Sewing – Page 4 – Knit-Spin-Quilt

Resurfacing with an announcement: KnitSpinQuilt on Etsy!

I’ve opened an Etsy store to try to sell little sewn bags, stitch markers, and occasionally handspun yarn. Readers get 10% off with the code “KnitSpinQuiltReader”.

To start things off, I’m having a SALE on handspun yarn: all handspun yarns listed in my shop right now are listed at prices that will cover the hand-dyed top, with minimal (if any!) markup for my time. I’ve moved to a small apartment and space is at a premium.

Watch this space for more spinning content and a little bit more sewing and quilting as well. This summer I’m not teaching, so I’ll have more time to update the blog.

Two-Finish Friday

These are both gift quilts: one for a friend and her husband and one for a new baby. Here they are all folded up, about to be packed and mailed:

The first quilt I finished was made up of hourglass blocks. I pieced them all over the summer on my Singer 66, and then they sat, and sat, and sat over the fall, because I didn’t have time to finish it until the semester was over. But now it’s done!

The backing is a boat print, because the mother and the grandparents all sail. You can see in this picture that I quilted a simple diagonal grid 1/4″ on each side of the hourglass blocks.

I used a black pezzy print for the binding because I didn’t want to emphasize any particular color from the front. I think it works! I wish I had more of this fabric in stash to do the same in the future — I’ll just have to keep an eye out for similarly useful prints. I attached the binding by stitching it down twice. On the back you see two lines of stitching:

On the front, you only see one, because the other is hidden at the intersection of the binding and the quilt:

The other quilt is for friends of mine, because they live in northern England and it gets coooooold! For this one I used a pattern by Elizabeth Hartmann: her New Wave Quilt.

I cut my fat quarters very, very carefully, and had enough extra pieces to showcase the wave pattern on the back of the quilt as well:

This one I quilted by stitching in the ditch along the edges of the white sashing. I stitched smaller diamonds within the “waves” as well. Then I did some free-motion quilting in the sashing, which I’m really quite proud of.

I did the same kind of binding on this quilt, and also bound it in a pezzy print, though this one was navy, to complement the blues of the quilt.

Not bad for a break that only started on December 23rd!

Linking up to TGIFF!

One (unexpected!) finished project

We recycle plastic bags, and the plastic bag full of plastic bags hanging on a door handle have been getting on my nerves. So I did a little digging online, checked a couple of tutorials for ideas, and made a plastic-bag holding tube!

I started off with a fat quarter, and backed it with fusible fleece. I picked fleece because I wanted a little extra sturdiness to the bag, and the roughness of the fleece on the inside of the tube should help keep the bags in place better than a smoother interfacing.

I cut off three inches from the long side of the fat quarter, to make a narrower tube. I sewed that 3″ strip into a tube (wrong-sides out) and turned it right-side-out to use as a loop for hanging the bag. Next time I do this, I’m cutting the 3″ strip off first, and then fusing on the fleece. Turning a 1 1/2″ tube that’s backed with fusible fleece inside-out was really exasperating.

Then I dug into my scrap box, cut two pieces of black fabric 2″ x 15″ and made them into 3/4″ draw-string tubes at the top and bottom of the soon-to-be tube.

Two pieces of elastic later, (8″ on the bottom, for a small opening, 12″ on the top, to make putting bags in easier) I sewed the whole thing up the side, and flipped it right-side out, and ta-da!

Now it lives in the coat closet, where it hangs very nicely on one side and is up high enough that we can all reach it easily, and the best part? It doesn’t clutter up the hallway anymore.

Organization! It’s a wonderful, if short-lived thing.

I’ve been doing a lot of cleaning and organizing and getting-rid-of-stuff over this winter break. I culled something over seventy books from my overcrowded bookshelves, which means that the books I own now fit on my bookshelves without stacks on the floor for the first time since I moved back to NYC. (Some of them are still double-shelved, but shh, that totally doesn’t count.) I left the bookshelf-bit in this photograph, which is theoretically all about the fabric stash in the top half. You can see all the books! I am irrationally happy about this.

I also took the opportunity to re-organize my fabric, which is now organized by color, as well as by cut size (more than 3-yard cuts are all in one place), and my sewing cart, which has made getting to things a lot easier, as well as giving me a bigger box for scraps (which is amusing, since right now I’m at probably the lowest level of scraps I’ve been at in months, what with the Scrappy Trip quilt decimating my scraps. Even the contents of the fat quarter box are really organized! The pieces stuck in the left side are long quarters, so I don’t pull something and then get all disappointed when I realize that, no, I can’t cut a 17″x15″ piece from a long quarter-yard.

But I also got some fabric in the mail, as belated Christmas presents. I didn’t photograph much of it, but I couldn’t help but get a picture of the Pearl Bracelets fat quarter set that I got from Stash Modern Fabric. Look, isn’t it pretty? All the colors! I love this print so much.

I couldn’t resist pulling some of it right away — cosmonaut, anchor, and river bend are the colors I chose — and I made these three fabric boxes using a tutorial on The Sometimes Crafter.

I used an iron-on interfacing (Pellon 809, which is really stiff) instead of sewing in interfacing, and I think it’s working out pretty well. I pinned them carefully, with vertical pins at each corner, to hold things in place and horizontal pins for three sides, so I wouldn’t have to pull out the pins while I was sewing. I marked the turning hole with vertical pins, because I have been known to sew all the way around something and only then realize that I needed to leave part of it open to turn the project right-side-out.

Ironing them square was really fun, though I didn’t take any pictures of that stage. There’s a good tutorial on The Sometimes Crafter.

I’m using them to hold leaders and enders (light in the light box, dark in the dark, sewn pairs in the medium blue box), and I’ve already emptied the medium blue box once, because it was full of paired ones, and I needed more space!

These are actually my first finish of the year, so I’ve added a picture of them to the 2013 Finish-A-Long Flickr pool.

Finally, because I found it tremendously amusing, have a picture of my cat, Clio, attempting to supervise my sewing while I worked on the Scrappy Trip quilt. (She’s just next to the computer, which plays music or audiobooks while I’m working.)

2013 Finish-A-Long

This year, I’m going to be participating in the 2013 Finish-A-Long. It looks like a lot of fun, and like a great way to get me to finish some of these projects that have been sitting around forever.

There’s no penalty for listing more things than you can finish, so I’m going to make a pretty ambitious list for myself, and see what happens. (I can predict what happens: I don’t finish all of them.)

Let’s start with the biggest ones and work down:
1) I’m going to finish the Scrappy Trip quilt top. This is a pretty big goal for me, while the semester is going on, especially since it’s going to be a queen-sized quilt, but I’m going to go for it. It makes for really good mindless-sewing, so perhaps I’ll have some luck working on it.

2) I’m going to finish my New Wave quilt. It’s all cut — all I have to do is pick the order of the fabrics, piece it, and quilt it. All. Hah. I’m actually pinning the fabrics up next to each other for this one, and I’ll be posting about that soonish.

3) I’m going to try finish up the 2012 In Color Order Half-Square-Triangle blocks, sash them, and quilt the whole thing. These are one of my July blocks, and two of the March block:

Finishing this up is a bit of a bigger task than it sounds, because I’m doing 2 blocks for each month, which makes for a twin-sized-or-bigger quilt, not a lap quilt. The main question will be figuring out the sashing, backing and binding fabrics.

4) I want to make a Pinwheels and Postage Stamps quilt using two charm packs and two mini charm packs of Simply Color. I think it will look LOVELY. And I’m not sure how big it will end up being — that’ll depend on how much I can eke out of the fabric I have.

5) I’m going to make a handful of little change purses with keychain rings as gifts for friends using this tutorial on Noodlehead.

6) I’m going to make a trio of fabric baskets to hold my 2 1/2″x2 1/2″ fabric squares and my leaders and enders. The main question for this is picking the fabrics!

7) I’m going to make a weighted pincushion organizer for my sewing table, because it would be nice to have somewhere to put thread scraps without bending over to figure out where I’ve put the garbage can, and I actually don’t have a pincushion right now.

And, honestly, that’s more than enough for me to have on my plate for the spring semester, with all the coursework I have in store!

Gifted and unblogged…

Though my semester was really pretty crazy, I did manage to finish a couple of other projects either in snatches of borrowed time or in mid-December, once my papers were all in.

The one I’m going to talk about here today was another Mabel Messenger Bag, which I put together using Perk Me Up fabrics — I saw them over the summer and instantly knew they were made for a friend of mine who loves all things chocolate and coffee. This collection? Pretty much perfect for her. She asked for a bag she could use for her knitting, and liked the Mabel bag I made over the summer:

This bag is altered in a couple of ways. One side of the bag is a simple piece of Kona Chocolate, with a large print on it as an exterior pocket. The magnetic snap attaches inside the pocket, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but … well, I probably wouldn’t do it again.

The other side is a patchwork of the various different fabrics in the Perk Me Up collection.

One problem I had with my first Mabel bag is that the strap slides a lot. For this bag I made two changes to help it stay in place. I made it scrappy, with seams that add a little bit of body to the strap every few inches, and I made it just a smidge wider than the pattern called for.

The inside has a simple unzipped pocket, just the right size for knitting needles, scissors, crochet hooks, etc. It’s going to be used as a knitting bag, so I made sure it went to its new home with some yarn and a set of DPNs. (The green blob is a lace shawl, which will show up here as soon as I block it. Don’t hold your breath: I’m terrible about blocking things.)

I really enjoyed making this pattern for a second time: it makes for a very smart bag, and I think I managed a couple of the details like the snap and the bag’s strap a little better this time than I did last time. It was a lot of fun to revisit the pattern.

2012 Year in Review

1. FinalWhole, 2. FQ-Close, 3. Front_garden, 4. Full_front, 5. BlueBlack-staggered, 6. Henrietta1, 7. Notebooks, 8. Sarah’s potholders (front), 9. Black bag 1

In 2012 I started quilting seriously, started blogging, met a whole bunch of really lovely people and learned tons from advice and tutorials and quilt-alongs, and finished a lot of small projects and several quilts, including one that isn’t featured in this mosaic.

In 2013, I’ll be joining the Inspire circle of do. Good Stitches (which I’m really looking forward to) and trying my best to keep up with the Pile O’Fabric Skill Builder Block of the Month in hopes of learning how to sew curves at the very least. And ideally, I’ll be a little bit better at keeping up with this blog during the spring semester than I was this fall.

Prepping for the school year

I’ve been making notebook covers for my various courses, using Rachel’s tutorial at Stitched in Color.

It turns out that this pattern is perfect for my long-cut quarter-yard NYC prints from the City Quilter.

Here’s a fuzzy instagram picture of the first one:

The next one will be black and white using the skyscraper print from City Quilter, in the same design as this one, and the third will be burgundy and yellow/gold, to match the colors of the Plantagenet kings. That one will be all red on the outside except for a thin vertical band of yellow at the edges, and the inside flaps will be yellow, with a pocket the right size for index cards.

I tweaked the measurements for the tutorial, because I’m using 8 1/2×10″ spiral-bound notebooks instead of composition books. I cut my cover to 12.75″x32.5″ because the notebooks are a little bit larger, and followed the tutorial otherwise, while adapting the pocket flaps to be the right depth for my notebooks. It’s a great tutorial!