bag lady reprise

Late in the evening of my "bag lady Saturday" I found myself wondering what would happen if I downsized the pattern I was using for the zippered project bags to make smaller ones. Voila! They are super cute.  I used a fun stripe print for the inside, and combined a pretty purple flower print with some sassy alpacas.

I was inspired by the piles of scraps leftover from the baby quilt I made recently, and I sort of improvised my way through the sizes based on whatever the scraps told me. I suppose I could measure and try to replicate this again, but of course I didn't write anything down so this could be like those dinners you sometimes make only once because there's some random combination of leftovers in the fridge. 

I made two, one for me and one for a friend. I think I'll keep the one with the little tab and give her the one with the purple zipper. 

springy table topper

Last weekend I had a hankering to play with some more scrap sewing. I am really enjoying the stash of “precuts” I made for myself and squirreled away (this reminds me I should do it again with the growing stash of scraps from recent projects). I wanted to make something to grace my dining room table for spring/March so I pulled a quantity of greens and found myself a neutral linen (not surprising for me) to cut to match for patchwork improvising. 

 

I wanted to make simple four patches and combine them to make a sparkly patchwork panel. It was a lot of fun on my design wall moving things around for a couple of days. I bordered it with a great plaid that I think just takes it over the top straight to St. Patrick’s Day. That gave me a goal, to finish it before the holiday today. 

I used this pretty linen-ish garden print for the back and, as has been my habit lately, decided to hand stitch the binding down to the back. It took me a little bit longer, but I finished it by Friday the 13th! I’ve actually been enjoying the slower approach to binding. The hand stitching without need for a pattern or planning is meditative. 

I chose to do crosshatch quilting, in the light gray thread that was already on my machine. It was quick and simple, pretty much the same as the patchwork. This is not an overthinking project. 

It took me a few days to actually “style” the table so it looks festive, but here’s my springtime table scape! Shopping around the decor and things I recently organized was satisfying and fun. I love how it turned out, and I am really pleased with how the handmade items I’ve been pulling out and creating new have made my home cozy and full of personality. 

girly quilt for a colleague

A coworker is expecting, and I know her well enough to feel comfortable asking if she would a) enjoy having a small quilt from a coworker and b) if girly colors and patterns were ok to use. Happily she said yes to both so I got to have a lot of fun putting this piece together. Pulling fabrics was, of course, the best part. I started out thinking I was going to use an entirely different cat fabric with bright colors, but as I pulled both from my bag of scraps I've precut into charms plus some of the pinks and floral fabrics in my stash, I gravitated more towards the softer palette here with purples, yellows, soft pinks, and neutrals. 

I knew I wanted to make something relatively simple because I didn't have much time (said coworker was going to be in town for just a week). Some creative googling led me to a tutorial on the Diamond Chain pattern at Missouri Star and followed that (loosely) to make the center panel. It looks the same, but I didn't follow the specific sewing instructions since I wasn't starting from the precuts that were shown. 

Despite including lots of yellows and purples, it was still feeling VERY neutral and kind of washed out, so I played around with some of the prints and decided to add stripes at the top and bottom. That really changed the character of the whole quilt. The purples popped much better and the yellows sparkle around the pattern instead of blending in. Very pleased with that decision!

I had exactly enough of this wonderful ric-rac stripe print for the binding. If that's not the universe saying "great choice!" I don't know what is. Aaaand it's pretty perfect. I'm finding that working with fabric collections is fun, but my real joy is in these types of projects where I can assemble something cohesive from different fabrics I've collected over time, even better if I use scraps! Some of these are offcuts from trimming quilts after quilting, one is a blender my mom sent from her stash (so quite vintage!), and of course because it's me there's some unconventional texture in there in the form of flannel. Usually it's linen, but here there be flannel kitties. 

The backing is just a couple of large leftovers of a couple of the prints that are pieced together. I quilted it with gray thread and a simple cross hatch in the center panel and "in the ditch" along the stripe seams on the top and bottom. It ended up being 32" x 44". It was a gorgeous morning today, so I snapped a couple pictures outside before heading to work with quilt in tow. I'm pleased to report that it was well received. 

bohemian ponies, finished

I made 10 yards of binding for this quilt. That is a lot! Though, I am amazed that 10 yards of binding can come from less than a yard of fabric. Magic. Or math. You know, same same. I was so motivated to finish this up that I spent a late evening sewing the binding on. I debated doing my usual zig zag to tack it down, but two things: 1) I was running out of bobbin and 2) I think I'm starting to prefer hand stitched binding. 

The sheer number of linear inches around the quilt did give me pause, of course, but once I started it zipped along pretty quickly. I even managed to enjoy it. Basically it's pre-snuggling under your quilt, right? I'm so glad I had enough of the border print to do the whole binding. It's not my usual approach, but I do like that it blends in on the front, and the back is framed nicely. 

Speaking of the back - that is an eye wateringly bright print from Anna Maria Perry's Welcome Home collection called London. I happened upon it online when I was cruising around Missouri Star's sales and I am grateful for the serendipity and the risk I took. It's bright and bohemian hip in a similar way to the front just like I thought it might be. I really enjoyed it while I was tacking down the binding. 

As I mentioned when I finished the top last January, the mix of fabrics was collected over time and worked out feeling very "me" with flowers, horses, and some of my favorite colors. I am most pleased about that, to be honest. Some of the fabrics come from the same collection (the mustangs and arrows) but otherwise they are all me-curated. I can't actually believe the luck that so many of the prints have the exact shade of mustardy greenish gold. It nicely ties everything together and it's a really unusual shade that I quite like. How lucky. 

I will say, it was totally worth having someone else quilt something as big as this. I am STILL working on hand quilting a queen sized quilt (and questioning my life choices) and even if I did quilt it myself in my machine, I would have put it off so long it would be another year before it was done. It was a real treat to be able to drop it off and pick up such a wonderful thing a month later. I'm sharing another closeup of the rather perfect quilting pattern. As I was piecing the top I remember feeling like the vibe was very tribal and geometric, plus horses and this quilt pattern captures that completely. 

As predicted, it did not take me long to get this finished after picking it up. I was so looking forward to sleeping under it as soon as possible! I am really proud of how this one turned out and tickled that it turned out to be the perfect fit for my room. 

seed packets and pouches

It is Christmas Eve, and in true procrastination style (or: I had a sweater to finish before the 17th) I am a little late on getting friend gifts put together. I have been saving seeds from my garden all year and am going to share them with folks that I know are fellow green thumbs. They all also happen to be horse people - I wonder if the two are connected. 

I had my box of labels, bags, and bows out already so I took out the winter scrapbook paper deck I keep in there (for the occasional tag) and worked out how to make some seed packets using folding and a few pieces of scotch tape. I was pretty impressed with myself! 

I also decided they should be delivered in pretty fabric pouches. I used an easy drawstring bag tutorial and some larger fabric leftovers. In the future I will have to remember that a 5-inch wide piece of fabric ends up being kind of a pain to sew around the opening on my sewing machine. The purple print was 6-inches wide to start and much nicer to work with than the other three. Still, it was all improvising and scrap play so little snags are to be expected. 

In the end, each pouch held the seed packets just fine which is the most important part. The seeds included Chocolate Cherry Sunflowers, Grandpa Ott Morning Glory, Yellow Giant Sunflowers, and Black Knight Pincushion Flowers. It's great to be able to pass on seeds from my own garden, and I'm looking forward to seeing them thrive elsewhere. 

blue improv

I've been feeling a draw towards making small things rather than quilts which is quite unusual for me. It took me a while to get back to the sewing machine though because I knew that the "next thing" I wanted to make was the Firefly Tote and I was intimidated by the pattern! But now that I've gotten over that mental block and made an amazing first one, more holiday gifting presented the perfect opportunity for more small, quick makes. Enter coasters. While I often have trouble deciding what my sister in law will like, we've had success gifting each other things that we would like to receive. I think fabric coasters are so cute and she is a tea drinker so they are likely to be appreciated. 

This improv and scrap play was really fun. Quite a while ago I organized my scraps and trimmed many down into pre-cut square sizes. That stash was SO satisfying to pull from. Even the batting was from scraps trimmed off of quilts! My sister in law is a fan of blue, and I had some favorite prints still floating around. I used an ikat print for the "back" (these could indeed be reversible) and sort of intuited my way through the front making mistakes into design features. I was originally trying to do just one large half square triangle with two quarter square triangles but ask me about my cutting math.... In the end they turned out looking even better than intended. 

I could have just tied these up with a ribbon, but why not take the opportunity to make another cute small thing. I found a tiny basket tutorial (Fabric Mutt's Pixie Basket) and thought I'd use some wintery prints to give the whole thing some holiday flair. The outer fabric is a heavy canvas and the inner fabric is a flannel, so it's a bit more substantial than as written, and a bit of a pain to sew if I'm honest. That was totally down to the fabric choices though, not the pattern. If I were to make one again I wouldn't use such a heavy outer - it also made it weird to get the lining fabric to fold down inside over the bulky seam, so I just left it as is. It's cute to see it peek over the edge anyway - another happy accident!

To round out the theme of "enjoy a cup of cozy tea" I added a few bags of some of my favorite teas from Trader Joe's - Winter Warmup, Orange Rooibos, and Well Rested. This all got boxed up and wrapped, and shipped off just in time! Phew, I'm really cutting things close this year. 

improvisational squares

I like watching Pin, Cut, Sew on YouTube when she's working on quilt projects, and a recent video was about wonky four patches. It got me feeling like I wanted to play a bit with some color, and I happened to have some pre-cut stacks of scraps to use. 

Since they were already squares I declined the wonky direction and just went with four patches instead. It was a fun (late!) evening of improvisational piecing, serendipitous pairings, and I kind of like what I ended up with. I'm not sure yet what these will end up being, but it was quite fun to take a break from all the knitting. I'm currently considering a wall hanging for outside my sewing room. 

 

stitch markers for crawl

Bay Area Yarn Crawl is just around the corner, and I recently heard that there will be a stitch marker swap as part of the festivities. I've made some in the past, and this seemed like a great opportunity to dig into my miscellaneous beads and findings and see what I could come up with. 

These yarn hanks are really fun and unique. It's kind of a kick to contemplate all the different colors of yarn on the shelves of a yarn shop and to recreate them in miniature. I have a lot of DMC floss from a very long time ago, and these variegated colors haven't been that useful to me in stitching but are the perfect mini hand dyed yarn. 

These little sparkles look just like oblong skeins of yarn to me. The silver findings in the middle give the impression of the label and the jewels on the end are the squishy yarn bits. 

And of course I couldn't pass up the chance to add some of my sunflower charms to a few. These lovelies are combined with the sparkly yarn skeins and millefiori heart beads to make longer charms that should hang quite nicely. 

I made markers on several different sizes of rings and even included a couple of safety pins (saved from clothing!) to accommodate use in crochet. I'll have to find a good box or tin to pop these in for carrying around during the yarn crawl. No idea how this will go, but it was certainly fun to revisit stitch marker making!

glamour shots to catch up

While I was out photographing my North Sea wrap yesterday, I decided to take advantage of the beautiful day and great lighting to take pictures of some knit pieces that I have finished since 2021 (and also a way better picture of my Shetland shawl than I had).

Shetland shawl August 2017 - June 2019. Literally one of my favorite things I've ever made and I never took very good photos of it. It's 6 feet square, so that's a challenge. It's folded in half here the way I've been wearing it. 

Phoenix started week 22 of pandemic, according to blog post titles (August 2020) and finished Aug 16 2021which is the day after I went back to work.

This is a pattern out of my Colorwork Shawls book by Melanie Berg and made with some beautifully hand dyed wool and silk yarn from a woman I met at Stitches West the one time I went. The stripes between the green and blue yarn didn't workout quite as well as I imagined, but the wash of color against the bright orange is still pretty and you can still see the interesting geometry of the sideways construction. 

Scarf of my own design Feb 20 - Mar 27 2022. Very cozy yarn from Monarch Knitting in Monterey. I can remember purposely choosing a combination of colors that I don't normally wear. 

Unlike many of the wool-based knits I make, this one feels good on my skin and doesn't seem to irritate it if I wear it a long time. It's extremely soft, and I wonder if I'd ever be brave enough to knit a sweater with it. 

This crochet blanket was a fun thing I made in April of 2022. I can't remember how, where, or why I got this yarn but I suspect the pattern may have been something from the label. 

I made the blanket shorter than was called for and got to play with making some wonderfully dense pompoms to add onto the ends using the rest of the yarn. It's a great blanket for the couch, and those pompoms never get old. 

Fractured is a cowl that Dave picked colors out for a while back on one of our trips down to Monterey. It's Brooklyn Tweed yarn from Monarch Knitting, and I finally cast it on this past year and worked on it sporadically from January to December.

I started it in January intending to have it done for his birthday in February, but it was slower going than I hoped. I blocked it out over the holidays and am amazed at how much everything evened out. It looks great and I'm hoping it suits his oceanside lifestyle.

improv with scraps

I have been inspired by another Missouri Star tutorial I found and have pulled out my scrap jars to improv piece. This has the satisfaction of clearing the slate (for more scraps, of course) combined with the slight intimidation of having no plan. It was actually quite addicting, once I got started. 

I started out thinking I was just going to do a bunch of random strip pieced blocks, but it evolved. Eventually the approach I took was to sort scraps into little piles based on shape and color and then decide how to use them from there. Many of them lent themselves well to monochromatic blocks, and others were experiments in combinations that I found pleasing or that were inspired by a multi color print. 

I have ended up with quite a few blocks of random shape and size.

I'm not certain what these will end up being yet; they may end up in one big project, or they may be fun pieces for some small projects. I don't think knowing is the point, really. This was about sitting down and just playing for a while. And how great it is to see the way my mind works! I started out with those random diagonal strip blocks but quickly ended up picking just one or two colors to create themes for blocks. Even in improv I gravitate towards some order.

using what I've got

I'm feeling like I'm winning at quilting this month. I'm pretty jazzed about this latest milestone because it took no time at all. Except it did. A lot of time. These French braid blocks have been around since before I moved to this house. That's at least 5 years, probably longer, languishing in a "to be dealt with later when inspiration strikes" box. I can remember making them with no particular plan in mind, just wanting to play with the braid pattern to see how it works.

Well, since the flurry of making with my mom in November I pulled these out and threw them on my wall. Then they sat, and I wasn't inspired. Again. Still. I thought about adding a bunch of negative space in navy, some blocks with cute appliqué mushrooms, make a big big quilt. Then I realized I didn't want this one to be a big quilt; it doesn't rise to the level of "I want it on a bed" for me. And then I realized I didn't have any fabric on hand that would match to make any mushrooms out of - not a scrap of these to be seen. And then I realized what was feeling really good lately was being able to use what I had on hand to make things, without going out and getting more stuff. So. They got put away again, and I made a whole different quilt top. 

Directly after finishing that project, I realized I had hit the jackpot. The jelly roll jackpot. Similar to how easy it was to sash the stacks of bricks, it could be just as easy to do that here. What an elegant solution. I debated cutting strips of gray instead, but the gray I have on hand clashes with the gray end pieces I added on (a continued design regret since I did it, but one I am choosing not to remedy). It took a little bit of finessing because the bias edges had all stretched to different degrees over the years, but I managed and it took just an afternoon to get this albatross taken care of. 

 

Now of course, there is the question of backing the thing, but the decision of what to do with the braids has been made, and it will end up being a fun summery throw quilt. 

happy new year, a quick quilt top

[Note, I will be back filling this blog with posts "written" at the time the projects were actually done, I will be writing now but my sensibilities are much more satisfied with backdating them. There's been a few things since 2021, but not a whole lot to catch up on until quite a bit this past year, so I think it's not too crazy to do this. For now, I am actually starting to write real-time again in January 2025 because I have found the mental space to miss it.]

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I can't quite believe how happy I am with this project. The fact that so many of my quilts-in-waiting are now finished (minus one) has really lifted weight off my mind and allowed my creative juices to start swirling around big projects again. 

I have had most of the fabrics I used for this quilt sitting together in a stack for a long time. I knew I wanted to use them together, I just did not know how. Those mustang prints from Melody Miller are large scale and I have struggled to imagine cutting into them and losing most of the "fun" I get from the pattern. I like that they are horses running together - having a random ear or head in a half square triangle block or something like that just wouldn't do it for me. There's also a great print from Sarah Watts called Horseback which, appropriately, has sketches of horses with bright saddle pads on the perfect greenish blue. Note for the interested, it's the Honeymoon line for Cotton + Steel (just in case it ever gets re-released, I'll remember what it is from this note). Regardless, a special collection over time for sure. I had a hankering to play with these fabrics now that my table and mind are clear, and so I just started laying them out and adding a few more leftovers of prints that I thought might play nicely. 

I was binging on some Missouri Star Quilt Co. tutorials on YouTube while all of this was going on, and one of the projects that came up was a slant rhyme to a coin quilt. While coin quilts are usually smaller strips, this Simple Stacks quilt was stacks of 5"x10" cuts of fabric, ideal for large prints. I didn't buy the pattern, but the great thing about those videos is it gives you the gist of the pattern well enough for a person who has quilted a bunch to be able to do it on your own. I did watch the tutorial a few times to absorb what was going on, and then I committed to cutting out some big bricks of fabric. I adjusted the size to be more amenable to the fat quarter and half yard cuts I had, and away I went. 

It didn't take long, maybe a couple of evenings, to get all of the fabric cut. I used as much of my stack of curated fabrics as I could and then augmented with some Anna Maria Horner scraps and one mustard tree fabric that I don't remember the origins of. It matches those mustard mustangs pretty perfectly. I was doing math on the fly to see how many bricks I would need and about how large the quilt would end up being. My goals were to have something that would use up fabric and be proportional, so I was pretty much making it up as I went along. In terms of fabric placement, I resisted the usual impulse I have to be deliberate. I made myself improvise a bit and just try not to put things near each other that were too similar. And guess what? I didn't die. And it looks great.

In digging through my cabinet for fabric to use for sashing, I found leftovers from an all-white jelly roll that was hiding in the back. What. A. Gift. It was so easy to just piece a bunch together and go to town on sashing the thing. By the time I was done, it was tempting to leave it without more of a border, which is what I usually do. The "modern" look of no borders is generally appealing to me. But. I laid it out on my bed and it was so close to being the perfect size to drape nicely over the sides of my mattress that I decided to go for it. The teal linen was leftover from my shot cotton quilt and I found a floral print that I remember buying yardage of thinking "I'll use this as a quilt back, or something. It's on sale and it's pretty.". I debated adding the more 'traditional' looking fabric with the more tribal/geometric mix I had, but it actually worked out pretty great since there were a few florals thrown in there anyway. Mixing the two also makes it feel a bit more bohemian to me, which I like. 

I'm really proud of how it all works together without having been a designer's collection. How did I have all of these great things in my stash?? The top measures 84"x96" and it's going to be epic. I'm pretty sure I will finish it on my machine with the wavy preset stitch pattern. I'm not sure what thread color to use yet, but I have some time to mull it over because I don't have a great backing fabric at the moment. It took me just under a week to work this up, and it feels like a great way to start this year's creative adventures.