Knit-Spin-Quilt

A thoroughly relaxing weekend.

Last weekend was great: I went to see Avengers on Friday with a friend who hadn’t seen it yet, went to the Brooklyn Flea with the same friend on Saturday, and spent the rest of the weekend hiding in air conditioning and quilting. My family was out of town, so I had the house more or less to myself.

I’m almost done with the Circa 1934 Filmstrip quilt: all I have to do is sew down the binding. This may take me a while, though, because I’ve decided I want to do it by hand, and I’m terribly slow at sewing by hand.

I made it a scrappy binding, alternating black fabric with strips of the various prints used in the front of the quilt: I had just enough to make it work, with hardly anything left over at the end.

The backing is a simple red and white stripe — I’ve actually had the fabric for years, trying to figure out what to do with it. I suppose this will only encourage me to be a packrat in the future. (Ooops.)

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I also cut fabric for my next project — a Kitchen Window quilt. Because I don’t have enough half-done projects already, right? But I know myself well enough by now to know that I’ll pretty much always have more than one WiP at a time: I do it with knitting, with spinning, even with reading books: I like to have a variety to flip back and forth between.

I’m torn right now between using a black fabric for the frame and using a navy one — I’ll have to lay them both out for a little bit and look at them in different light, I think. The sashing between windows will be a deep green to pick up some of the teals and greens in the panes.

How were your weekends? Anything out of the ordinary, or interesting projects?

If you have time, check out the Monday Link-Up at Plum and June:

And keep an eye out for the Let’s Get Aquainted blog hop posts this week: there are three on Tuesday this week!

Circa 1934 meets Filmstrip.

Happy Friday the 13th!

This quilt is (hopefully) going to be a quick project. I’m following the tutorial for a Filmstrip Quilt at Crazy Mom Quilts.

This is what it looks like right now:

I’m not happy with the way the print repeats in the upper right hand corner, but I’m not sure how to fix it. Suggestions would be awesome.

I cut out the pieces on Tuesday night and Wednesday night, and ironed the ones that were being stubborn about curling where they’d been folded. (I know I should iron before cutting, but I was just so impatient… it hasn’t caused any problems yet.)

I’m using five fat quarters of the Circa 1934 and 1 yard of a Kona cream-colored cotton (I don’t recall which exactly), which were enough to make 15 block centers and 15 block borders, with a teeny bit of each print left over, which I may add to a scrappy binding, spaced out with black. I may also just bind it in a red-white-stripe. I cut my solid stupidly, and had to piece together my last two 9″x2.5″ strips together from scraps, which was a little annoying. I’ll know better next time.

This is it all cut:

I pinned all of the blocks to their short borders first, which took a while, but meant that I was able to chain piece the 15 red-centered blocks in one fell swoop, which was nice and fast:

I finished all the white-bordered blocks first, before embarking on the red-bordered ones.

Another two bouts of pinning and ironing and trimming later, I have all of my 30 blocks, trimmed to 8.5″.

These pictures show half of them, before I trimmed them:

I made up a schematic the other day and decided that I really want there to be sashing between the blocks: so I’ll be adding 1.5″ strips of black between the various blocks, and arranging the blocks diagonally, rather than horizontally. This is my very awkward mock-up:

I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m going to do with this quilt once it’s done, but I can figure that out later.

Blocks of the Month, halfway done.

Hooray for holiday long-weekends: I was able to catch up on the Half-Square Triangle Block of the Month Quilt Along last week. I finished second blocks for January through May and made one block each for June and July — then I ran out of squares of white fabric and had to stop. Poor packing — next time I’ll know better.

These are my January blocks:

These are the February blocks:

These are the March blocks:

These are the April blocks:

This is my second May block: (the first one is still not fixed)

This is my first June block:

This is my first July block:

A number of the points on the blocks aren’t matched as precisely as they might be — it’s visible in the June block, for example. It’s true of a number of the second blocks, which has a lot to do with having sewn them on the Singer 66, with a little less attention to spare for making sure everything lines up, since I’m concentrating on treadling, too.

I’m not a hundred percent happy with the make-up/final appearance of all of the blocks, but I’ve been regarding this quilt-along as a learning process in selecting fabrics. There are some blocks I’m particularly happy with: the all-solid January block and the July block are favorites of mine right now. I’ll have to see how it all comes out in the end. :)

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It seems appropriate to link up to WIP Wednesday today, given that this project is almost exactly halfway done: I’ve got twelve of my final twenty-four HST blocks.

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Other works-in-progress that I’m working on (or planning, but haven’t cut just yet) are a knitting bag for a friend, using the Perk Me Up fat quarter bundle, which just about yelled her name at me when I saw it. I’ll be using this pattern, with the modification of adding both an inner, zipped divider pocket as in the orange example in the linked post, and a set of flat pockets for knitting needles and other tools, along one of the inner walls of the bag.

I made two Dresden wheels of the coffee fabric — at first I thought I’d applique one onto the bag, but that idea died a swift death. Now I’m thinking about putting together a mini quilt for the EZ Dresden Challenge, with three wheels on the front, one larger and two smaller. I would have pictures, but it was dark by the time I finished the second one on Tuesday evening.

I was going to try to make a large (queen sized) Dresden quilt for the EZ Dresden Challenge, but I decided that trying to make, quilt, bind and finish a queen-sized Dresden quilt by August 31st when I have class, volunteer work, a MA thesis to finish, and plans to go to Europe for eleven days in August (though it’s not set in stone — I don’t have tickets yet…) — well, I figured trying to shove in a complicated queen-sized quilt on top of that was a little bit crazytown.

Still, these are 16 of the 20 colors I’ll use, when I do start that quilt, which I will in September:

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In the meantime, last night I cut up some red Cosmo Cricket Circa 1934 and some off-white Kona cotton to put together a Film Strip / Little Plates quilt — inspired by Books Bound’s recent baby quilt, which is based on Crazymomquilts’s Film Strip quilt. I also looked a little bit at the pattern in Elizabeth Hartman’s Practical Guide to Patchwork, which pairs prints with prints in some blocks. I’ve been looking for a pattern that has comparatively large pieces of fabric, to show off the typewriter keys and the larger numbers of the Circa 1934 prints, and this looks like it’ll be fun. It also looks like it’ll be a fast project, which is something I’m really looking for — for some reason I’ve been itching for a finish for the last few days.

Tuesdays are for knitting

Given my schedule this summer — which is class & work on Mondays and Wednesdays — I get a lot of knitting done on Mondays and Wednesdays. Wait, you might say, didn’t you just say you’re busy those days? Yes! But I also have an hour-and-a-half commute each way from home to school/work, and I tend to knit on the subway.

Last week, I finished these socks, which are a simple toe-up 2×2 rib.

The yarn is Claudia Hand-Paint, which I love for its sproing. It just squishes so nicely once it’s knit up: there’s so much life to the yarn! The colors are fabulous, too, which doesn’t hurt.

I don’t particularly love knitting toe up socks — I don’t hate it, but it’s not my default sock pattern — but this yarn comes in such small skeins that I feel like I have to do it toe-up to be sure I make the most of it. I do, after all, have pretty big feet (~size 10 US, which is British 7.5/8 and European 41/42). The only thing worse than making socks for me is making socks for the rest of my family — my sister’s feet are larger than mine, and my father’s feet are 12″ long. That’s a LOT of foot! These socks look longer off the foot than they do on:

Having finished those, and woven the ends in on Sunday, Monday I started a new pair! These are Plymouth Happy Feet yarn, which I’ve never knit with before.

The yardage on the Happy Feet is only about 192 yards, which may sound like a lot — but remember, big-footed family. My default assumption for a pair of socks is that it will take about 200 yards of yarn. So it was a bit of a surprise when I decided that, no, I wouldn’t be knitting these socks toe-up — I’d be knitting a pair of Monkey Socks from the cuff down, and if I have to add in a different-colored toe, I’ll add on a different-colored toe.

Sewing on a Singer 66.

I mentioned last week that I’ve been sewing on a Singer 66 foot-treadle sewing machine, so I thought I’d post a little bit about the machine.

My family has it because about thirty years ago one of my father’s co-workers bought a furnished house, and was going to throw this sewing machine away. My dad bought it from them for $10, and since then, it’s lived in my parents’ house in Connecticut. (That house had no electricity when I was a child, thus the mechanical sewing machine rather than an electric one.)

I learned to sew on this machine when I was around ten or twelve, and played with the foot treadle and base of the table before then: it made a great fort if you draped sheets around it and you were very, very small.

These days, it usually looks like a little table right next to the dining room table:

When you remove the candles and runner, you can see that at some point in its history, it wasn’t treated all that well. One of my projects for this summer is to lightly sand off the existing finish and oil the wood, to help it be a little better protected from the sun. I did the same thing to my spinning wheel a couple of years ago: it takes focus, and willingness to do rather tedious, repetitive work, but the end result is completely worth it: the wood just gleams. But that’s in the future. For now, it looks like this:

Then you flip open the tabletop, which folds up to the left, and you see that this little table holds something rather more interesting than a drawer! Other than, of course, the four drawers it has on its sides, which are fabulous for holding thread and pins and needles and scissors and all the other notions you want to put somewhere close at hand. This machine is really well designed.

You flip up the piece of wood closest to you, (which is unfortunately a little hard to tell in this picture):

Then you look in: it’s a sewing machine! Lying on its side!

You pull the machine up, and lift it just high enough that the front piece of wood goes beneath it: the machine rests on it, and stays up and solid. This is a really well-engineered machine, and it all fits together very well.

From a little more of a distance, it looks like this:

Then you make sure the belt goes around the drive wheel, under the table, and check it’s seated properly around the machine’s wheel, and you’re almost ready to go. You can see the drive band in this picture: it’s the red thing that loops around the cast-iron wheel. When you treadle, the large wheel (let’s call it the drive wheel) goes around: the belt connects it to a smaller wheel on the machine, and a series of little gears and belts powers the machine, making the needle go up and down as you treadle.

Now you’re almost ready to sew! You thread the machine (and this is one of the places where looking at the manual I found online was helpful, as I was running the thread just a smidge wrong before:

The biggest difference for me in sewing on this machine, once I’d gotten it oiled properly and the tension adjusted (you turn the large knob on the head of the machine to adjust the top thread tension, and the bobbin thread just sort of does its own thing), is that you have to remember that your feet need to keep moving. Once it’s in the swing of things, this is easy enough: it’s trying to sew while the machine is still waking up (so to speak) that’s a chore. Sometimes I’d have to re-start the wheel by hand on each full rock of the treadle, because it stalled out, which was very annoying.

But I did learn to sew on this machine, so it came back to me — kind of like riding a bicycle, I suppose. It’s the same muscle-memory coming back to help you, after all. I still found that my seams are less precise (I don’t have a quarter-inch foot for this machine, for one thing, thus the masking tape) and that the fabric tends to drag more — I’m going to try buffing the bottom of the foot, to see if getting rid of some of the corrosion will help the fabric move more smoothly. Overall, though, it’s a fun project, and I’m really enjoying myself — I feel very lucky to get the chance to use this, and to also be able to go home and use an electric machine with a simple one-foot-pedal, which always seems so easy in comparison when I first get home!

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about the machine, just ask — if I know the answer, I’ll answer to the best of my ability!

I’m not sure when this machine was made: there are a lot of websites about the history of sewing machines, and they mostly seem to suggest that the Singer 66 model was made for a long period of time. I don’t know how to localize it more specifically than that.

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Let’s end with a quick reminder about the Lets Get Acquainted Blog Hop on Plum and June. Today is the Monday link up!

Head on over to find out who will be posting this week, and check out their blogs on Tuesday and Thursday — you’ll find some really excellent tutorials and quilters this way.

Half-Square Triangle Block of the Month

Happy belated 4th of July! I hope everyone who celebrated it had a good time. We watched fireworks over the horizon and met up with. neighbors and friends.

But back on topic! Remember this?

Man, do I feel behind! Jeni just posted the July Block, and I haven’t even made up a single June block yet!

Last weekend I was able to trim all of my half-square triangle blocks for my second blocks for January-May, and two sets for June,, but not to sew them together, because I couldn’t figure out how to change the stitch length on the sewing machine. Why? Well, it’s a Singer 66. I don’t have a picture of it just yet, but this will give you an idea.

This is actually the machine I learned to sew on, but when I was learning (oh, twelve or fifteen years ago, now) my grandmother was taking care of my sister and me and she knew how to make the machine dance. In contrast, my approach to it is “Think really hard: maybe I can logic it out!” and my mother’s is “Turn everything that turns, oops, that’s not supposed to come off!” For some reason, these were not the ideal approaches.

So I’ve done a little online research on the Singer 66. That let me figure out how to adjust the tension and stitch length I oiled all of the various joints and hinges. It works more smoothly now, and I’ve been able to see up my second blocks for January through May. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish my June blocks and one of the July blocks: I didn’t bring enough white fabric with me to make two sets of July blocks. I’ll still be closer to caught up than I was before. :)

Blog link-ups

I didn’t really know what blog link-ups were until maybe a month ago. This week, I’m posting to two:

And, over at Plum and June, the Let’s Get Acquainted Monday Link-Up.

Head over to either of them to get a really convenient list of interesting quilting blogs: small blogs, for the one at Lily’s Quilts, and anyone participating in the Let’s Get Acquainted at Plum and June.

Tobin’s Mixtape: Finished!

My new free-motion quilting foot arrived in the mail last week, all metal and (so far) much sturdier. I had Friday off, and took advantage of the time to organize my fabric stash and finish up my Mixtape Quilt, from Elizabeth Hartman’s pattern. I made the “Favorite Songs” style, in its largest size: the lap-quilt of 8″ blocks, which ended up 62″/62″. All posts about it can be seen by clicking the “mixtape quilt” tag on the right sidebar.

I had already quilted about half of it (before my previous free-motion foot broke) and started on it with the previously quilted sides neatly rolled and folded to keep them out of my way. I did my best to keep it all in neat place so that it was smaller, which did make it a little easier to move around, though it was surprisingly heavy.

But by about halfway through today’s quilting, I had given up on keeping the outer edges folded, and only rolled the edge that was under the sewing machine’s arm. I got a little bit better at manipulating the quilt as I went along, and at figuring out where to place my hands while I was moving it — left hand to the back and left of the needle, right hand right and slightly to the front (that is, closer to me), moving in tandem. I think the quilting of it improved a bit by the end. Overall, I’m very proud of it: it’s the first thing I’ve ever free-motion quilted, and it’s the largest quilt I’ve made so far, at 62″x62″. It could be a bit awkward to do something larger than this, because it got difficult to manipulate too closely with half the quilt folded up under the arm of the machine.

Once I’d quilted all of it and trimmed the borders, I machine bound it in one of the fabrics I used in the quilt. It’s a slightly heavier weight than some of the other fabrics, which may stand up to wear and tear a little bit better than a lighter fabric. Since this quilt is going to a 3-year-old boy, durability is definitely a concern.

Once I’d finished it, I tried to take a picture indoors. That was … not entirely successful: I had to hang it up over the railing and take a picture from the stairs. It ended up being a bit of an odd angle:

Thankfully, it was beautiful outside, so I took it out to the back yard, and hung it from the back porch:

It may be feverishly hot outside today, but it made for nice picture-taking.

I’m so pleased to have finished this project, and I can’t wait to see the look on my friend’s face when I give it to her and her son.