Author: Susan

Roundabout

Here’s a late-night photo of the beginning of the quilting.

I love the way the rings are turning out. I had to run out and buy a compass to build my circle templates, and this is as far as I could get with it (it has a max diameter of 13 inches). I’m thinking I should be able to eke out a few more with a longer pencil, and then I’ll start using a string/pen homemade system. Each circle’s radius is an inch greater than the previous one. The sewing went very smoothly, except for the tiniest circle (the size of a quarter) – I just can’t turn the fabrics quickly or smoothly enough to make it circular. I keep ending up with misshapen ovals. I’m going to need to practice until I can manage a better version, I think.

This was my first time using a fabric pen – rather a success. I found a purple one that has disappearing ink. The package said it would disappear within 48 hours, but my experience has been more like 10 min to 2 hours, depending on the weight of the line I drew. It’s hard to consistently trace the stencils hard enough to get a heavy line that lasts. Instead, I started tracing a circle or two at a time and then sewing it before it disappeared. Not entirely efficient, but the end result is great.

A bit more coordinated

Since I finished my Olympic Mountain comforter a year and a half ago, I’ve been meaning to use the extra fabric left over from the trim to make a matching bed skirt. For a while we had a ruffled white lace thing, but it did not look nice with the dark quilt and wood bed, so we’ve just had a bare box spring. Not the most attractive option.

The sewing for the bed skirt was not hard (straight seams, cotton fabric), but there have been a slew of delays. First I didn’t actually have enough of my patterned fabric (amazingly, three years later Joann’s still had it in stock!), then I was dragging my feet on measuring and cutting the pieces. On the whole, I’m good at designing things to fit a space or an object, but when the measurement is larger than my arm-span, I always seem to get a bit off. Luckily, a bedskirt does not demand the same precision of measurement that trim does (and this one doesn’t even require perfectly parallel lines, since the skirt bottom is going to be tucked behind the base of our bed frame), so once I finally got started last week the project moved pretty quickly. The biggest issue was actually just that I’m getting ponderous enough that doing all of the measuring out, pinning, etc. on the floor was harder than it would have been normally. I made three long panels (one each for the two sides of the boxspring, and one for the base), and four squares to wrap the corners. I still have my bed sheets from college, though the twin extra long isn’t a useful size, so I used one flat sheet for lining the panels and the other for the piece that lies between the box spring and the mattress.

Here’s the empty box spring after we’d removed the mattress and bedding:

And here it is with the new bedskirt in place:

And the made-up bed in the morning:

It looks so much more polished, and it’s a great long-term item to finally have off the list.

Quilt sandwich

I basted the baby blanket this morning, and I’m so happy with the medium blue/turquoise bali fabric that I found for the back.

The quilt front came out to what seems to be a perfect 36″ square, without any trimming. I cut the batting and backing about an inch and a half bigger in case pinning it out revealed some sort of stretch or slant, but now I just have a neat border to trim once I’m done quilting. I was having trouble settling on a quilting pattern that felt right, but I’ve come up with a concentric circles plan that I really like. Can’t wait to see how it works out. I found a fabric pen to mark out the lines (a bigger achievement than it sounds at first glance – there are so many different options), so that’s on the docket for later this afternoon. We’re going to see Up for a Father-to-be Day evening out, so I’m curious to see how much I can get done around that.

New footwear

On the bright side, pretty new shoes, and they were even on sale!

On the flip side (no pun intended), it’s a good thing that I like them so much because they’re my only option right now. In the last week or so, the foot swelling has graduated from occasional to constant. There are about two months left (this was week 32), so at least they can pass for pretty summer shoes instead of a desperate pregnancy choice. 🙂

And NOW it’s summer

Our first CSA bag of the season came today!

Like last year, the first bag is on the small side, but it was still very fun to unpack. They included a bag of lavender – I’m torn whether to try some of the lavender recipes that they included or just dry it and make more of the great hot/cold bags with it. The strawberries and cherries are great, we have tons of apriums (one of the reasons we chose this CSA over others is that they grow a lot of stone fruit and hybrids), and we pretty much finished the lemon basil last night. (Yum.)

A question for you: do you have any recipes/strategies for radishes? They included a pesto recipe for the greens which looks like the plan for tonight, but I’m at a bit of a loss when it comes to the radish itself.

Progress!

The quilt top is done for the Bento Box baby blanket!

I’m wishing that I’d used a little bit more of the medium blue, but I think that once the blue binding is on, that will do the trick. I’m still wavering whether to use the fabric I have for the back or to see if I can find a coordinating Bali print, and I don’t have great ideas on how to quilt it, though the size (36″ square) will make the quilting so much more manageable than the daybed quilt was.

Here’s a close-up on one of the corner squares:

Several of the fabrics are the remnants from my Olympic mountains log cabin quilt (that lives on our bed), and it makes me happy to see them in this context.

Newborn sweater

Here’s the beginnings of a new sweater – the last one I’m planning to make before the kiddo is born. (Two more endless months still left, but at a 7 st/in gauge, the sweater has the potential to take all of it.)

(I’m working sideways, so the button band is down, the neck is to the left, and I’m knitting across the chest towards the left sleeve.) The pattern calls for garter stitch throughout, but after trying that for a few rows, I decided that such tiny stitches deserve at least some stockinette. Now I’m thinking that I’ll do this yellow stockinette/blue garter stripe pattern for the front and sleeves, and use garter on the back? It’s quickly becoming the indecisive sweater.

Favourite baby sweater

I’ve barely posted about this project at all, which is such a pity because I’ve loved working on it. I started about a week before we left for PA, then continued working throughout the trip, and finished the hat and bootees once we got home. The pattern is cute, but the part that pleased me the most was how wonderful the yarn is. It’s a bamboo blend, machine-washable, and so very soft and drapey. It just feels snuggly.

The back is simple, too – there’s something to be said about a pattern like this that just works the way it’s written and comes together well.

So now it’s off to go live in the cabinet with the pile of other baby things for a few more months.

Flower help?

10 points to anyone who can tell me the name of this flower:

They’re big (a good 8-10 inches across), and the name has been on the tip of my tongue for weeks now. Whatever they are, they’re beautiful. The blooms are far too heavy for the stalks, so they tend to drape themselves languorously over the nearby azaleas, and in some cases just rest their heads directly on the driveway.

Sensational, showy things, and such a pretty color.

Quick sewing

The bento box quilt top is coming together so quickly, which is nice because I seem to be getting so sleepy again in the evenings and haven’t had that much time to work on it. I have the right panel finished (shown here on the chair), and am getting closer on the two remaining panels.

I needed to rip and redo some of my seams so that the blocks would all make nice points (it seems that even with my ¼” foot, I still managed to get pretty far off on some of those seam allowances), but it’s gratifying to have such a fast, pretty project.