Long Weekend

I've been thinking about posting for a long time, really. And then yesterday I looked at my blog and realized really how loooooong it had been.

Chalk it up to a busy busy summer and lack of motivation. I finished my studies officially at the end of June, and now officially am unemployed as a teacher. However, I continue to work at camp and at the computer company (part-time). Camp has been fairly good, busy as usual, different from other summers, overall good.

This weekend, being the long weekend, gave us an extra day off... starting camp Monday at 1:30 rather than Sunday at 1:30. So so so very nice to have an extra day. Saturday I took off from computers and went shopping and ran some errands, did some sewing. I looked all over for dinosaur fabric and didn't end up finding any anywhere, so ended up getting some other fabric that I already had a bit of. Worked on another baby quilt in the evening. Would post some pictures but they're on my memory stick and it's downstairs and it's too much effort to go down there and get it. :) After fabric shopping I went to the mall and ended up getting a grey polka dot tank top from Old Navy and a flashy dress from Forever 21.

And now it's back to camp for another week.

Striving Higher

For this past Christmas, I finished two quilts to give as presents. The first one ended up being a pinwheel design I blogged here, here, and finished here. The other one I talked about here, but never put up any photos of when it was finished.

My original idea for both of these quilts was from the little zig zag quilt in this post from the blog a Stitch in Dye. But, as you can see, neither of the two quilts I made ended up looking anything like it.

The second quilt I originally planned to craft from white and orange and brown patterns and solids in cotton. However, I found that it was nearly impossible to find a variety of prints that matched in those colours, in fact, it was very near impossible to find any prints in those colours. I had a few in my stash, but not nearly enough to make a whole quilt out of.

One day whilst I was at Fabricland on another mission, I stumbled across two matching shiny home decor fabrics in different shades of orange. And, they were on sale. I wasn't too sure about the content of the fibre (and still am not sure exactly what it is... satin, nylon? Something a little plastic-y, but not scratchy). They were stiffer than what I was hoping for, but I figured they'd make an okay quilt, seeing how they were home decor fabrics to begin with.
The shiny orange fabric was quite nice on both sides, reversing to an opposite design on their reverse sides, so I knew I would be able to use the two fabrics as if they were four.

I can't remember how much fabric I bought, but it ended up being just a little short of what I needed, so I had to go back and get more fabric to cut a few more blocks from.

For the backing, I used some chocolate brown broadcloth. The broadcloth dictated how big the quilt ended up being, as they only had three metres of it. I had to piece it together to make it wide enough, I ended up putting a wide section in the middle and two smaller side sections, rather than having a seam down the centre back.

The quilt block pattern I stumbled upon on the internet when looking for a quilt idea using squares (rather than triangles, I was triangled out after the first quilt!). The pattern is called "Bento Box." The fact that the Bento Box pattern is actually squares and rectangles meant that it would take even less sewing time than squares. I can't find the original picture now that I had used for an idea, but Google of course has a whole wealth of other Bento Box quilts.

Although, this quilt ended up being very labour intensive. I was able to finish it in a couple of weeks, but it did take a lot of non-stop work. I decided on sewing all of the seams flat because a) I liked the way it looked, and b) the nature of the fabric meant it unraveled very easily (and there are still orange threads all over the house). Sewing the seams flat made a nice look and gave the quilt a better durability. In the end I used a little over 3 spools of orange thread to finish the project.

I planned the quilt out by using Microsoft Excel. I played around with a few different designs of block placement before I decided on this stair-type option. Unfortunately the height of the blocks meant I ended with the bottom section not being complete boxes, but in the end I don't think it hurt the design at all. This is a "tv watching sized" quilt, and was a little too short without those additional two rows of blocks on the bottom.

The centre of this quilt is two layers of a polyester batting. I wanted a puffy sort of look with the chocolate brown cotton ties, and found that I needed two layers of the batting to get that effect.

Unfortunately these aren't the best photos, but I don't have a great digital camera at the moment. You can click on any of the photos to make them bigger and get a closer look.

Overall, I quite love this quilt. And it's very warm and comfy.

Pinwheel Joy

Back in September I started this quilt, with a few layout ideas. I didn't actually end up going with any of my ideas from that post, and by Thanksgiving had decided on a pinwheel pattern.

This quilt took a whole lot more time than I was expecting, but I was so glad to have it done in time for Christmas, finishing the binding on December 17th.

The coloured fabrics I purchased back in I believe it was spring 2007 from Fabricland (some of the fabrics they still carry, some have been discontinued). I'm generally not too great at matching fabrics so well, but I took the cues from the multi-coloured green fabric and tried to find ones that matched it, and was quite please with how it turned out. The white is a recycled cotton sheet... they don't make them like they used to, so good for quilting.

The quilt is a lap / tv watching size. I made it as big as I could, I didn't have enough fabric left for any more rows.

If I was to redo the quilt, I definitely would have bought a rotary cutter, ruler, and matt beforehand. Some of my blocks, especially the first ones, were not quite so square, or triangularly perfect, which led to some puckering and mismatched edges. And the white cotton wasn't the same thickness as the coloured cottons, which made it somewhat difficult to match the corners perfectly in all cases... I ended up ripping out a lot of stitches and redoing many.

The quilt batting was a thin polyester, the only previous quilt I had ever made (in 1996/97) had led me to believe that only fluffy batts existed. I quilted in straight lines lengthwise as I was pressed for time, otherwise I would have liked to have quilted diagonally. I had a lot of problems with the thread breaking, which was eventually solved by using a lesser tension setting.

Overall, I loved the way it turned out, but I don't think I would make another quilt in this pattern... unless I was wanting a project that would take forever!

First Baby Quilt

I have a file on my computer desktop entitled "People Who Are Pregnant". There are currently 17 people listed (well, one gave birth today, so I suppose I can take her off the list!). Those remaining include good friends, college friends, and church friends. I won't be giving all of them gifts, but I have decided to make a few things to give as gifts over the next few months.

This is a baby quilt I designed, did the sewing of, and quilted in an evening (minus the binding I did on a second day because I did it by hand). The fabrics were all ones that I already had on hand, and the batting was some I had leftover from a Christmas project I had made late last year.

I designed the quilt in Microsoft Excel... good for more than just spreadsheets! I quite like it for designing layouts, especially since I don't really have any good graphics programs. Originally I was planning to do a log cabin type of design, but eventually settled on straight rows, and I really like how it turned out.

The fabrics I used were as follows:

- old white sheet
- the brown with white floral was a vintage duvet cover I purchased a few years ago, it has made a few appearances in other crafts of mine in the past including a few purse linings and a shirt
- the white with brown and blue floral was also a vintage duvet cover purchased at the same time as the brown one. It's been repurposed into a purse, some purse linings, and a skirt.
- plain brown broadcloth
- blue with brown print is actually a home decor print I bought originally to make this baby dress a couple of summers ago.



You can click on any of the photos for a closer look.

Life and Other Things

Back in July I went back to school full-time (probably because I said I'd never go back to school and things we say come back to haunt us) and today finished my first placement for teacher's college. The past five weeks I spent Monday to Friday teaching grade 7 and 8 students art, geography, literacy (English), and math. Now I'm on Christmas holidays, but will be spending most of it working... catching up on things at camp and still somehow managing to spend a few evenings a week and Saturdays working in computer service.

Wednesday night marked the completion of the pinwheel quilt I started back in October... I thought for awhile that it would be the quilt that never ended! I'll post some pictures when I can, at the moment my camera is on the fritz. I machine pieced and quilted it with a thin batting.

A little while ago on a break from the aforementioned quilt, I started another one. Tonight I'm working at getting the final rows sewn together before I begin to sew them to each other. The pattern is apparently called "Bento Box".

Thanksgiving Weekend

Today was Thanksgiving Monday in Canada, and the weather was lovely all weekend. Long weekends are always nice, but warm ones are especially nice. Saturday I trekked to Ikea looking for a lightbulb for a light I bought there in the early spring, only to find that a two-pack of bulbs for it cost $14! I decided the lamp could continue to look nice (although non-functional) without lightbulbs at that price... at the moment I can't afford them! I did end up picking up one cheap Christmas present so that was good I suppose. So far I've one finished present that I crafted, and three others are currently in various stages of completion.

I didn't get as much done as I hoped to get done this weekend, but overall it was a lovely weekend. Yesterday at church there was a Thanksgiving potluck. I went for a walk in the late afternoon and took a few pictures tinkering around with an old camera and trying out some TTV photography. Also worked a bit on the quilt I started about a month ago, finally decided on a layout and got a good chunk done. Today I spent with most of my housemates at an acquaintance's home for Thanksgiving... a farm somewhat in the middle of suburbia with a great big glowing yellow maple tree in the front yard. It was lovely.

Layout

I started making a small quilt today... and am playing around with a few layout ideas. What do you think? Click on any for a closer look.


Squares

Arrow Down
Zig Zag

Target

Multi Zag

Left and Right (Not Connected)

Left and Right (Connected)

Multicoloured Lines

Flying Geese

Variated Flying Geese