Bird and Little Bird

Quilt Talk.

Some of you may remember my mad attempts to finish making a quilt for our bedroom during my overly ambitious days of late pregnancy.  Perhaps some of you even wondered if I managed to get it done on time, although probably not.  I'm guessing you have plenty of other things to think about. 

Anyhow, the quilt did, indeed, get finished.  But here's the thing: I'm not really a quilter, although I do occasionally play one on the internet.  I pieced the entire thing myself, and was pretty pleased with how it came together, but I was also smart enough to know that my feelings of goodwill towards this project could be easily done away with by frustrating attempts to quilt and bind the whole thing while eight months pregnant and absolutely enormous.  Plus, when it came right down to it, I just didn't really feel like doing it.  So, I bundled up the quilt top, stuffed it into a box and sent it off to Alewives.  They did the quilting and binding for me, and I had them add the batting and backing from materials in their shop.  By the time I got the quilt top off to them, I was really, truly, ridiculously pregnant and I found the Alewives folks to be extraordinarily tolerant of my particular brand of third trimester crazy.  Like when they called and asked how I wanted the quilting pattern to look and I said "Oh, I have no idea.  Why don't you just think of something and do it?  I'm sure it will be fine." Like I hadn't just spent months working on this quilt only to turn it over to strangers and tell them to do whatever they wanted with it.  Ha!  But they did a lovely job, so my faith turns out to have been very well placed.

The batting is washable wool, and so far I think it is amazing.  I don't know that I will ever go back to cotton after experiencing how well wool works in a quilt. From the beginning, this quilt was designed to be used.  I wanted to make a quilt that would be woven into daily life and that could be washed when it got kid dirt on it and that would feel warm and cozy during the long Vermont winter.  And that is exactly what I made.  So as far as feeling some latent guilt over the fact that I had a little help with the nuts and bolts of the operation? None.  I'm sleeping very well at night under my new quilt, thank you very much.

 

Buckets for Baby Things.

 

With only about six weeks left to go, I'm starting to realize that the pre-baby to-do list is a little on the lengthy side.  The crib is assembled and nestled into a little alcove opposite our bed, and the bedroom walls have been repainted, so a few things have gotten done.  But there are quite a few more.  One item that had been hanging out near the top of my list was stitching up some fabric buckets for storing baby clothes.  We are using up what little space we have for furniture on the mini-crib, so the little guy won't have a dresser of his own.  Instead, I found a small, low bookshelf that I'm planning to line with baskets and bins to hold all the little socks and onesies and whatnot.  Goodness, I do love the little socks.  I finished the first couple of buckets today, using the incredibly simple but perfectly genius nesting buckets pattern from Maya.  Do you read Maya's blog?  If not, you should.  She is one of the nicest gals on the interwebs as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, I used a natural colored linen for the main fabric for the buckets, and some Heather Ross Far, Far Away III for the rest.  For the middle layer, I used The Mystery Batting.  The Mystery Batting is a random cut of batting made from unknown material that I picked up at a fabric warehouse sale a few years back.  I've always suspected it was wool, but had no proof.  Anyway, The Mystery Batting is pretty fluffy, floppy stuff, so for the next round of bucket sewing I will probably go with something a little stiffer.  But since I'm assuming that these buckets will be fairly well filled, I think that having such soft sides won't really be a problem for them. 

Longer than necessary story made short: I'm really happy with how these turned out and am planning to make a bunch more in different sizes. 

 

Oh, and if you don't need buckets for baby clothes, you could absolutely put other things in them instead.

One Step Closer.

You know how sometimes the best way to get something done is to do it while feeling like you are really, really supposed to be doing something else?  Such is the way with the quilt.  For some reason, the fact that I need to write a semi-enormous paper about my local library and its collection of cookbooks has me feeling like quilting is the most important and logical use of my time.  Well, I suppose there is also the element of having reached the thirty week mark in my pregnancy and feeling like it is time to start doing something to get ready.  The small fry is going to be sharing a room with Dan and me, so part of the preparation process is a somewhat major overhaul of bedroom decor.  I'm trying to convince Annie 2.0 to help me repaint this weekend, and we've already ordered the small amount of "nursery" type furniture that we think will be useful enough to justify the space it is going to take up in our not-so-spacious bedroom. 

So, the quilt.  I really want it to be finished sooner rather than later, and laying the pieced rows out on the bed today to make sure that they look like they actually belong together gets me one step closer.  I didn't actually lay out the individual triangles before piecing them; I couldn't seem to find enough cat-free time and space to do that.  Instead, I made piles of the different triangles and then put together rows by pulling from each pile in a different order so that ideally, each row would be slightly different.  Of course, it wasn't a perfect system, so there was some adjusting to be done with the rows themselves once they were stitched, but in all, I still think it was much faster to do it this way.  Also, I was less confused, which counts for quite a bit.

Now, there is a lot of pressing and sewing in my immediate future.  After cookbook cataloging, that is. 

One at a Time.

I mentioned the other day that I had finally gotten around to cutting out the pieces for the quilt that I've been planning to make for about the last year.  Afraid that I might lose momentum on the project (again), I decided that I should probably give myself some sort of parameters for the sewing bit.  My agreement with myself was that I would piece one row a day, meaning that I could have the rows all done and ready to arrange and stitch together in a little under a month. 

It's is probably best to just admit that I have a really hard time starting things.  I have a project que a thousand miles long, and this is unlikely to change unless I undergo a radical personality transformation sometime soon.  I'll let you know.  Anyway, this quilt has been at the top of my list for such a longtime, and it started to seem like the longer it sat there, the more difficult it was to just get on with it already.  I am therefore pleased to report that the "row a day" commitment is going swimmingly.  In fact, now that I've removed the pressure to finish the project quickly that I usually apply to myself, I find that I'm having a pretty good time piecing the rows and instead of the five I planned on having done at this point in the week, I've done eleven. 

Of course, there may be another limiting factor in this situation: in yet another effort to demonstrate that pregnancy is filled with nothing but joy and wonder, I can really only sit down for a few minutes at a time before my ankles totally swell up.  Not that you needed to know that.

A Fox for Molly.

Some of you may remember my gushing over Molly's lovely little crocheted star garlands awhile back.  I had offered to trade someone a fox or a rabbit if they wanted to make me one, and indeed, Molly herself took me up on the offer.  So, we worked a little crafty trade.  The best kind, you know.  This is Molly's fox, now officially dispatched to his new home in California.  

And speaking of crafty trades, Molly has been secretly at work on a rock-your-socks idea. Very shortly she will be announcing the official launch of Blarter, a website devoted to helping bloggers arrange craft and craft supply exchanges.  Genius, no?  Watch her blog over the next couple of days for more news.  

 

Dressed in Cloud9.

A little while back, I got an email from Michelle of Cloud9 Fabrics, asking if I might be interested in making a couple of animals from my patterns for the Cloud9 Quilt Market display.  For reference, this is exactly the sort of thing that I say "yes" to.  Quickly.  I have long been a fan of Michelle's design work for her personal fabric line, Cicada Studio, and the previous Cloud9 collections have all been lovely.  

The new collection, Nature Walk, is no exception.  I love the diverse color palette and the brightness of the prints.  Like the rest of the Cloud9 collections, these fabrics are organic and are printed with low impact dyes.  They are also incredibly soft, which is somehow very important to me.  I'm planning to incorporate some of these fabrics into the quilt that I am now thinking very hard about making. But that is another story altogether.

So, these friendly fellows are headed for Quilt Market.  I'm sure they will have a wonderful time.  I kind of wish I was going along.  

And, Done.

 

Remember this? Well, you'll be glad to know that something did eventually come of it. Actually, the basic structure of this smock was finished a couple of months ago, but really needed a pair of well placed pockets in order to be officially called complete.  Taking the time to finish detail work on projects is generally the thing that holds me back, and this was certainly the case here.  It took me three months to find the fifteen necessary minutes to be able to do the sewing needed to take the smock out the mending pile and hang it in the closet.  

 

I ended up pretty much ditching the original pattern on which the basic structure of the smock was based.  Instead, I came up with an a-line shape that worked well enough for the front (with room to add some pintucks), and then made a back that was slightly smaller but split into two pieces. It closes at the top of the back with a single wooden button.  In other words, I'm not exactly sure how I made this thing, and I'm not sure that I could duplicate it.  

Oooh... check out my messy dining room table and laundry pile in the photo background.  I don't think I meant for you to see that. 

Handmade Love, Indeed.

I like embroidery.  A whole lot.  I love how the simple act of repeating small stitches many times can make such a beautiful picture.  However, I'm not so very good at it.  Although I do have my ambitions.  My mom does a lovely job of it though, which is why I enlisted her to stitch up a couple of my favorite patterns from Nicole, also known by her blog and shop name Follow the White Bunny.  Nicole and I have done some pattern trading in the past, and have been known to tweet back and forth to each other throughout the day about any number of things, including the fact that I wear very sensible shoes.  In other words, she's not just a creative superstar, she's really nice too.  

The picture above is one of the finished patterns that my mom started when she was here visiting last summer.  She sent it to me in the fall, along with another, and both are destined to go on the wall in Mariam's room.  I haven't hung them yet, because I ran into an unbelievably long shortage of appropriately sized embroidery hoops in not one but all of my local craft stores.  Completely bizarre.  And I really do want wooden hoops and not plastic.  So right now, only one of the finished patterns is ready for hanging.  The hoop that I ordered online for the other didn't quite fit, so I'm going to try to make one more go at the local shops and hope that they've restocked.  

I figure that I've still got a bit of time to find the right sized hoop.  Mariam's birthday is at the end of next month, and my idea is to hang these pieces as part of a big bedroom redo that will be her birthday surprise.  More about that later, no doubt. 

Basic Bookmaking: Miniature Center-Stitched Book.

It's funny, lately I have actually been doing a fair amount of crafting, but have been almost wholly remiss in actually posting about said crafting here.  On my craft blog.  Right.  I think that at this point we can all sort of agree that my blog has undergone at least a handful of transformations over the course of the nearly six years (!) of it's existence.

Sewing blog to craft blog to small business blog to parenting blog.  I should make a colorful flow chart.  I think maybe now this space has simply become the internet extension of my brain.  It is whatever I want it to be on any given day, and I feel pretty grateful that people seem to be patient enough with me to continue reading along.  Even on the days where I just talk about my cat or how much I like acorns.  Oh man, and those painfully nerdy and too frequent posts about woodpeckers.  You all are seriously good to me.

Anyway, I digress.  What I mean to say is this: yes, the making stuff part of this here blog has been a bit absent.  But not because I haven't been making stuff.  I have. And these little books are among the things that I've been making, and I'm going to tell you how to make them too. 

Miniature Center-Stitched Books

 

What you will need:

paper for inside pages

cardstock or cover weight paper for cover

bookbinding thread (or upholstery weight sewing thread or something else that's strong)

bookbinding needle or other strong, slightly blunt needle (embroidery needles could work)

bone folder, craft stick or other folding tool

 

What you will do: 

 

Cut a stack of regular paper for the inside pages of the book, and a piece of cover weight paper for the cover.  The cover piece should be slightly bigger than the pieces for the pages.  Here I used pieces of paper that are 3 inches by 4 1/4 inches for the pages.  The cover piece is 3 1/4 inches by 4 1/2 inches.  

 

Using your folding tool, fold the cover in half by carefully matching up the corners of the cover stock and making a sharp crease at the fold.  Do the same for each of the pieces of paper going inside the book.  

 

Stack the folded pages inside one another, and then fit them inside the cover.  Using your folding tool again, press on the pages at the fold to really push them into a tight stack with the creases of each page tightly fitted to the one behind, and the whole stack tightly fitted into the cover.  

Even if you really smash the creases into one another, you may find that your stack of pages no longer has an even edge.  If this is true, and it bothers you, take the stack of pages out of the cover, and while still folded into one another, trim them with a papercutting knife, a sharp pair of scissors, an x-acto.  That sort of thing.   

 

Clip your stack together in a couple of places so that it will hold together, and use some kind of sharp object to poke holes all the way through the stack.  A bookbinding awl is great, but you can also use a nail, a needle- whatever you've got.  Since this is a relatively thin book, something small and sharp should work fine.  The spacing of the holes is up to you, but you'll want an even number and they should be done in pairs.  For this book, I did four sets of holes, with 1/4 inch space between the holes in each pair.  Each pair of holes is spaced 1/2 inch apart, with the first hole on each end being 1/4 inch from the edge.

 

Thread your needle and tie a knot in one end of the thread.  Starting on the outside cover and pushing your needle through to the inside, pull the thread through the first hole at one end of the book.  We'll think of this as the bottom from now on.  Go back out through the neighboring hole, and then repeat the process in the next hole up, going from the outside of the book in, and then out the next hole on the inside.  

Keep stitching until you have reached the top of the book, and it looks like the above picture. 

 

Repeat the same process, this time going from the top of the book back down, making stitches in between the ones that are already there so that the outside of the book looks like the picture above (the inside will look like this too).  

 

 

Tie the two ends of your thread into a tight knot to secure your stitching and trim the ends.

 

I used a bit of bookcloth tape to cover the outside of the book and hide my stitching, but it's really just an extra step and isn't necessary.  If you do want to cover your spine and don't have bookcloth or bookcloth tape, you could probably get away with a bit of lightweight fusible interfacing and a strip of fabric, provided you are very careful with the iron!  Okay, yes, I've done it before...

 

I also used a handheld corner rounding tool to round the corners of my pages and cover. Again, definitely optional, but also pretty easy to do if you feel as though it's a detail that you like.  

And that's pretty much it!  Not nearly as complicated as it seems, and really a pretty quick project.  And guess what else? 

We can add this book to our list of things to put in tiny envelopes.  It fits perfectly.

 

The template for the envelope is here:

Envelope template

Follow the White Bunny Giveaway.

If my knowledge of time zones is at all adequate, I'm thinking that there are only a few hours left to enter Nicole's blogiversary (300th post, I believe) giveaway.  You can read about the details of the giveaway on her blog, Follow the White Bunny.  Nicole and I have become blog neighbors of sorts over the last few months and have been trading emails, patterns and surprise packages.  Very fun.  Anyway, I offered to contribute a couple of patterns to her giveaway this weekend, so if you've been wanting to make a fox or a rabbit, this may be your chance.

My mom recently finished using a couple of Nicole's embroidery patterns to make wall hangings for Mariam's room.  I'll show them off as soon as I can find the right size embroidery hoops for hanging them up; the local craft stores have been out of eight-inch hoops for weeks now.  They are super cute though, so I may just give in and order some hoops online so that I can get them on the wall!