Category: quilting

Finally, something for the blog

There’s so much going on here (hint: a house!), but I’m feeling leery about jinxing it and a bit reticent about posting all of the details for the world to see, so blogging has suffered. If we get past the inspection details, and financing, then I’ll definitely start posting more frequently (endlessly?) about choosing appliances and little home projects. But as much as I’ve been scheming, I’m trying not to be too public just yet, lest it all disappears.

So, between THAT excitement, and a big crunch at work, and a secret gift knitting project, I’ve had nothing particularly bloggable. Kevin’s been taking a game development certificate at UW for the last year (it ends tomorrow night), and had a ton of work left for his final project, and I was feeling overwhelmed with too many new concepts and half-way-along research (insulation, and slabjacking, and kitchen renovations, and energy efficient appliances, and curtains, and garage storage systems, and carpet, and utility sinks to name about a tenth of the topics I keep getting waylaid by). So, I decided to take the day and make progress on the quilt.

As you may remember, I had almost finished the near-shore land, and the lake (4 squares remain of 32), when I realized that I’d made all 28 squares of my yellow and blue sky four strips too small.

Since I’d sewn the squares together already, I not only needed to add the extra strips, but first had to rip out all of the seams holding the squares together. And since these were my first squares, and my piecing was pretty wobbly, most of them were a fair bit under 5”x5”, so I’d actually put multiple seams between squares in hopes that it would make the quilt less rippable. So, yesterday, away I went with the seam ripper:

I’d finished the blue and was really getting going with the yellow, when I realized that I’ve never liked that blue to yellow transition, nor the two half-blocks sewn together, and so I should take this as an opportunity to fix things. So, I started eight yellow squares from scratch:

And before I knew it, the daylight was almost gone (especially now that the sun is setting at 8 pm! So sad.), and I had eight full yellow squares. I spent the rest of the evening working on the 16 blue squares – even with only one round left, all of that matching and sewing and pressing eats up time. But now I’m so happy with it.

The best part is that the yellow is so much smoother now. The first version, with its half squares, didn’t allow for long vertical strips, and so the long horizontal strips got lost in the busyness.
I also have a new plan for the yellow-to-blue transition. Hopefully it will work, and I can show you in a few days. (You can see the beginnings of blue encroaching in half of the yellow squares…)

Handmade, for us.

Lynn, of Scott and Lynn (the same long-time family friends who invited us to the Red Sox game!), made us a wedding quilt. It’s truly gorgeous.

Here it is on the futon: the colors couldn’t be prettier or richer, and it just glows there. I can’t wait until it gets greyer (not something I say often), because if it looks this cheering in August, it will be cozy and amazing in December.

Here’s the back:

I love that stripe of color.

And the front:

And a medley so that you can see some of the fabrics close up, not to mention the quilting!

Isn’t she talented? I can’t even imagine how much work this was — it’s gorgeous.

And there’s the lake

My nice healthy state of denial about losing the house is occasionally chipping, and there’s no Harry Potter to distract me like yesterday, and so it’s been an out of sorts kind of day.

A major bright side is that I finally went through and tallied all of the quilt squares I need to make larger, and the damage isn’t as bad as I thought. I’ve already fixed the 7 green squares. On Friday, I cut the strips for the fifteen lake squares, and today I finished sewing them. I have four more mixed green/blue squares, and then the bottom portion of the quilt will be ready to sew together!

So next up on the fixing bandwagon are the pale blue and yellow sky squares. These will be a project, since they’re already all seamed together. There are 28 squares — five short of what’ I’ve completed so far. Those 28 squares need to be seam-ripped apart, I need to cut 4 new strips for each, and then sew the strips on and re-seam. I keep going back and forth on how daunting I find that work. It’s probably about 5 nights worth?

The good news is that the mountains are already big! Those are the ones I was dreading, since I was already running out of two of the purples, and there’s no way I could have finished if I also had to make existing squares larger. I remember vague angst about needing to rethink some part of the design as the reason I’d stopped sewing last summer, but I’d blocked out exactly what had happened to make me feel like this project was hopeless. I’m guessing that the size of the already-completed squares took the prize.

I’ve updated the sidebar to show the resizing status. (The dark blue and green squares are already counted as finished, given this weekend’s work.) Jobs like this are easier when you can appreciate your progress.

Regrouping

This week has been so exciting because we put in an offer on a house we loved, and have been counter-offering for the last few days like mad. And then, this afternoon, someone put in a full-price offer and we lost it. 🙁 Madly disappointing. 🙁 We’re sad.

To balance out the second guessing, here are more quilt squares:

I’ve “biggened up” 7 more squares, bringing the full sized tally to 13, and the still-little tally to 48. I’m excited because I haven’t been clear that the “landscape” quilt design would work, but seeing the squares so far convinces me. How cool. I guess an upside of losing the house is that it’s more incentive to work on the quilt?? Seems like a stretch. We wanted the house.
:-/ Eee. I’ll be more positive tomorrow.

A muddle of Thursday things

We (and the Brown dinner crowd) just got back from the Harry Potter movie. The IMAX at the pacific science center hosted a “wells and spells” viewing — a ticket got you into the science museum and movie, plus a(n adult) drink, they had snacks, and lots of attention to theme. I was very impressed at how many people showed up in hogwarts attire, including an extremely convincing snape. It made me wish I had a Weasley sweater, or at least a house scarf, at the ready. 🙂 And I call myself a knitter…

The movie itself annoyed me, but then again I never like movies based on books. Since I’d just reread 5 last weekend, I was particularly galled. That said, Luna was great, and the I’m fascinated (in a sort of horrified way due to Umbridge’s outfits) how long it takes until the knit patterns based on the movie start appearing. I feel like they were catering to the knitters, in a way — so many different sweaters, scarves, vests, dresses, and ponchos. It was also fun to get to wear the 3D glasses for a portion — I think it added a lot.

And then we got home, and I was confronted, again, with a major disappointment of today:

Apparently Kevin’s fancy camera was on some secret setting that makes everything glow in space — the room was pretty dim, and I don’t know why it didn’t turn out. So, do you see the problem?

Here, try again with a (this time very dark and deep) picture taken by my camera:

The six new squares are bigger than the others. These are the first squares I’ve done in color pattern for the quilt (except for the purple/mountains, and I stopped a year ago on those because something had gone all wrong and I blocked out exactly what). I was trying to follow my pattern last night, and the things were way too big — I was already up to the 5″ strip, which is the largest, on the 16th block of the square, but each square should have 21 blocks. So I held the squares up to the ones I’ve already done, and they were exactly the same size, but missing five pieces. It took me ages, I kept recounting and remeasuring, but eventually I realized that all 55 squares I’ve done so far (including the 32 that I’ve already sewed together into a large block of sky) are all too small by four blocks (an inch of height and width). I’ve been ending up with 5×5 inch blocks, and I needed 6×6 blocks.

Once I made the first few, I just kept following the pattern.

This is demoralizing. I’ve been really excited by my piecing progress recently, and now I have tons more fabric to cut, strips to sew, blocks to iron, and before I can do most of it, I have to remove many, many yards of teensy machine-sewed seems. A major bummer. We’re thinking of moving (a house?), and I need to have this done before we leave because it’s a representation of where we live now (and the first place we’ve lived together). It’s so important to me to “seal” its importance by seeing it here before we go. I’m already regrouping, but when I first realized the mistake, it was a blow.

On a much brighter and happier note, here are the flowers that Kevin brought home for my birthday!

I had a long and self-pitying post about how much I liked being 25 and why I wasn’t ready to move on, but I scrapped it in favour of pretty closeup flower shots. 🙂 Here’s the red:

Seven!

Kevin and I cleaned all afternoon (the tub! the fishtank! the cabinet under the sink, even.) and then ordered pizza and retreated to our relative computers. He was deleting unloved music when I last checked in, and I finally caught up on the last few days of npr, and worked on the green squares for the quilt.

My computer desk is tucked into a little nook, facing a matching bookshelf that stores all of my craft things (thank you, Target), and because of the flat panel monitor (thanks yet again, Mom and Dad!), it’s easy to put the sewing machine (also Mom and Dad) on the desk without displacing any computer parts. I have a file cabinet a few feet away, with an iron pad on top, on which I iron the pieces as I work.

With my new system of cutting all of the strips ahead of time, things are moving much more quickly. Opening the seams and ironing is the slowest and most annoying part (especially since the steam compounds the summer heat…), but I always enjoy setting back down with my newer, bigger squares, and running the next round of strip selection. It’s not a scientific process — I try to place a medium tone strip against a light or dark, and a light or dark against a medium, and whenever possible, I try not to repeat strips within a square. Usually, when I finish and take a photo, I see two identical strips in the same round somewhere in the batch, but I’m relying strongly on serendipity, and unless my seams are too crooked (I seem to have a lot of trouble with the smallest strips going off kilter under the presser foot), I don’t rip strips out.

Sorry for the flash, and the ghastly color on the far left (in person, it’s a mottled lime green backing with ivory leaves. This picture looks like the skin of the mermaids in Harry Potter.), but here’s the fabric lineup waiting to be applied to the newly-ironed squares.

Each square takes 17 strips and (hopefully) ends up 5″X5″. These green squares are for the extreme foreground of the quilt and are meant to be a hodgepodge — they represent the landscaping, trees, bit of road, etc, that make up the area in front of the lake.

I can’t wait till I’m done and can see if the effect works and show you exactly what I mean. I was so happy to find fabric patterns that were more or less green, but also included red (for all of the shrubs that are red for 3/4s of the year), and yellow and blue (for the construction and streets). We live in a relatively urban environment. I want this quilt to represent the view of the Olympic Mountains and Lake Washington from our street. And while I block out most of the foreground in appreciating those, I want the serenity of the lake and mountains to clash a bit with the jangled suburbs in the foreground. Again, I can’t wait to see if it works.

Things that are green

1. New strips for the bushes and trees in the quilt!

I was cutting at the kitchen table — one of the coolest spots in the house, since it’s on the first floor, all the blinds were closed, and I got the few fragments of breeze from the fan that made it past the fishtank. (We really should buy another fan at some point.) After sunset, I had to give in and turn on a light to read the markings on the ruler, but in all it wasn’t a bad way to take my mind off the heat. (Good thing the fabric wasn’t red or orange!)

2. The second batch of beans!

I really need to stake the plant, since it’s gotten very floppy and top-heavy as it’s grown, but in the meantime it seems to keep spitting out plants unperturbed.

P.S. The fish made it through the heat wave without issue. The tank got up to 83.4 degrees or so, but Kevin’s ice cubes and ministrations throughout the day seem to have done the trick, and when I approached the tank to take a picture, all of the dudes, including the shrimp, came clamoring over to the glass to be fed. A very good sign.

Sorry for the florescent, flash-marred picture. It’s really hard to take good pictures when the white tank lights are off. First thing in the morning, we turned off all of the refugium lights and the white lights on the main tank, leaving only the blue main tank lights for the day. It was an attempt to avoid as much heat as possible without stressing out the fish and corals too much. As a result, everything glows (think bright colors under a black light). Pretty in person, but tricky for photos!

The original forecasts for today were for a second day in the upper nineties, but luckily, cold wind blew through overnight and the morning was quite cloudy, so we were given a reprieve. 🙂

Restarting old projects

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!

Half the Mountains

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!