Category: Olympics quilt

Notice anything?

Namely, that it’s been a solid year, and the fabric scraps and comforter still look like this:

instead of being a nice, pretty quilt on the bed. Luckily, no one who’s seen me work on projects expected faster progress, but I’ve been gearing up to get going again.

On Tuesday, I pieced together my plans, straightened out the strips, and finally started sewing again. Yesterday afternoon, I finished these!

Progress at last! Each of the squares is 5″x5″, and each strip is half an inch wide after seaming.

Before, I had been cutting each round of strips as I went. So I’d cut, sew, iron, repeat. This time, I cut all of the strips for my six squares ahead of time, and then pulled from the existing piles to do the sew/iron repeats. It feels a bit faster (though I do wish the ironing was speedier — that’s where all the time goes). Here are the 3.5″, 4″, 4.5″ and 5″ strips.

And one last parting shot of all the pretty blues next to my desk! Love that fabric!

We had sort of an eventful evening on Monday. It was a bit warmer and the wind died down, so we decided to take the kayaks out for a maiden voyage along the shores of Lake Washington. While it wasn’t that windy, the waves were still big enough to have little whitecaps, which we didn’t realize until we’d tromped the kayaks down the hill (it turns out that at 45 lbs each, they feel really heavy for my fingers — it will get better, but for the moment: oof!). As long as we paddled into the waves, it actually was pretty smooth. The boats are great, I’m happy with the paddles, and I really love the slimmer profile on the shoulders of the lifejacket. We paddled down to Kirkland Center at about a 40 degree angle out from shore, and were just turning around when Kevin caught a paddle on a wave and flipped his boat. I had a brief moment of panic before he grabbed off the spray skirt and got out — I’ve seen people freeze and be too disoriented to get out without help, and I was several boat lengths away. Luckily, he kept a cool head and got out, but then we had a kayak 2/3 full of water and a boyfriend with blue lips a few hundred feet out from shore. We didn’t have anything to use to bail the water (I wasn’t anticipating anyone getting out of their boats and filling them with water… oops. Not so plan-ahead.), and when he tried to get back in, the boat got so low in the water that we were both afraid it would sink, which would have been deeply bad for morale. So, instead, we looped the carrying ropes from the back of my boat and the front of his together, and Kevin grabbed the back of his boat and kicked to keep it straight while I paddled as hard as I could. Kevin kept his shoes on because I was really worried about extra heat loss given the water temperature. It took a brief eternity to get to shore, but we made it, the boats didn’t sink, and Kevin didn’t freeze to death. All of the stabilizer muscles between my ribs still hurt, but thankfully no lasting injuries and hopefully we’ve gotten our kayak drama out of our system. And both of us agreed that as miserable as the entire experience was, it was vastly preferable to the kayaks flying off the roof of the car as we crossed the 520 bridge.

Quite the unnecessary adventure!

(Quick aside: Kevin had his cell phone in his pocket when he landed in the drink. It was quite dead afterwards. My mom had read that someone had “cured” a soaked digital camera by putting it in a bag of uncooked rice which absorbed the moisture. Kevin gave it a shot, and the phone is back (yay!), though the LCD is a bit more psychedelic than before its swim. Worth keeping in mind in case you have similar luck with electronics and water…)

In between setting up the fishtank and falling out of kayaks, I’ve been making slow progress on the quilting. The Olympic mountains are steadily growing — I’m at about half (shown here with my graph paper chart and a thing of tape for size reference):

When I look at the real mountains from my street, their snowy tops are brilliant, there’s a dark line of contrast where the snow line ends, then they gradually get hazier and less vivid as they approach the horizon of the nearer hills. This was my attempt to mimic that with five colors, and I’m very happy with the effect so far.

I’m starting to be quite concerned about the amount of fabric left. It’s very hard to tell if it will be enough to finish, and I bought it a year ago so even if they’re still making the same prints I can’t imagine that the dye lots will be the same. Keep your fingers crossed that the remaining squares are more fabric-efficient than I am anticipating!

I made a bit of progress yesterday, but didn’t actually start knitting until well after dinner. Instead, I made progress on two projects so that I could get them folded up and out of the way before my job starts tomorrow. First, I finished redoing the sleeves of my purple cable sweater and wet-blocked it:

I know a lot of people don’t like wet-blocking wool, but I needed to widen the cable sections, so it seemed like the best option. In general, I find wet-blocking much more effective than spritzing or steaming.

Then, I finished up the sky squares of the quilt:

I’m pleased with the way they came out, but I’m not completely sewing it up yet. I think I may end up adding another row of sky squares underneath the two pure blue ones. It would be a mix of the light blues used in the blue and yellow squares plus two or three of the medium blues. I think it may make the transition work better. I’m waiting until I have more of the quilt done, though, to decide if it would work proportionally.

And finally, here’s the scarf progress:

Right now it looks a little bit Vegas, but I think that once I’m past the beads it will look more subtle. I’m pretty sure it’s just having *all* beads that’s making it so gaudy/brilliant. It looks better in daylight than it did last night.

A quick post before I head off to knitting… I spent most of the afternoon working on my quilt. The strips have been decorating the bedroom since the summer (which, if you consider it, was actually quite a while ago — how time flies, especially for interrupted craft projects). For those who no longer recall, here are links back to my inspiration and fabric, my self-designed pattern, and some early progress. I’ve spent the day listening to NPR and working on quilt squares. I’ve made it completely through the yellow — my first color to cross off! These “squares” are actually longer than they are wide, because I’ll be cutting them in half to seam to blue squares. I just have to make four long blue squares and then I’ll be done with the sky.

I happened to finish just as the light outside was turning pink, so I took the camera up the hill for a quick sunset photo. It’s not going down until 5:30! Progress!

I’m done with the all-blue squares for the sky! 🙂

I was talking to some people from knitting, and realized that they were under the impression that the squares were large. Not at all! Each stripe of the fabric is 1/2 an inch wide, and the entire square is only 5″x5″ (or at least, that was the intention… very few of the “squares” actually fit the moniker). So here’s a picture with my hand for perspective:

And finally, since it’s always fun to see the messy side, here it is (it looks surprisingly similar to the front, since each strip starts as an inch wide, so the two 1/4 inch seams fold back to present the same right-side color):

I finally got all of the fabric ironed and cut into strips a few nights ago. All of that color sitting just inside the door to the bedroom makes me happy.

Then I got on a square making kick last night, and so here’s the progress:

Aren’t they pretty? I still have yet to make a perfect 5″ square, but someday it will happen. I also noticed that sometimes I log-cabin around clockwise and sometimes it’s counter-clockwise. However, since the point of the squares is to blend the colors, not to create a pattern, I don’t think it matters so much, and I can keep quilting as the spirit moves me.

Here’s the first log cabin “square”, yay quilting:

The colors rock, yet I think something went awry on the assembling, as the end result is 4 3/4″ x 5″ instead of a solid 5-by-5. Obviously more practice is needed. 🙂 I’m in luck though, as the final square count is over 80 so by the end of this I should be an expert. I’m figuring to aim for a square a night, and hoping the assembling will move faster as I get in the groove. Meanwhile, I’m loving the 1/4″ foot that came with my sewing machine (thanks again, Mom and Dad!! — the machine was my endlessly appreciated and already highly used birthday present from last year.)

I’ll try not to post pictures of every new square. 🙂 Though: Kevin was actually amazed at the result. Mad cool. I’m used to a delay and a “huh” when it comes to crafting… 😛

After a great weekend replete with movie, beach and deck time, I settled down to “work” on Monday with the washed and ironed quilt fabrics and the mat and cutter. The circular cutter took a while to get used to. I finally figured out that I had much better control when I stopped holding it like an x-acto (hand over the top, cutter at a 45 degree angle), and starting holding it vertically with my hand on the side (rather the way you would if you were stabbing with a knife – sorry for the graphic analogy :-P). I also didn’t realize until I was 8 colors in that cutting one way is much stretchier than the other way. I get confused if it’s with the selvage or against (I don’t have my lingo down yet), but things went much quicker when I started cutting parallel to the woven edge. My fabric was pretty neatly divided between fat quarters and 1/8 of a yard cuts, and so some of the cuts won’t be long enough for the 10″ strips that I’ll need for the outer edges of the squares, but I should be able to fake something together for those.

I finished all of the blues and purples, which felt like major progress. I only have greens left to cut at this point, though I think I’m going to need more fabric – more greens, some yellow for the sky where it meets the mountains, and a different color purple – one of the colors is too yellow, and needs to be redder or else it won’t progress properly (see the half line in the picture below). I was worried about it when I bought it, but after cutting it became too clear that it was a completely different color family.

I planned to wait to post these until I made enough progress for them to look like something, but somehow this has been one of those months where the projects get started but never really wrap up. So, in the name of procrastination and a large enough apartment to get away with it, here’s the new circulation system for the tank (thanks to silicone & pvc master, Kevin):

(and somehow, those looong pvc pipes fit in the mustang. allegedly with the windows closed. wow.)

and here’s the design for the quilt-to-be:

The mountains were giving me problems (I want them to look like the view of the Olympics from my street), until I decided to turn their grid 45 degrees. It won’t be a traditional log cabin anymore, but I’ve decided I’m completely fine with that. Upon further consideration, I decided that this actually has multiple upsides. Not only are they now recognizable, but I think they really have the potential to “pop” now. I haven’t been able to figure out how to make them command the attention they should (for example, it’s dangerous to drive when the real ones are out, they’re so exceptionally mesmerizing.) The grid shift won’t completely solve this, but will certainly help draw the eye. Perhaps a good stitching pattern for quilting would solve the rest?

My books on quilting all came in at the library, and while I was picking them up, I came across one called A New Look at Log Cabin Quilts by Flavin Glover. It’s amazing. Basically, she uses a mix of log cabin blocks and techniques to make these amazing landscape quilts. I took pictures of some of the finished quilts — go find this book, it’s so fun to read:

Isn’t that awesome?? She said that you should work on a scene that inspires you and that’s meaningful. Living in Washington, I’m surrounded by them, but it wasn’t hard to choose the view across Lake Washington overlooking the Olympics and Seattle.

I don’t have any confidence that I’ll be able to even approximate her results, but I got all inspired and went to the fabric store and came home with this:

Isn’t it beautiful?? Best of all, it was all 50% off, so each color only cost $.45 for a quarter yard. My hat goes off to the Joann fabrics woman who did all the cutting — she didn’t seem put out by it at all. So now I have blue for the sky and water, purple for the mountains, green for the hill and trees in the foreground and the opposite shore’s near hills, and pinks and greys for the sun setting behind Seattle.

The picture part of the quilt is going to be about five feet square, and then I took my mother’s excellent advice and bought (cheap and nice-feeling) flat sheets to sew up for the rest of the front and the backing. I bought a light blue king size for the back and a deep blue queen size to frame the front, and here are both of them with the trim: Oooh. 🙂