On the Road

Things I have seen while driving hither and yon lately:

• Car being chased by the police with a white powder streaming out of one of its windows.  Ash tray cleaning or something more sinister? 
• Big, honking SUV with a memorial to a dead boy on its back window that included a picture, the dates of his life and 'In Memoriam", all on a clear plastic panel. It creeped me out.
• Bikes loaded on the top of a car with the bike wheels spinning in the wind.  I wonder if they had any idea that the wheels were supposed to be locked down as well.
• Big, honking pick up truck so covered in mud that the windshield wipers couldn't clean the windshield even though the window cleaning liquid was splattering the mud all over the passing cars.
• Debris in the road... bags of cement, concrete blocks, a ladder, several five gallon buckets and other construction stuff over five miles of road way.  Then a construction company truck on the side of the road with a puzzled driver trying to figure out why the truck bed was empty.  I waved at him.
• While at a stop light with the dogs in the back barking at a dog in another car.  The other car had its windows open and promptly closed them when they realised my guys were barking at their guy.  Did they think Alex was going to jump through my closed window and get their dog?

And my final one:

• People texting on their phones being physically incapable of turning on their turn signals while cruising in and out of traffic at 70+ miles an hour.  Grrrrr!

I hope your week is going well.  I am off to see the dermatologist about my spongiotta dermatitis tomorrow to see what I can do about keeping the itch away.  Please no more treatments using things with the feel of vaseline or Crisco!!!!!!!!  

Women on a Mission

A group I belong to, the Once Upon a Time Bee, is the only quilting Bee I know of that doesn't  quilt.  We sew for all sorts of charities and learn all sorts of techniques for getting these projects completed with the minimum of fuss.

Our project in May was to make ditty bags for Operation Care Package.  The bags will be filled with goodies and sent to our troops overseas.  I have heard that many of these bags make it into the hands of local kids so, even though many of the troops are manly men, more whimsical fabric choices are also acceptable.

In one evening we made about thirty of these simple draw string bags using a pattern from The Creative Thimble.  Here's how they look:

Pink Camo fabric...How cool is that?

Each bag contains a one gallon zip lock bag to protect the contents.  We also addded a calling card sized note from individual members of the Kingwood Area Quilt Guild expressing thanks and encouragment.

Most members of the Guild wrote a card and several took the instructions for making the bag.  I may end up with several more before I send them off to Joliet for distribution.

I love this kind of project as it helps to reduce stash fabrics and allows you to give back to the community. 

I will admit that I am conflicted about the whole 'supporting our troops' mentality of this type of project. 

On the one hand I hate that we, as a country, are fighting a war on terrorism against an enemy without a national identity.  This conflict is essentially un-winable as this is not a country versus country comflict.

On another hand, in the process we might be able to bring peace to a part of the world where, until recently, females of any age were not allowed out of their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. 

In addition, I have known several young men who have gone into the military and I know they will appreaciate our meager contributions to their comfort.

And then there is the young British Ranger I heard a while ago saying that it is all well and good to support the troops but to do so you must also embrace their conviction that these wars are necessary.

Unfortunately the world is not black and white and while I may be conflicted, I do hope that these bags will bring joy and comfort to someone.  After all, isn't that what charity is all about?

Canadian Socks

I finished a pair of wooly socks the other day that seem perfect of wearing under snow boots, so they are going to Canada.

You know who you are so they will not be a surprise and here is a bonus picture preview:

It seems that every other pair of socks that I knit are plain and simple and then I will do one that is a little bit more challenging.

This pair is the challenging pair.

These socks have an invisible cast on so that the top of the sock is a double thickness for durabilty.  I also tried to do a picot edge on the top of the sock and, although I did get the edge to look like a picot,  it doesn't look as interesting as I had hoped.

The yarn is from Lana Grossa and is made in Italy of virgin wool (80%) and polyamide (20%).  I though there might a problem with washing them but they came out just fine even after being put through the dryer.

I love this type of yarn as the dyed colors create such lovely patterns.  I didn't even try to match the stripe pattern from one sock to another but they came out quite close to each other... only about 10 - 15 knitted rows off....a complete surprise.

I hope your week will go well... lots of sun in the north, lots of rain in the south and may it warm up in Britain so my cousin can enjoy her new home with the windows open and the furnace off.

Yarn Twirler

No not me, my latest tool to make knitting easier for me.  My most favroite tool continues to be the Knit Kit but coming on strong is my Yarn Twirler.

Here it is in action:

A member of the Kingwood Yarn it! Darn it! group saw one at a craft fair and asked her husband to make her one.  The rest is history.

Essentially it is a dowel that goes through the center of your ball of yarn and, as you knit, your ball of yarns spins around.

It add a little bit of tension to your yarn which helps in keeping consistent tension in your project and it allows you to feed your yarn from the outside of the ball.

Truly a great tool. 

Another bonus is that Alex and the Girls are completely disinterested in my yarn when they are on this Twirler.  I don't know why but they completely ignore them.

Of course, a Yarn Twirler deserves its own bag ...

The fabric was from my stash of cute fabrics that I have no idea how I will use it and the cord is something I bought 6 - 7 years ago.  All this time I thought it was leather braided into a cord until I worked with it last night and found out it was plastic.

No more rain today... Yeah!

Here's hoping it dries out enough over night that the Dachshund meet-up tomorrow won't be in a sea of mud.  I can only hope.

Zig Zag Runner

The Cut Ups met yesterday to work on a project from the book Loose Change by Claudia Plett and Le Ann Weaver.  There are many wonderful quilts in this book that all use basic cuts of fabric.

The one we worked on was based on five inch squares of fabric to create a 30" x 12" table runner.

I have not completed mine yet (still don't know what to do about the binding) and I cheated by not adding borders but this is how it came out:

I used some of my hoarded hand dyed fabrics from Just Imagination and I like the way that the fabric seems to give additional movement to the the piece.

The Cut Ups try to do projects that are small enough to get a good chunk of the work done within a three hour period.  This project fit the bill and, thanks to Janet's prep work which included re-writing the instructions to make them more efficient, this project fit the bill perfectly.

 What took the most time was squaring up the little 4" component blocks.  When you do that 40 times, its gets a bit boring.  The thought if ding that for a full size quiltmake me cringe.

There was a complex border in the pattern, made up of flying geese rectangles, that I eliminated because I didn't want to take all that time for a basic project like this.

I hope your weekend is going well and that my local friends did not get drowned out in the thunderstorms last night.  I don't know how much rain we got but the forecast currently calls for the possibility of showers every day for the next week so I expect we will all be soggy by next weekend.

How I love the smell of soggy dog!

Surprsing Quilt Block

A dear friend in the cold north asked four of her friends to send her a yard of fabric that they loved.  I sent her a yard of a wonderful lime green fabric with silver chinese writing on it.  I have yards of it so thought it was a good choice in case she needed more it for her secret project.

I though she would try to mke a quilt for herself that incorporated our contributons.

WRONG!

She used each of our fabrics in a separate 24" block paper pieced blocks from one of Carol Doak's star patterns from books like this or or this .

Here's how mine turned out:

My color correction does not do justice to the vibrant colors of the background fabric I supplied.  Notice how the corner fabrics were fussy cut so that the lettering is oriented to the corners.

I don't know how to use this block... as the center for a quilt, for a pillow, for ???? but I do know that whatever I do with it, it will be impossible to match the skill and ability shown in the workmanship of this block.

Thanks Martha!

1 2 3 Red White Blue

After Mother's Day, the next big holidays around here are Memorial Day, Father's Day and Independence Day.  I am going to have to take down the springy decorations at the restaurant and put up something patriotic and manly so I won't have to make any more changes until after the Fourth of July.

I have decided that patriotic can also be manly so I came up with this quilt:

Alex and Kimora do not understand why they can't sleep on it!

 It is supposed to look like a rail fence pattern like this:

Mine does not have the traditional stair step pattern because the Jelly Roll I used of pre-cut 2 and 1/2" strips of fabrics had lots of blue and white but very few red strips. 

Lesson learned - do not assume a nice even distirbution of colors or values just because you bought a jelly roll of fabric strips from one whole line of fabric.

The line of fabric represented here is the Hamptons from Moda Fabrics.

After I quilted it I thought it needed a little more security so I added the red buttons. 

Lots of red buttons, few red fabric strips.

Other decorating will be some of those red, white and blue fabric swags, some similar flowers and, maybe, a couple of suprises.

Sorry that I haven't been keeping up this blog recently. 

I'll try better.

Happy Cinco De Mayo!

Cold Floor Socks

The weather is beginning to get warm here so the A/C will soon be working overtime. 

One of the A/C friendly things about this house is that most of the ground floor floors are ceramic tile.  Although I may not like the color too much, it does help to keep the temperatures down by being cool to cold all season long.

In the winter that doesn't bother me as the floors do seem to warm up but in the summer they are down right frigid.  All that cold air pooling on the floor may make the rest of the room delightful but my feet end up freezing.

I mentioned a few posts ago that I wanted to try my hand at another pair of DK weight socks and these are what I came up with:

Pretty Colorful, yes?

The yarn is Plymouth Yarns Dream Baby DK Yarn.  It is all acrylic/nylon and has a very soft hand.  The colors are wonderful... sort of like a fiesta for the feet.

The spiral pattern created by the color changes was an unexpected bonus.

Cold floors?  Bring them on!

Coiling

This past Saturday the Saturday Strippers met to experiment with sewing baskets.

Yep, sewing not weaving.

The process if pretty basic... take some clothesline, cover it in fabric, coil the result and zig zag it together.

Pretty straight forward HOWEVER there were five of us working on this and all of us ended up with a different take on how to do the actual covering and sewing together.

Check out these two bowls:

Both of these were created by covering the clothesline with 2  1/2" strips of fabirc by folding the fabric over the rope.  In the bowl on the left all the raw edges were left exposed while the bowl on the right (mine) folded the raw edges so that they were enclosed.

These coasters were created two differents ways.

The two on the left and bottom were made by wrapping narrow strips of fabric (about 1/2 - 3/4" wide), on an angle around the rope so that the raw edges were exposed.  The one on the upper right was made by sewing 1 1/4" strips of fabric onto the rope, the seam trimmed, then the closely covered rope coiled and sewn down. 

Similar looks but different processes.

This one was made in a beautifully controlled manner.

2 1/2" strips of fabric were first pressed the long way with right sides together.  Then raw edges were folded into the iddle and pressed again.  Then the cord placed into this little packet and sewn down.  Then the whole strip was coiled and sewn into this mat.  It will eventually become a basket/bowl.

So there you have it.

Five people, five variations, five great results.

If you are intrigued by this process, here are a few links that you might find useful:

http://www.craftstylish.com/item/33825/how-to-sew-a-fabric-bowl/page/all

http://www.hgtv.com/crafting/coiled-fabric-bowl/pictures/index.html

Also, here is the link to my first attempt at this process using the Bali Bags pattern which yielded a very different result.

What a great way to use up some left over bits of fabric and to get a usuable result.

Have a good week!

Are You Sure This Is Not Going To Hurt?