charm swaps – Knit-Spin-Quilt

Modern Designer Charm Swap

I took two spots in the Modern Designer Charm Swap going on over at Flickr. I was assigned two designers whose work I am not as familiar with, which was great. It was fun to get to trawl through their fabrics to see what caught my eye.

For my Heather Bailey fabrics, I went with warm colors:

For Amy Butler, I went for darker backgrounds:

There’s just one problem: I cut the last set of charm squares while I was on hold on the phone, and in my distraction, I cut wrong! I ended up with 54 squares, and 4 rectangles of 5″x 3.5″! Did I feel stupid, or what? New rule: no cutting fabric while on the phone. I’ve got a fat quarter on the way to make up the 2 extra squares, and then I can mail them all in.

I have to say, I’m looking forward to getting back the products of these swaps in the mail: it’s going to be great to get little packages as a bunch of surprises!

Signal boosting

Do you like modern, designer quilting fabric? Consider this:

When you sign up for the swap you vote for designers you’d like to see included. Participants will be split into 8 groups of 7 people, and each group will be assigned a designer. You get two yards of different fabrics by that designer, and cut each into 56 charm squares. Collate them AB, AB, AB, etc. and send them in! Get back charm squares representing 14 fabrics each by 8 different designers. This sounds like a win-win scenario to me.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for Lizzy House, Riley Blake or Denyse Schmidt, though I’m also looking forward to discovering new designers!

As of right now, there are 16 open spots. Come join us, and help get this thing going! I can’t wait to get cutting. :)

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And, just in case it’s fallen off your radar:

This past week, we had posts on July 31st from Audrey, of Hot Pink Quilts and M-R from Quilt Matters. On August 2nd, there were posts by Jennifer, of GH Quilting and Danny, of MommyFor Reals.

This week, we can look forward to posts on August 7 from Liz of What I Did On My Summer Vacation and Susan, of Canadian Abroad. On August 9, we get posts from Kirsten of Gemini Stitches and Stephanie of Sewing By Stephanie.

This blog hop is a ton of fun, and a great way to meet new people, find awesome projects and get a ton of inspiration. Drop by their blogs and see what they’re up to! Even better, leave a comment — if they’re anything like me, it’ll make them happy.

I’m not up to bat until the very end of the blog hop, but I’m already thinking about what my project / mini-tutorial is going to be. :)

A finish and a start

I’ve joined two charm square swaps. The first is the the Let’s Get Acquainted I-SPY Swap, for which I’m sending two sets of blocks, one of moons and stars and the other of bananas. (If you’re interested, it’s still looking for more people!) I’m planning on making a quilt to donate to a children’s charity with the squares I get back from this swap.

Then I stopped by my local fabric store today to pick up some yellow and brown dotted fabrics for the 3×6 Fabric Swap. Now I just need to pick up a yellow solid (all the ones at the local store were greenish, or too orange for my taste) and cut it and the brown and I’ll be ready to send off all the charm squares. Now to find envelopes to enclose that will hold the right number of charm squares so I can figure out return postage. :)

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While I was at the local fabric store, I noticed that they’d gotten a new shade of green in: Kona’s Kelly green. I looked at it and it looked like I’d prefer it to Clover for the background of my Kitchen Window quilt: it’s a more sober tone, and I think it competes a little less with the prints. It presents less of a contrast with the black, too, which I think I like. Here’s a quick photograph of the two of them side-by-side:

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I’ve just started a handbag using the pattern Mabel, by Jenna Lou Designs, which I found through Purse Palooza 2012 on Sew Sweetness. I’m going to try to make an altered one with an internal dividing zipped pocket, so I figured I should make one following the pattern as written, first. I’m using scraps from the Mixtape Quilt. They ended up being cut sort of sideways, so the birds are all facing the wrong direction, but I think that will be all right in the end. It’s a good test case for getting used to working with interfacing, which I have not used before.

Of course, I only ordered the magnetic snaps and strap hardware today, so I’ve pretty much gotten as far as I’m going to get until it arrives. Maybe I’ll work on putting in an interior zipped pocket on one side and appliqued, open pockets on the other, just so the bag will hold something useful and not be an enormous black hole of stuff. It’s mostly a test case for a potential knitting bag, so I think I’ll try out pockets from this knitting bag, putting the outside pockets on the lining of the Mabel bag. We’ll see how it all works out!

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Finally, I finished my red monkey socks this week. They ended up being too small for me, and there wasn’t enough yarn to finish them even if the ankles hadn’t been too narrow, so they’ll be a gift for a friend.

The friend I’ll be giving the socks to is further along in her PhD program than I am, and she’s writing her thesis, so we meet about once a week and study together. It’s a really good system for me, because having someone else around helps me focus and keeps me from spending too much time surfing the web, or knitting or quilting or otherwise putzing around. It works surprisingly well.

I’ll cast on a new pair of socks this weekend or early next week, using a Malabrigo sock in the “Persia” colorway. I’m not sure about the pattern yet: something with some stretch to it, and an easily memorizable repeat.