Thursday, October 28, 2010

Numenorean Design

I felt the need for a new hand project and I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings. There are so many wonderful designs in the architecture and clothing in these movies. The floor of the kings hall in the citadel of Minis Tirith was the inspiration for the basic design - the on-point square with circles.


I stitched this design by machine and now I am going back and filling in with hand stitching.


Wow! You can really tell the difference in the lighting conditions of my sewing room. The second picture is truer to the real color of the turquoise wool I am using.

The current plan is to cover the machine stitching by couching some thin crochet thread over it. I have beads and buttons that may get added too. At the moment I do not have a firm plan of where this is going. I'm just making a decision about one part then doing it. As I work, other ideas come to me which I write down or sketch in my idea book.

If you are interested, you can see the floor I am talking about in the third movie, The Return of the King.

This will be my last post for a few days. I am going on a quilt retreat this weekend with my guild. I leave as soon as possible tomorrow morning. Today is being filled with packing and baking.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Making Progress on House Ornaments

I didn't get the ornaments finished yesterday, but I'm making progress.


I need to press them nicely and then sew around the edges to close up the opening.

Today I have to go meet my students and then I need to begin preparing to leave for the weekend to my guild's annual retreat. Not great timing to have it Halloween weekend but most of our guild members don't have Trick-or-Treat age children. Where we are going is only about an hour from home so I plan to just leave about lunch time on Sunday. That will get me home in plenty of time to prepare for our Trick-or-Treat party.

I haven't shared any kitten cuteness recently so here you go.



It is getting colder here so the felines are scouting out the sunny spots in the house.

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Market Day

Parker and I finished up his fire flies for Market Day yesterday afternoon.



All that is left is to add the glow stick. They go inside the bottle. He is going to let his customers choose which color glow stick they want since I bought several different colors.

I am making progress on my house ornaments too. I got the doors and windows appliqued on this morning. Now all that is left is to sew the front and back together, turn, press and stitch around the outside.

Sunday, October 24, 2010

Artist's Toolbox Course at QU

I signed up for the Artist's Toolbox course at Quilt University taught by Lyric Kinard. The class began on Friday evening. This morning I had a little bit of time to start on my homework. There are several exercises for this week. One of them is to sketch texture in our surroundings. This morning I sketched "rough."


The bricks on the outside of our house have a rough texture. I am just learning to draw, but I am pretty pleased with this one. Below is the view outside my sewing room window from my rocking chair. It is the wall I sketched.

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Ornament Decision

I have tested several possible ornaments for this year and I have made a decision. I will be making the house ornaments.


Yesterday I cut out all the house pieces and started assembling them.


Instead of putting a number on the back of each house, I am putting the recipient's name, the year and my initials.

I found out yesterday that Parker's class is having another Market Day next Friday. I wonder when the note is going to come home about this? Grrr! Luckily, Parker and I have already planned our craft and have all the key ingredients already. We are going to make fire flies. We decided this last school year when we thought there was going to be a third Market Day. The third one didn't happen in 2nd grade so we just saved all the stuff since he was going to be with the same teacher this year.

I have made a little more progress on my Strata project.


This is likely to be as far as I get with this for a while. I plan to be making fire flies this weekend and finishing the ornaments if there is time and energy left over after the fire flies.

Friday, October 22, 2010

Secret Agents

I finished another Christmas gift yesterday, the third on my list. I can't show you photos yet because I know the recipient reads my blog. I had seven gifts or sets of gifts to make on my list. So far, I have completed four of the seven. Yippee skippy!

Since I can't show you pictures of my sewing project, I'll share photos of Parker's latest venture. He and his friend Jamie are now Secret Agents.


Here are closeups of each sign - because this is just so cute!




Seems like quite a bargain! Let me know if you have a problem and I'll have the Secret Agents contact you. Wink, wink!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Strata Project

My art group met yesterday and we started a strata quilt project. This is as far as I got yesterday during our meeting.


I made other units at our meeting that aren't shown here and added a few more pieces to this yesterday afternoon after I got home. This is about 18" wide and I'd like to make it at least 18" long. The next step will be to cut it up into squares (or some other shape but I'm thinking squares). I will rearrange the squares then sew them back together. I am considering appliqueing some circles on it but have not yet decided if I want to do that before or after cutting it up.

I finished the blocks for my Clifford charity quilt.


All blocks were sewn as Leaders and Enders while making other things.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Productive Weekend

My boys (son and husband) went to Colorado Springs for the weekend. It was probably my last "home alone" weekend until after ski season, so I took full advantage. I didn't even turn on my computer yesterday because I didn't want to get sucked into something and end up wasting valuable sewing time. So what did I make?

Remember all those things I cut out recently? Click here to read that post. I got them all made.




Saturday was my monthly guild meeting too. We had a class after the meeting to make a grab and go bag.



It has a variety of pockets inside and could be used for a travel sewing kit, knitting or crochet kit or for a scrapbooker to carry supplies. I have no idea what I'm going to do with mine. I was just taking the class to socialize.

Goldie missed her boy very much this weekend! She drove me crazy yesterday. Just look at this!


This is my sewing chair. It is very hard to concentrate on a project with a cat looking over your shoulder!

Friday, October 15, 2010

Satin Edge Blankies

I have signed up with Jean from the Quilted Cupcake to make some blankets for Project Night Night. I am making what we call boppies (pronounced bop - i ) at our house. My mom has been making these blankets for years and all of her grandchildren have received at least one. When Parker was not yet 2 he corrected me one day, telling me that his was not a "blankie" but a "boppi." You can't argue with a one-year old! So that is what we call them.

Anyway, these are just one yard of flannel with a satin binding. Very easy to make. I cut off the selvedge and just try to make the piece of flannel as close to a true rectangle as possible. Then using one package of satin binding, bind the rectangle of flannel. If you use more than a yard of flannel, you will need more than one package of satin binding. I have made three so far.




If you are interested in joining Jean and me in this endeavor, click on the Project Night Night link above to go directly to Jean's blog for the details of her effort. You can make any blanket or quilt that fits the criteria. You should also listen to Jean's podcast, The Quilted Cupcake, if you don't already. Look for it on iTunes.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Cutting

I have been cutting out stuff today. I signed up for Sandy's Holiday Challenge over at Quilting for the Rest of Us, so most of what I cut out today are going to be gifts. Click on the link to go see what the challenge is all about.

The first project I cut out is not a gift. It will be a zipper pouch for me to match the purse I made recently.


All of these will eventually be a purse with a matching zipper pouch.




I don't feel like I accomplished a whole lot, but that is only because I didn't actually sew anything today. The cutting was a lot of work!

Monday, October 11, 2010

I'm Back

My class ended yesterday! Yippee! In case you were worried, I passed. I was able to do a little more work on my New York Beauty project during the week in 15 - 20 minute segments. Here is what it looked like last time I posted it.


And here is what it looks like this morning.


I'm sorry I didn't take in between photos. I was just so glad to have a few minutes to sew that I didn't want to waste any time trying to take process photos. I think the piecing part is done. I am starting to think about how to quilt it.


Since I haven't posted in a week, I have a few cat photos to share. The first was taken on Tuesday, Oct. 6th.


It is Goldie and Maggie both asleep on our bed. Notice the water bottle in between them to remind Goldie to leave Maggie alone. Goldie has been slowly trying to make friends. The picture below was taken just yesterday. I did not think this day would ever come!


They stayed like this for about an hour. I'm not sure Maggie ever realized Goldie was in the chair with her.

This last one was taken on Saturday. Parker and I watched a movie in the afternoon and he felt Goldie needed some friends to watch with her.

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

I won, I won!

On Pat Sloan's Radio show last week the guests were Leah Day and Rossie, two of my favorite bloggers. I won the template set that Rossie was giving away! They arrived yesterday.


She sent me the circles set! Circles are my favorite shape. This was the set I was hoping she would send. Dreams do come true!

I can't wait to play with these. Included with the templates were directions for how she uses these both with dye and discharge processes. Alas, this will have to wait until next week when the @#$% class I am currently taking is over. In fact, I think this will be my last post until next week as a result of this class.

Just to give you an idea of how much time I have been spending on it - my son went to school with mismatched socks one day last week because he had no clean matching socks and my husband fixed dinner one night so that I could work a little longer. I use a laptop computer, usually I only need to recharge my laptop battery once every 2 or 3 days. I have yet to make it through a day without needing to recharge the battery since this course started. Not that all my computer time has been spent on this course, I do still have three classes I am teaching for which I use my computer often and I read blogs on my computer, but I have been spending a lot more time on the computer than I usually do.

On Sunday morning I had about a half hour to sew a bit. I made a little more progress on my wonky border.




Only the left border is attached in the photo above. I took several pictures of where to put the border on the right. I haven't made a decision on that yet so don't be surprised if it gets sewn on a different side, not used at all, or cut up and used in a different way. Who knows! I made both borders out of the wonky strip from the first picture above.

Well, that's all the time I have for now. Don't expect to hear from me again until next week when I can hopefully show you more progress on my Wonky NY Beauty project.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Border for Wonky New York Beauty

I have had very little sewing time recently due to my course. The good news is that it is about half over. The bad news is that I still have a week left. We have assignments due every day and each assignment is taking me several hours.

I have been able to do a little toward a border for my Wonky New York Beauty blocks. I am taking scraps left over from piecing the blocks and piecing these together. I am pressing the seams open on this. I'm not sure why. It seemed like a good idea at the time.


Then I am making a long strip that I plan to cut narrower to use as part of the border.


In sewing these my little Clifford the Big Red Dog charity quilt blocks are also getting pieced. It's my Leader and Ender project. The stack is growing.


I have about 2/3 of the Clifford fabric squares sewn to the first rectangle.