process – Knit-Spin-Quilt

Bag-making & sewing setup

It’s been a while since I’ve done a process post, so here goes.

First of all, a look at my current (extremely cluttered) workspace.

(I intentionally did not tidy up before taking these photos because I’m not an influencer trying to sell you a perfect lie. I’m human.)

Sewing table with thread racks on the wall behind it

My thread all lives on the thread racks on the wall, out of direct sunlight. The main surface of the table is covered in a 36”x24” self-healing cutting mat, and my main shop sewing machine, a brother nouvelle 1500s lives here 90% of the time.

To the right of the photo is a 4×2 ikea kallax unit, which holds bins of fabric, and my Eversewn Sparrow usually lives on top of it, close at hand for when I need a zig-zag stitch or a buttonhole.

To the left of the main sewing area is a small table topped with layers of cotton and heat-proof batting sewn in a cotton casing to make a small ironing board, and under that table are clear plastic bins of more fabric. Are we starting to see a theme, here?

I sit in the middle on an early 20th-century round (hardwood) piano stool, which allows me to spin in place and raise or lower the seat depending on what I’m doing.

Today, let’s talk about sewing a drawstring project bag, something I do a lot of!

Lining fabric laid out flat to be cut with a quilting ruler and a rotary cutter

Bag outside and lining, cut and ready to be sewn

Once I have the fabric cut to my specifications, I start the sewing process. This goes a lot faster these days than it did when I was first starting, but that’s largely because I’ve figured out how to assembly line cut and piece: sewing a single bag from start to finish takes nearly as long as it ever has.

Here are some process photos:

One part I particularly enjoy is top stitching the drawstring channel. It allows me to coordinate thread colors to bag top colors (in this case: black) but also rewards precision and accuracy, which I find soothing.

Video of the process of topstitching a drawstring bag, done slowly.

In the end, after adding drawstrings, I end up with a bag for the Halloween collaboration kit with the Periwinkle Sheep!

A purple mushroom print bag next to my brother sewing machine

As a reminder, these bags are available for a limited time only and come with a matching skein of custom yarn that looks like this:

Periwinkle Sheep yarn for the Halloween collaboration kit

You can get the kit on The Periwinkle Sheep’s website until August 20th. Kits will ship on or before October 10.

And remember: we will be donating 10% of kit sales to World Central Kitchen for their efforts to combat starvation and famine in Gaza.

Medium (sock sized) project bag video

This video shows an example of how much the medium or sock sized project bags I make can hold, as well as highlighting some aspects of their construction.

Find medium bags here on the shop

Back to Quilting

It’s been a little while since I’ve quilted — I’ve been under the weather for about a year now (long story, but I’m on the mend) and I’ve been focused on bags, because small projects were all I’ve had the attention span for.

But this past week, the quilting bug bit me again, and I decided to rearrange my sewing space, and try a baby quilt.

Pardon the untidiness: this photo was taken mid-batch of bags for the Moms and Makers Market (see previous post or my Instagram!)

I grabbed a pack of charm squares, a tutorial from Elizabeth Hartmann, and off I went!

I used an old thrifted sheet for the backing and cut a queen batting in quarters, so I suppose there are three more baby quilts in my future!

The quilting was all done by eye with a walking foot — I just let myself stitch where it looked appropriate, and see what happened! I’m quite pleased.

The backing isn’t quite as pretty — there are a couple of places where the top thread (white) pops through because my tension wasn’t quite right — but overall, I’m delighted with it.

Now to find it a new home! I’m thinking about putting it up on Etsy to help me fundraise for the Hispanic Federation, because god knows Puerto Rico still needs help!

Scrappy Trip Around The World, take three

Some of you may remember that I made a Scrappy Trip Around the World quilt a few years ago as a wedding present for friends, and another one for a friend’s baby.

The larger quilt was queen size: here it’s being held up by my father (6’4″) who is standing on a chair: N&AHuge

The smaller quilt was for a baby:

Both were made using the Quiltville Scrappy Trip pattern.

I initially thought about doing a pieced back for the large quilt, and I’ve had blocks 12.5″x12.5″ cut for ages with no purpose. Instead I decided to use them for a new, small, scrappy trip around the world quilt.

The newest quilt will be a lap quilt, in differently-formatted blocks: they’re blocks of 4 instead of blocks of six. The colors are a departure for me, and I’m not sure I’m going to want to keep it in the end, but it’s been really soothing to get back to my machine for a quilting project again.

ST3 ST2 ST1

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.)

Scrappy Trip-Along

I have enough projects half-done that I really ought not take on another one. But we all know how that works, right? The Scrappy Trip Around the World quilt has been flying around, and I’m afraid I caught the bug big-time.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out photographs on the flickr group, or the tag “scrappytripalong” on Instagram. (In fact, even if you do know what it is, go check out those photos, because, WOW, are there some great blocks and quilts going together! I love how very different this quilt ends up from different people’s stashes.)

The idea for this pattern is basically to use up scraps — you cut strips 2 1/2″ x 16″ and put them together more or less at random. The pattern is really quite ingenious. I’ve really only just finished cutting, so I’ve only made a couple of strip sets so far: I’m going to do at least ten, and then pull out the iron and cut them into proper strips and make up squares.

Compared to a lot of people out there, I haven’t been quilting for all that long. And I tend to cut fabric as carefully (obsessively?) as I can, so I went through all my scraps pretty fast and didn’t have enough strips cut for the size quilt I wanted.

So I went through my “mistake” fabrics — you know the ones, the fabrics that looked great on the shelf or in the picture online, that showed up and made you wonder what you were thinking. Then I went through my fat quarter box and pulled a ton of Jo-Ann fat quarters that I bought on sale a few years ago, to so “something” with. And then, with absolutely perfect timing, two scrap packs I bought before I was even thinking about this quilt arrived in the mail, so I cut those all up and added them to the count!

In the end, I cut kind of a lot of fabric.

Why so many? I could tell you that it’s because Brenda, of Pink Castle Fabrics did the math to tell how many strips to cut for various sizes of quilts, and you need 336 strips for a queen-sized quilt. I could tell you that! I’m certainly planning on a queen-sized quilt.

But, um. I kind of just got caught up in the joy of hacking up scraps. I also tossed in every once in a while something that I really do like, so that I’ll be able to look at the quilt and find squares that I love hiding in all the scrappiness.

Now, this quilt thrives on randomness, and I’m really bad at random. So I cheated. I divided up my fabrics into color groups.

In case you’re wondering, I cut 74 Pink/Red/Orange, 74 Yellow/Green, 75 Blue/Purple, 38 Dark Browns, 40 Blacks, 71 Light Neutrals, and 20 OMGWTF ALL THE COLORS strips.

With this pre-color-selected setup, it’s really easy: all I have to do is make sure that each block contains one black or brown, and something from each other pile. Or two from one pile, if I’m feeling in a blue and purple mood. It makes putting together the blocks really easy for me, which it would not be at all if I had to pull from a giant pile on the floor.

I’m trying one new thing for this project: I’m using leaders and enders. I’ve got more than enough 2 1/2″ squares, between my own scraps and some mini-charm-packs I picked up from FatQuarterShop.

I’m using a shortcut for those, too: I’ve divided them into “light” and “dark” and made three piles of each. When I need to pick up another two squares, I match up whatever’s on top of those piles with whatever else is on top and looks best. So far, I’m getting quite a few of them, and it’s really satisfying. Not to mention, not having to hold down the thread ends every time I start a new strip? SO NICE.

I’ve still got a few Christmas presents that haven’t made it up here yet, and a finished quilt to show off on Friday, if I can get decent pictures between now and then.

Tuesdays are for knitting

I’m still working on the same sock, and it’s still a subway project! I’m using Happy Feet yarn on size 0 (2.0mm) needles.

I’m about halfway done with the first sock, and well into the part of a sock that is the least interesting to me: the endless march down the foot. Unlike the cuff, you don’t have turning the heel to look forward to, and the toe isn’t interesting enough to make me excited about getting to it.

Thankfully, the pattern for this sock is enough to keep me engaged. I altered it slightly to fit my larger-than-average feet.

This pattern, Monkey, calls for you to cast on only 64 stitches: 4×16 = 4 pattern repeats. Well, I happen to know that my feet and ankles (not to mention my very high arches and deep heels) just don’t fit into a 64-stitch sock, unless I knit it with thicker yarn on larger needles. And we’re not talking about a “slightly bulky” sock, here — we’re talking about slippers. So I had to find a way to expand the sock to make it fit, without making it look really odd.

I know that about 80 stitches makes a ribbed sock that fits me nicely, and that the Monkey pattern doesn’t have a huge amount of stretch to it: it’s knitted, so there’s some, and there are purl sections, which help, but it’s not super springy.

I considered adding a fifth repeat of the Monkey pattern, to put me at exactly 80 stitches, but that would get awkward when it came time to do the heel and would be difficult to space out over the top of the sock when the time came for the foot: two and a half repeats? Three repeats? It didn’t seem like a great plan.

So instead I cast on an extra ten stitches, and knit p2, k2, p2, k2, p2 ribbing between the first and fourth repeats of the pattern, along the back of the leg.

If I had been thinking more clearly, I would have added fourteen stitches, because while this sock fits, it’s snug, and it’s a near thing: any smaller, and I wouldn’t exactly be eager to wear it. As it is, it fits, though getting it up over my heels can be a bit of an endeavor.

In any case, it’s certainly better than my worst sock ever. In college, I went through a phase of knitting on VERY SMALL NEEDLES. Let’s just say that if you knit a sock on 000 needles, with a normal sock yarn, and you pull the yarn as tight as I do? Well, I could wear it and have one very bullet-proof foot. It is SO uncomfortable, it lives in the back of a drawer and gets used to clean dust from my computer screen and that’s about it.

What about your disasters? Any funny mistakes that you look back on now and laugh?

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.