thing on) that I managed to finish that darn 6-hour quilt.

We’re going to just look past the fact that my next project, the first one that really pieced together like a quilt, is still sitting unfinished in a project box. One day I’ll finish that French Braid. Probably not any day soon though.

So I have unfinished projects. Not counting my Osaka block of the month, I have three projects in need of piecing and three more in various stages of binding. It’s not a crime to have UFO’s, not even if those UFO’s are numbering in the double digits (not yet).

It’s probably not the best thing to ignore them though. Or more accurately in my case, to pretty much entirely forget them the moment a new idea pops into my head.

Like one did the other night. This idea was so brilliant, so perfect for me that I almost couldn’t fall asleep once I thought it up. I haven’t thought of any other projects since then, despite knowing that it might be better for me to work on the UFO's (particularly that set of placemats I meant to give to my friend for her 21^st birthday, last summer…) .

But then this project, in all its tantalizing goodness, just draws me back in. So I’ll work on the new project, and hopefully have a Finished Object to show off in a while. =D

Quilting with the Tubes

It’s hard for me to work in silence. Whether I’m cleaning, studying, or quilting, I need something to be going on in the background. Normally I choose music, but the sewing setup in my house (i.e. what used to function as a kitchen table and is now my mom’s and my shared workspace) has a fantastic thing known as a television. Unfortunately, the television’s availability has had a bit of a side effect on my quilting.

Probably not a Jellicle Cat.

I can only really concentrate on my sewing if I’ve already seen what I’m watching.

Take last week for example. I spent a solid evening delightfully submerged in the sewing zone, fueled by CATS on one of the upper cable channels, a musical I’ve seen so many times I know every single word. Granted, the fact that it’s entirely in song and all about felines does help a bit, but still. I’ve seen it a lot.

When I first got a VHS copy, I spent a solid month watching it on an almost daily basis. The tiniest inkling of the show makes my brother want to groan and weep.

Basically, it’s the perfect viewing selection for quilting.

It’s not the only one though.  I also love quilting to television marathons, especially of NCIS, CSI, Buffy, and the ultimate winner, Doctor Who. I’ve seen them all, I love them all, and they’re just interesting enough (even on a 3^rd, 4^th, even 8^th viewing) to make me want to turn my head occasionally.

What I’m watching right now, terrible for quilting. Too new, too entertaining-definitely too distracting. (That’s why I’m only typing on commercials!)

But as soon as this episode is over, it’s quilting time! =)