finishes!

I’m linking this post with Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday which, this week, is being hosted by Janet at Simply Pieced blog.

Last week, before I went away, I managed to get the binding on my teacher’s donated quilt and to hand sew it down. The trickiest part of the project then loomed – getting all the pencil marks out of the border. I’m not sure how long they had been there but my teacher intimated that it had been a while. I rubbed Amway’s LOC into every inch of that border by hand; it took ages. Then I put it in my front-loading washing machine, prayed and let the machine do its thing! An hour later, I hung it on the line – there was not a pencil mark in sight! Praise the Lord!

Sometimes I look at the binding fabric and wonder if I made the right choice. It’s a green and beige stripe; I think it’s a Debbie Mumm fabric. The green is very similar to the greens in the quilt but, because the beige stripe and the green stripe are the same width, from a distance it reads as a muddy light khaki colour!  Up close it looks fine but from further away: well, I’m not so sure. However, it’s done and I’m not going to change it – mostly because I didn’t have any other more suitable fabric here to use! The photo shows my first quilting of a curved line using my walking foot and following a pattern.

 

So, may I present K.’s finished quilt (remember, I didn’t make it; I only quilted the border, bound it and washed it). Unfortunately, the colours are a bit washed out -- the photo above shows the real intensity of the colours.

But wait, there’s more…

Yesterday afternoon, I joined the pre-cut binding strips and attached the binding to my Jacob’s Ladder Goes Barn Raising quilt. Last night, as mum and WM watched the football (rugby league), I sewed the binding down. This afternoon I sewed down the two sides of the label that weren’t held down by the binding.

So, for your further viewing pleasure, may I present another finish:

 

And in knitting news (drum roll please!)…

Last December I started knitting a bear for my great-niece at the request of my niece who bought the pattern and sent it to me. It was a very fiddly knit; lots of teeny-tiny pieces. When I pulled it out last week, I could not figure out where I was up to so decided to start at the beginning of the pattern and put all those little pieces together as directed (I had knitted them on a long train journey and didn’t have the things I needed to sew it together at the time). The head (seen left of photo ) seemed way too big for the body but I proceeded anyway!

Surprisingly, it came together much better than I thought it would. I sat in the hairdresser's shop last Friday morning (20 March) waiting for mum to have her hair set and worked on the legless bear  and left home (for the wedding) last Friday with a bear that just needed some final adjustments. On Saturday, by the time we needed to have lunch and get ready for the wedding, I had got it to the point where I had to add only one more eye and some paw prints on one foot. I procrastinated on that second eye for a couple of days – I really dislike embroidering faces on knitted toys – if the eyes are wrong the whole thing is wrong! the pattern called for buttons but I don’t sew buttons on toys for two-year-old children I prayed and took courage – and it turned out much better than I’d even dared hope! I am very, very pleased with how this turned out!

The greatest compliment came when my niece said “it’s Charley Bear” and my sister came to have a look. She almost reeled in shock when she realised I had knitted it! Charley Bear is a TV character for under-fours. Here’s a clip for those not familiar with the show (I have grandsons so I’ve seen it many times).

I’m hoping to see another quilted finish and another knitted finish before next weekend! Hey, when you’re on a roll … LOL

Jacob’s Ladder goes Barn Raising

I had already begun to write this post when I found a link on Sharon’s blog, Vrooman Quilts, about the Scraptastic Tuesday party going on over at She Can Quilt blog. If there’s anything I do know, It’s scraps; so joining in sounded like fun. When you've finished reading here, why not take a few minutes to pop over and see what other people are doing with their scraps?

Over the weekend, I cut and stored all the orange scraps shown in my last post. I pressed the contents of three of those shopping bags screaming at me from under the ironing table.

For now, they are in two trays, waiting to be cut and stored.

  

Before class on Monday, I decided to sew some small scrap triangles together – my container of triangular off-cuts (from flying geese, braids and string blocks) was getting quite full.

I’m thinking I’ll make some blocks called “Cotton Reels” but don’t hold me to that!

picture from http://blog.shopmartingale.com/quilting-sewing/quiz-how-many-quilt-block-designs-have-you-made/

I began to put together the four-patches to make what I thought was the Jacob’s Ladder block in class on Monday. Traditionally, the Jacob’s Ladder block is a nine patch, consisting of five four-patch units and four HST units.

http://www.quiltivate.com/quilting_block/15-jacob-s-ladder

In Scrap Quilt Sensations, Katherine Guerrier uses a four patch block to make a Jacob’s Ladder quilt.

I didn’t think to take the book to class and my teacher and I ended up having a long discussion about how the block went together. In the end, my block is a four-patch but not the one Katherine Guerrier uses!

 

Now, I had several choices:

1. unpick the sixteen blocks I had done and make them up correctly according to Katherine Guerrier’s diagram – no way!
2. add units to my four-patches to make a traditional nine-patch JL block – maybe!
3. go with a different layout using the four-patches I had made – yes!

When ‘mistakes’ happen, what happens next comes down to two things: is the resulting quilt of an attractive design, and is my time being used wisely?

Option 3 was not only the easiest but also satisfied both my criteria. When making quilts for donation, quick and easy but effective is often a good route to take given that I spend a lot of time in preparing scraps for use in the first place. The less time I fiddle around with unpicking and re-making, the more time I have to make other items.

In lieu of a fixed design wall and tired of crawling around the floor, I decided to be inventive! I still have the flannel-backed tablecloth that used to be my design wall (hanging in front of a wardrobe/closet) at our previous house. The rivets WM had attached to insert shower curtain rings are coming adrift and it’s fast outliving its usefulness as a hanging system. But those shower curtain rings gave me an idea – my design ‘cloth’ now hangs from our bathroom shower rail. The bathroom is used infrequently by WM and I so it seemed like a great idea and WM approved (at least as a stop-gap measure)!

See how the second, third and fourth rivets are pulling away from the doubled-over-for-additional- strength fabric?

Here is my design wall in use: with the ‘barn raising’ layout of my Jacob’s Ladder quilt; possibly not traditionally but it works!

I'm letting it sit for a while before I start putting the blocks together. In the meantime, I’m using leftover four-patches and HST units to make a panel to widen the the backing fabric.

What do you do when you make a “mistake”?

• Turn it into a ‘design feature’?
• Throw it in the naughty corner?
• Toss it?
• Or resolve it in some other way?

knitting progress and the Grab Bag Challenge

As is my usual custom, I sew during the day and knit in the evenings when WM and I watch television. I also got plenty of knitting time on two train trips in late September/early October – one of nine hours to collect DD and the Grandboys for the conference; the other (of eight hours) after spending a few days with DD and the Grandboys at the house my sister had rented for two weeks for her annual vacation.

I seem to be making fairly good progress – but that’s probably because I’m knitting relatively simple and smallish things in order to use up the yarn in my 'grab bags' as well as my two tubs of sock yarn!

Socks for Someone #5, started on 1 July, were finally finished (grafted and ends sewn in) on 9 September. They are made from Moda Vera Noir “Pink Mix” using my generic sock knitting pattern for women on 2.25 (US 1) double pointed needles. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to have a photo of the finished socks.

Socks for Someone #6 were cast on 5 September and the knitting was finished 9 October. The grafting was done a few days later when I had time to do it during daylight hours. The yarn is Moda Vera Noir “Olive Mix”; pattern and needles as above. These socks were a bit on the small side so I will make the next pair slightly bigger.
 
Socks for Someone #7 were started on 10 October. I am knitting them in Moda Vera Noir, colour-way ‘Laguna’. I have not knitted this colour before and was looking forward to seeing how it knits up. Overall, it’s a lovely shade of green, more like the first photo than the second.
 

~~~~~~~~~~~
Now, on to my Grab Bag Challenge – in which I grab a pre-packaged bag of yarn, find a pattern that works with that weight and amount of yarn and knit! Each of the “grab bags” contains smallish amounts of yarns that were donated to me. My challenge is that I have to use all (or close to it) of the yarn contained in the first bag I grab. I’m not allowed to read the labels or swap for another bag unless I don't have the appropriate needles available!

The first of the Grab Bag Challenges I have to show you is a shawl I have called “Taupe Buffalo”. This is because it was knitted in Lincoln Yarn Buffalo, colour-way Taupe. The “Lincoln Yarn Company” is now defunct as far as I can tell from my internet searches. The balls  of the yarn were labelled “1 oz” – the Australian wool industry has used the metric system since 1971 so that makes the yarn more than forty years old!

I managed to get eleven repeats of the pattern from the amount of yarn I had.

The original pattern, Springtime Bandit by Kate Gagnon Osborn (Ravelry link), had only four repeats of the pattern so mine is considerably larger, a great winter shawl for an average-sized woman. I didn’t have enough yarn to finish the edging as in the original pattern. I should have done one less repeat of the body pattern but misread the instructions – then didn't feel inclined to rip out the last twelve rows! It looks okay and the unknown recipient won’t know the difference – I’m sure the fact that it’s keeping her warm will be far more important!

My next Grab Bag Challenge project was a scarf which I called “Courtelle Garden”, because the yarn consisted of 63 grams of Patons Courtelle 5ply (sport) which is 100% acrylic but quite soft. It’s a pretty colour that cried out to be knitted into a light and lacy scarf. Thepattern for the Plymouth Vizions Garden Scarf by Nancy Queen (Ravelry link) seemed right for the job given that Vizions (by Plymouth Yarn) is predominately man-made, being 68% rayon, 3% nylon and 29% linen. Below is a detail photo; the photo of the whole scarf didn’t work!
 
This was followed by two more shawls, both knitted from a now-discontinued yarn bought long ago from K-Mart: a soft DK weight blend of 70% wool and 30% nylon, called “SportsKnit”.

The first was made from two balls of neutral colours using the Hippy Hippy Shawl pattern (Ravelry link) by Gabrielle Vézina on 4mm (US 6) needles. I had intended to use all four balls of yarn but realised that I didn’t need to; the shawl was quite big enough in just two balls. If I had known that at the beginning, I would have knitted this by changing colours after every two rows. As it is, I don’t like it so I think I’ll over-dye it. What do you think?
 
The second is made from cream and gorgeous blue yarns using the Zebre Striped Shawl pattern (Ravelry link) by Brenda Lavell. Unfortunately, I forgot to switch my needles to 5mm (US 8) before starting this shawl so the fabric does not drape as much as I would like. I finished knitting this shawl while I was holidaying at Scott's Head, with my sister, mother, niece, niece’s partner, nephew, DD and the Grandboys. (I didn't take any photos because I didn’t have a camera with me and my iPad didn't have enough storage space at the time)!

With both of these shawls, I just kept knitting till I ran out of yarn! Because they are ‘donation’ shawls, they will fit someone!

The next ‘grab bag’ I drew had 3 x 100g skeins of Panda Soft Crinkles, a now-discontinued 100% acrylic 12ply (bulky) yarn.

I decided to knit the Weekend Hoodie (Ravelry link), a free pattern from Lion Brand Yarn. It’s the first time I’ve knitted a sweater in pieces in a very long time! Ah well, it’ll give me a chance to practise mattress stitching the seams and three-needle bind off on the shoulders! One thing’s for sure, it is not a weekend project unless one knits all weekend and does nothing else. I’m knitting mine child size and only completed the back during the weekend with evening and travel knitting! The front took me another three evenings! I’m obviously a slow knitter! The crinkly yarn doesn’t do much for my tension either!

That’s it for my bi-monthly report. The good thing about knitting is that I can take it anywhere with me (unlike my sewing machine). Since WM and I will be away for most of the next two weeks, it’s very likely there’ll be quite a bit of knitting happening; especially given that we will be travelling over 1600 kilometres (1000 miles) while our dearest friends, visiting my mum, then DD and Family.

Tomorrow, WM and I are off on the first leg of our vacation at three different locations around the state. We are travelling by train to Kempsey where we will be met by our dear friend and transported to their acreage near the town of Bellbrook, population 356!

I’m off to pack; I need clothes, toiletries, books, iPad, chargers and stitch-related items: knitting -- Socks for Someone #7 and Crinkles Hoodie – and my Dutch Cap Hexies (English Paper Piecing); seen in this post (scroll down).

See you in November!

scrap happy

Wow! What a busy week I’ve had. I’ve had at least one activity every day this week, which is most unusual. Next week is also busy with church tomorrow, three activities on Monday and two on Wednesday. Thank goodness I have a free day on Tuesday and on Thursday. There’s nothing in the calendar for Friday but it’s WM’s rostered day off, so who knows? I can’t remember when I was this busy!

However, you didn’t come here to talk about my calendar! You came to read about scraps.
I have been remiss in showing you what I have acquired over the last few months.

First there was a little package from Kate (Kate's quilting blog) in the UK.
 
Then a fellow member of Caring Hearts Community Quilters gave me this little ziplock bag of scraps – all nicely ironed and sorted by size. I have been through the bag searching for pink scraps so it’s been a bit messed up since I received it.
 
Then another member of Caring Hearts Community Quilters gave me a large grocery bag of scraps – these are not ironed or sorted so the contents of the bag are a mystery to me!
 
The next few are not scraps but they have been donated to me in one form or other.

Firstly, I won these two fat quarters of batik fabrics on Lyndsey's blog, Sew Many Yarns. (I’ve just embarrassed myself and found the giveaway was February 2013. Sorry Lyndsey).

One of my class-mates has been de-stashing – I acquired this lovely collection of fabrics on behalf of Caring Hearts Community Quilters. We have no room left in the fabric cupboard in our meeting room so those who receive donations of stash have to store them (or use them) until such time as space become available!
 
This week, our founder arrived with several boxes and bags of fabric that were left on her doorstep last weekend. My fellow quilters decided I would like to add these fabrics to my Caring Hearts Community Quilters stash – they know I like working with bright colours!
 
Despite my busy week, I found some time for playing with scraps. I pressed and cut these 3.5" tumbler “charms”:
  
I’m still deciding on the final layout; this is not it. Whatever I end up with, this is the first of my scraps this year to be used in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge over at So Scrappy blog.

Speaking of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge; I used up the last sixteen 6” crumb blocks in a panel which will be part of the backing for my “Violet and Friends” quilt.
 
So, although there hasn’t been time (until now – late Saturday afternoon) to take photos or write a blog post, I have had a little time to sew. It’s amazing what returning to class after a seven-week break does for one’s enthusiasm!

Linking up with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Grab Bag Challenge #1

It’s taken much longer than it should have to complete this first challenge!

I started with one solitary 20 gram ball of long-discontinued Panda Double Bubble, a boucle-style 5ply (sport weight) 100% acrylic yarn. I’m not even sure how I know it was sport weight – I must have found it on the internet somewhere because it’s not in Ravelry’s yarn database!

Logic told me to give it away; after all, what can you do with 20g of yarn? But the colour was so pretty – just right for a little girl – so the challenge was to find something useful I could knit with 20g.

I have no idea how much length there is in a 20g ball of sport-weight acrylic yarn. I know that there are between 250 and 300 metres of yarn in 100g of acrylic 8ply (DK), therefore there are about 50 to 60 metres to 20g. This is sport-weight not DK, so I figured I probably had about 70-80 metres to play with.

And here is where Ravelry shines. I opened the pattern search page, ticked the filters for acrylic, sport-weight, 70m or less, free knitting patterns (or those in my library) that had photos. From the 25 patterns shown, I found two hat patterns that I thought would work with this yarn and chose Jeffrey’s Stripey Hat by Heather Wells, simply because I liked the shape better.

Ambitiously, I cast on 120 stitches (the 3-6 months size) on 2.75mm needles (I couldn't find my 3.25mm needles).

The first obstacle came when I realised that working with that boucle yarn on small gauge needles caused a great deal of pain in my left forearm and elbow. I could only knit about 300 stitches then I had to stop! So it took several days before I realised I was running out of yarn faster than I was running out of pattern! ;-)

I ripped it all out and decided to knit the newborn size. I cast on again but my arm ached worse than ever. I wondered if the small gauge was the problem. There was only one way to find out – I needed to locate my 3.25mm needles. (That’s the problem with having guests staying – things get shoved away to make room for extra beds).

With 3.25mm needles in hand, I cast on again. Still some aches but not as bad as before. It must be the combination of the acrylic boucle yarn and the small needles - - I knit socks on 2.25mm needles and have never experienced “knitter’s elbow”!

Taking it slowly so as not to aggravate my arm further, I completed the hat in four days.

the colour in this photo is the most accurate

The hat will go into my stockpile until I hear of a charity needing hats for newborn babies.
I had more yarn leftover than I thought, so I planned to knit a pin-cushion for my own use.

After four attempts at double knitting with a single yarn, I gave up. Three times I dropped stitches and couldn’t find them in the boucle bumps. The last time I had obviously not slipped my stitches correctly because I didn’t end up with a tube I could fill! This has never happened to me before – I assume it was because I’m too tired to concentrate properly (we've had a lifestyle change and I’m now getting up three hours earlier than my natural inclination). my arm is throbbing from four hours of knitting that yarn so I’m going to cut my losses; who knows, I may pick up the yarn again some day but, if not, it will go in the bag of scraps DD uses to needle punch toys for cats at the animal adoption agency!

Time to grab a new bag and find a pattern to use up the yarn it contains!

If you’d like to join me in this challenge, grab some odd balls of yarn or some orphaned quilt blocks or fabrics that work together (you get the idea), put them in a non-see through bag, then label it on the outside with generic labels (eg 2 x 50g balls 8ply wool/nylon blend); one 12” orphaned block; three fat quarters). You want to have a general idea of what's inside, not a specific one. Seal all the bags and place them in a drawer, cupboard, basket, box or tote bag. Grab one bag at random and make something using as much of the contents as you can. No putting one bag back to grab another – the challenge is to use up what's in the bag and therefore use up items that you have had around for a while but don't quite know what to do with!

There’s no linky party for this challenge (I’ll create one if enough people are interested) but there’s a button and ‘grab code’ in my sidebar if you want to add it to your blog. You can leave a comment on this (or any other) post to invite me and others to come and see what you’ve done with the contents of your “grab bag” and I’ll put a link here on my blog which will, hopefully, drive some traffic over to your blog!

Won’t you join me? We all have miscellaneous items we keep avoiding!

finished: two blankets

On Tuesday, my friend, D., from the Blue Mountains group of the Knitters’ Guild of NSW visited to help me sew some of the donated squares into blankets. We took a while to sort squares into colour groups then to decide on a layout for our first blanket.
We worked together to turn 28 squares into one blanket. D. sews faster than me but still it took us several hours to bring one blanket almost to completion. D. very kindly took all the crocheted squares home with her so my dining table looks a little less cluttered.
During the following days, I sewed the last ten inches of seam and darned in all the ends. I have named our collaborative blanket Scarlet Diamonds – for fairly obvious reasons!

I have also finished my Winmalee Blanket, which is a variation on the Moderne Baby Blanket, from “Mason-Dixon Knitting” by Ann Shayne and Kay Gardiner. I needed mine to be much larger so reinvented the pattern for my own needs. What should have been the length of the baby blanket became the width of my single (twin) bed topper and then I recreated the same layout in mirror image.
 
The photo was taken on a dark and dreary rainy day and the colours are wrong. It’s purple not inky black and the border is a lovely bright teal. I think knitting a whole blanket in just 38 days is pretty amazing (well, it is for me anyway)!
I am linking this post up with Thank Goodness It’s Finished Friday.
It would have been good if I could have written it last week when I was hosting but it’s really good to approach the end of the month with two finishes, even if only one of them is completely my own work.
And now, with the bushfire emergency over and the need for blankets passed (even though I still have a pile of squares on the dining table), I think it’s time to turn back to my UFOs and WiPs and see if I can end the year in style with 2013: The Year of the Finished Project.

quilts that went …

On Friday, a group of ladies from Caring Hearts Community Quilters and my WM gathered at our founder’s house to photograph, fold and pack 72 quilts to go to high school students (aged 12 to18) who lost everything in the recent bushfires.

That’s our founder, second from the right.

WM was kept busy on the back patio taking photo after photo while one or two women held the quilts up for him, and the ladies inside worked tireless in sorting quilts, packing quilts, collating packed quilts, attaching missing labels, sewing in or removing hanging threads, etc.

Most of the quilts were donated, less than half were  actually made by our group. What a wonderful crafting community! I’ve put some of the quilts in these photos; I’m sure you didn’t want to see all 72!

And, just because I can, a gratuitous photo of Younger Grandson enjoying spaghetti for dinner!