Bird and Little Bird

A Little Bit Here, A Little Bit There.

 

 

 

I had originally planned to try to work on my new quilt some each day, the way that I did with the last one that I made. That worked out well; the piecing work never felt overwhelming and I developed a rhythm with it that gradually built until the top was all of a sudden finished.

But there is a lot going on here these days. Work on the book. The kids and I moving from one house to another. I started a new teaching job the end of last week and now it is school vacation for the big kid.  So, not so much with the quilting and the knitting and the other non-required activities.

Just a little bit here and a little bit there, when the pace of things slows enough to allow it.

The Book I'm Not Writing.

 

If I were going to write a book about quilting,* it would be called something like The Lazy Girl's Guide to Making Quilts and Stuff. It would be about two pages long, and both of them would be dedicated to detailing the dangers of rotary cutters. Because I'm pretty sure that the rest is all just unimportant details. Right?

Hmn.

* I am not going to write a book about quilting, so don't worry.

Yarn Along (The Other Needle).

The Tea Leaves is ongoing. As in, on and on it goes. The knitting is pleasant, and although the progress is perhaps slow, it is for various good reasons.

For one, the baby has been sick with a wicked head cold all week long. Under normal circumstances little man is super cute and hilarious and a general snuggly delight. But let us take a moment to note the absence of the word "easygoing" in the aforementioned list of adjectives. And when he isn't feeling well? Sweet Christmas gravy (as my friend Ed would say). Things go from mundane to mayhem with astonishing speed. So there's that.

But the other reason that I haven't been doing quite as much knitting, is because actually, I have been sewing. The perfect storm of pets and resident small people has resulted in the near total destruction of a couple of the slip covers for the cushions on the living room couch. I decided that rather than moping about the sad state of one of the few real pieces of furniture we own, I would remember that things are just things and make some new pillow covers. And that I would do so with cheerful resolve. Or something approximating it.

 

With our big move on the horizon, I decided that said pillows would need to be made entirely out of fabric already in my stash. Of course, I almost immediately decided that I wanted some other stuff too, so I dug through my friend Sarah's stash as well, and between the scraps that we both had, came out with a pretty good pile to work from. This first pillow is actually kind a huge mess. I am the world's laziest quilter, so the pieces are pretty wonky and a lot of the seams don't quite line up. And it turns out that this doesn't bother me all that much. One of my roomates will probably just eat it anyway.

 

I decided early on in the whole process to ditch the idea of piping and zippers. Something about those features is making the official couch pillows of particular culinary interest to the puppy, and I think it is best to just eliminate temptation. Also, the lazy thing again. This second pillow cover is a little less haphazard than the first, being an actual semblance of a log cabin quilt square. I'm hoping to finish it this evening and bring our sum total of couch pillows back to regular numbers.

In all, I think I'm reasonably happy with how the whole project is going, even if it is taking me a lot more time than I expected. And I seem to have won Mariam's approval, despite her initial declarations that something was kind of off about the whole thing. She appears to have come up with some kind of idea that real grown-ups don't generally rebuild their home decor from scraps of stuff they find in a basket under the desk.

But she is in the other room using fluorescent colored duct tape to resecure her solar system mobile to the ceiling above her bed, so she has no interior design credibility as far as I'm concerned.

Yarning along with Ginny today (well, in spirit at least).

Birthday Blankets and Medical School Musings.

This past Monday was Annie 2.0's birthday.  I might have mentioned this sooner except that it took me until mid-week to finish stitching up her birthday gift.  Because it was that sort of week with the baby.  But I did manage to finish it up pre-birthday celebration dinner, which I felt like was a decent sized accomplishment.  I made her a lap duvet ala the Purl Bee and I now pretty much want to make one hundred of them.  So soft and lovely.  I didn't originally plan on actually using Nani Iro for the main fabric, because it is generally the sort of expensive that you might justify for a wedding present but maybe not a birthday gift.  But, the brushed twill was on sale at nido and so I was able to use the good stuff afterall.

 

If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember various things about Annie 2.0.  For instance, we have learned that she is equally comfortable grabbing a garden snake with her bare hands or driving a small tractor.  It's handy to have a friend like that around.  But also, she is perhaps the only person in my life at the moment who can totally understand the plight of the medical school spouse.  I try very hard not to complain excessively about the whole affair, but having a husband in medical school can be crazy making at times, and it is nearly impossible to explain it to anyone who isn't also living it, however loving and well intentioned they may be.  Having a friend around who is wedged in the same position and still manages to remain reasonably positive about things is a sanity saver, to say the very least.

Happy Birthday, Annie!

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.