Category: quilting

Progress

Tonight was the most complicated portion of the sewing: binding the mountains to the sky with a differentiator strip of blue between.

The mountains and the sky are 45 degrees off of each others’ axis, so it took a little bit of effort to make everything look the way it seemed that it should. I pinned the sky on top of the mountains, and then sewed left to right, adding the blue strips along the way. This picture should give you a good sense of the scale of the project (look at the needle).

Once that was done, I sewed the hills (and attached lakes and trees) on over the mountain base.

SO CLOSE!

Meanwhile, Kevin’s been drywalling like a madman, and has made it through the third coat of joint compound. It looks amazing.

It’s been becoming increasingly clear that we won’t make it through priming, let along painting, before his family arrives tomorrow but the room is at least cleared out of all construction scraps and relatively clean. (Some awesome guy saw our Craigslist ad and bought (aka carted away) the leftover pieces and paid us $25. We were pretty psyched. And, all of the tools in the foreground have been moved to shelves in the garage – a pretty major improvement.)

Too close for comfort

I am so, so close on the quilt, but this last part looks to be the most difficult. The white snow caps of the mountains don’t contrast well against the yellow horizon of the sky, so I’m inserting a small dark blue band between them. I’ve taken a bunch of inch wide strips and ironed a seam into them so that the new strips can just appear between the white and yellow. I pinned them together (and repinned, and repinned – it’s hard to get the 45 degrees off grids to match up correctly). Here’s the preliminary view.

Next, I have to insert these ½ inch wide little stubs for contrast, while sewing the two big parts together. Very fidgety, and not a little intimidating.

Peer Pressure

I’ve been really impressed with our neighbours so far. They seem to religiously clean the storm drains, brought some really cute kids around trick-or-treating, and are pretty industrious with the yardwork on the weekends. We came home a few days ago to a package on the front porch – someone started a holiday gift-giving chain letter. You discover a package of candy on your doorstep, with a sign that says “Ho Ho” and instructions to make two new signs, bake or amass treats, and put them on the doorstep of someone else on the block in the interest of “cheer and goodwill”. Once you’ve participated, you put the HoHo sign on your door so that people don’t regift you. Well, one day became two and Kevin and I became more and more stressed. (Usually, the words “chain letter” have no power over me. Apparently this whole “neighbourhood” concept is a brand new beast.) Our package had a slew of chocolates meant to be melted in coffee, plus a mini-stash of Halloween candy (a foil-covered chocolate eyeball, a butterfinger, some smarties…). Our kind of people, but still.

So, Kevin went to the drugstore to buy chocolate in pretty boxes, and I hauled the old calendars out of their niche in the closet, and made these.

Chainletters or whatever, I think they’re all sorts of pretty. The calendar was a collection of paintings by Alfredo Arreguin. The pictures I chopped for the yellow page were a jungle scene, so there are plenty of monkeys, toucans, and leopards. The violet page has salmon leaping through lots of spray.

And, I finished the squares! Here’s a way-too-blue photo of the new triangles after I cut them.

I decided that I needed one more purple square, plus more yellow (luckily I have the old yellow castaways) before I’m done with what I need for the sky-mountain join.

Motivated

Kevin’s family is coming to see us for Christmas (I’m sure this isn’t the first time that I’ve mentioned this) and we are busy bees trying to get things polished for their arrival. It’s such a gift – not only do we not have to be the ones to fly and endure the jetlag (I’m not an early riser in the best of circumstances, and that west-to-east transition is always even harder when 10:00 EST on a weekend is considered “sleeping in”), but we get to show off the new house, wedding gifts, and projects. And, best of all, we actually get to host a holiday. I’m delighted. Each year out here, we’ve gotten a tree and then made the call whether it would burn the place down during our week out east. This year, it’s the real deal. So exciting.

That said, we have a project or two left to finish before they arrive. No surprise. Procrastinator heaven.

So, Kevin’s been drywalling like a champ. Here he is midway through the first round of joint compound.

Two rounds to go and then we can start priming.

And I’ve been trying to get reengaged with my quilt. I was making great, rapid progress and then we put in the offer on our house and everything ground to a halt about a week before we closed. Now that Kevin’s family is coming, the finished quilt is actually quite important. We have three twin-sized warm covers (a comforter and two quilts), which will work well for me and Kevin (on the daybed and trundle in my office), and his sister on either the blowup mattress, one of the couches, or the futon. But if we take those covers, there’s no warm cover for our queen bed unless I finish up.

No pressure.

You may remember that I’d sewn the mountain squares into diagonal strips, charted out the three final multicolor squares, and bought new fabric for the mountain base. It took a long time to reconstruct the progress two months later.

Once I was ready to sew again, I made it partway through the last three solid squares. (I’ll cut them in half and use the triangles to form a straight bottom edge.)

Mountains

As I had feared, I totally ran out of material for the mountains.
When I first bought fabric, I chose an eighth or a quarter of a yard for just about everything. For things like the sky or the yellow, where I had at least 10 fabrics, this produced copious extra strips. However, where the mountains take up about a fifth of the quilt and I only had five fabrics, it wasn’t even close. Even worse, about two thirds of the mountains should have been the base batik, but I only bought an eighth of a yard of it. By the time I realized my mistake, the print was long gone.

So, I spent an evening carefully charting out strips to maximize each color, and then I had to go shopping for more. My first find was the one in the middle – bluer than the mountains, but under the florescent lights in the store, it looked feasible. On the way to the checkout from the cutting counter, I came across the print on the left. The stripes really weren’t ideal, but it had more brown tones, which worked better with both the existing batik, and the green/teal foothills.

When I left the store and saw the prints in daylight, both seemed like imperfect matches, so I went to a (more expensive) store that tends to have great batiks. There, I found the fabric on the right. It has the full range of dark purples, but is mostly a pink/brown/mauve, which actually works very well in the dark-to-light progression of the mountains, and the foothills really pop against it.

Such a relief!

Foothills

Finally, a stage of the quilt that just zooms by! Visible at the far shore of Lake Washington are the hills of Seattle (from left/south to right/north: Capitol Hill, Queen Anne, the University district). For this section, I used the same dark greens from the pine trees, plus several new teals. The result is quite vibrant from close range, but uniform from a few feet away, which was the goal. The opposite shore should be relatively monochrome, due to the distance.

The most challenging portion of this section was that none of the “squares” are actually square. Easier shapes were just short, squat rectangles, while others had “hills” growing out of the top. I mapped out the shapes on graph paper and colored in each strip as I sewed, but it was still a bit trying to keep track of each of the different shapes as I worked. Slow!

Here are all eight squares laid out along the top of the stairs.

Finally unstuck

After about a zillion redos, I finally finished my pine trees for the quilt! It was late when I finished, but I stayed up a little longer so that I could sew the lake and land pieces together.

I think they turned out so well, and the colors are so cheerful even in the dark grey light we had this morning. I ended up keeping the trees exactly as they were, but replacing the water strips with light and medium tones, so that the dark greens didn’t bleed into dark blues. The tree/water divisions are much easier to see now then they were.

Also, I only had to change two of the squares — the upper right and lower left tree piece. It took a few attempts to make those two squares work, since it’s easy to go too far and make the water too light, which was distracting. Once the top piece was in place, the two middle squares actually looked fine as they were.

Here’s a closeup:

Once I took the photo, I realized that there’s still one fix to make: I’m going to rip out the dark blue strip in the top row at the far right, and replace it with a medium tone. Otherwise, it would be too dark to contrast properly against the dark blue-greens of the opposite shore. 🙂 But that’s a very tiny change — mostly it just feels so good to have that bottom half all stitched together at last!

PS. I’m on my last spool of thread — I’m so curious to see if it’s enough to finish.

Sorry that it’s been so long

Oh, man, I’m far behind. I got lulled by my lack of bloggable photos and didn’t post, and now all sorts of interesting things have happened: the start of (fantasy) football and the related knitting, the back deck gardening success, the baby born (and sweater, etc. revealed, finally), the quilt progress and regression…

Usually I cope with lack of posting by just putting up five posts in a night (RSS feeds be damned), but for some reason this all feels intermingled, so this will be the longest post ever. Sorry?

So first of all, I went to the Farmers’ market a week ago Saturday. My intention was to pick up flowers, peaches and veggies (all of which were accomplished with the typical farmers’ market glee), but there were a few fun additions. I ran into Pam from my knitting group at the skirt stall, fun. And then after I was done shopping, I returned to the booth and bought one! (My Christmas stocking had a bit of fun money in it, and though we’re a full ¾ of the year later, I found something great to use it on. 🙂 Nice! )

Here are the farmers market flowers with the front of Isabella. I’ve finally made it to the lace – the knitting is so, so much more interesting now. I’ve made quite a few more rows since this photo and they’ve just flown by. All of the football in the last week hasn’t hurt the progress!

The plants on the back deck have been entertaining. The tomatoes are going strong. I’ve picked five so far, and there are at least 10 more in various stages of ripening waiting in the wings. The beans keep appearing – every time I give up and expect the end, I see 7 more waiting to be picked. No complaints! Best snack ever.

The strawberries just started blooming again a few weeks ago, and the fruits are closer and closer to being ripe to pick. And, exciting to me, the poor pepper plant that got overrun by the beans, is actually making peppers regardless. How cool!! Definitely runty and late, but I’m just delighted by every sign of progress.

And finally, I’ve been working on the pine trees for the quilt. They’ve been weighing on me ( a classic case of unexecutable vision), and I finally charted and started to construct them last weekend. Here’s the result about a third of the way in…

Since then I’ve been finishing and ripping back squares without quite finishing anything. I LOVE the deep-dark pine tree colors up close, but against the lake and land business, they don’t really work. I’m struggling to come up with a reasonable solution… so far I’ve tried improving the tree/water contrast (helps, but not enough). Next up is mixing in more medium greens to go with the darks. I may have to switch to mountains and hills and then return to this – I love the squares but they just don’t fit the quilt.
I meant to write about the baby knitting as part of my catch-all post, but then realized that it would be easier to have my pattern notes separate. So, to be carried on in a later post… 🙂

Labour Day update

So first of all, we’re having the neatest thunderstorm. Kevin watched the lightning as it came in from the north, and about 20 minutes later we had *actual thunder* that’s continued to rumble, as the rain continued to pour, for about the last hour.

I am a happy camper. There’s nothing like real weather.

It’s been a bit of an odd weekend. All of a sudden, twilight is happening at 7:20pm, instead of 9+ pm, and that’s thrown everyone for a loop. I can’t figure out how it keeps getting dark so early – I feel like the sunset has dipped 90 minutes in about a week and a half, which doesn’t seem rational. And the air has been cold, especially overnight, and smells like fall, which is sort of daunting. Add that to the house–closing date of October 12th, and you just want to unpack the sweaters and eat cheese, pasta, and wine and skip to fall colors. I’m not ready for full-out fall, especially the grey, but it’s better that this slow unwinding.

I made a ton of progress on the quilt. Not only are all of the transition squares done, but I sewed the sky together. Here are crummy photos with the flash of the front (with toes for scale — like the flipflop tan??):

And back:

Next up is those last four squares of lake/majestic-pines. I have them charted out, it’s just a matter of mustering the concentration – they’re complicated.
And then the hills (U-district, queen anne), and the last bits of the Olympic Mountains, and then the comforter and I will be in business. 🙂

PS. We’re having constant spider problems. They’re everywhere. (Typical, unfortunately, for late summer and fall.)

This guy, though, takes the cake. He’s enormous, and built a 2′ wide web, on an angle, over our porch light (which granted, does get a lot of bugs. I was creeped out. Kevin took photos.

Ugh.

More skygazing

I didn’t make quite as much progress on the quilt as I was hoping (10 strips out of 21), but it was still an neat evening, thanks to the eclipse. Kevin got out his tripod and new fancy lens, and got some amazing photos. (He was up anyway, working on his final project for the game development certificate he’s been working on at UW for the past year.)

Here’s the sequence between 1:42 am and 3:00 am:

Neat, huh? Click on the images for the big versions — I was so impressed at the detail that he managed.

And here are the bits of sky transition squares, in the morning sunlight:

I’m feeling very hopeful that these are going to end up working out. My vision is still a bit hazy, and this example photo isn’t perfect, but I want that late-afternoon golden look that just makes the lake shine out and the mountains pop: