A Pineapple Blossom quilt for Grandpa

I’ve been reading Bonnie Hunter’s blog for a while now. She came to our guild at some point last year and her scrap-user’s system really clicked with me. I started cutting all my stagnating stash into strips and using them in scrap quilts. In December, Bonnie started talking about a mystery quilt she was going to be doing called Orca Bay and I was IN! I love mystery quilts!

Well, with Christmas and everything else, I barely managed to start Clue 1 before I had to put it aside, and even with working on it a few minutes whenever I could, I’m still slogging through Clue 2 (okay, I’ve started cutting for Clue 3 as well). Everyone else got the final clue somewhere around New Year’s, but I’m still plugging away when I have a chance.

Here are the pieces I made for Clue 1 –

Black & white hourglass blocks 2 1/2"

I love all the different black and white fabrics I was able to find in my strip drawers – I did buy a couple more black fat quarters since I didn’t have a lot of selection but I’m really enjoying how they all work together.

Clue 2 has been a little harder. Not only do I have limited time to work on this quilt, Clue 2 is string pieced on paper… not my favorite. And I need to make 72 of these blocks:

After about 25 of these pieced on paper, I started to get creative… long strip sets I cut squares from, shorter strings I pieced in diagonal sets. Anything to get away from all those papers! I have almost 60 done now, so just a few more and I’ll be done!

Clue 3 is half-square triangles that I’ve been cutting a few of at a time in between other things. Now that I’ve finished up the Pineapple Blossom quilt and taken it to it’s new home (did I mention it was supposed to be a Christmas present? Whoops!) I can charge headlong into Orca Bay until it’s time to start on the next quilt. I have a t-shirt quilt to make for a graduation present, which isn’t due til early May, but I will need to get busy on it pretty soon.

• I couldn’t find my ball winder – I really wanted to knit up some of my stash yarns, but without my ball winder, I was stuck either working from skeins or winding by hand. (the ball winder is now found, but my sewing room is still a big mess.)
• I need to clear out my sewing room and move my workspace to a smaller area of my house (this does not excite me at all, but we need the room to be a bedroom again… for a new baby! That’s the exciting part)
• I need to cull my fabric stash so it will fit neatly into the area we’re allotting for my new sewing space.

Every quilter needs a stash of fabrics, but when your stash needs to be smaller, no quilter likes to simply throw fabric away (blasphemy!). Sure, some could go to my guild’s “free table” at the next meeting, but that’s boring! Why not use it?

Mary’s quilts turned out so great, I think I need to make more quilts in simple patterns for all the other babies in my life. Everyone I know seems to be pregnant right now!

Right now I’m sorting through my stash, cutting anything I don’t love into strips for my scrap system (based on Bonnie Hunter’s system). Then when I’m ready to start sewing, I can pull out a drawer-full of strips and zoom along.

I found a really cute pattern and started sewing, but the blocks were just taking FOREVER to put together (there were a lot of triangles, and bias edges drive me nuts!). I also realized it was so scrappy that when I was putting blocks together it was starting to look a little, … well… ugly.

Usually I like to give scrappy baby quilts. If it’s not so matchy-matchy and perfect, no one feels bad about throwing it on the floor for baby to roll around on, and it can be tossed in the washer if it gets a little grubby. I like my baby quilts to be USED! Plus, it’s easy to repair if the binding ever wears out or it tears.

So I’m sitting there looking at all these block pieces and I’m absolutely hating working on this quilt — what do I do??

I pulled out my bin of fabric strips, made some strip sets, and cut out some simple rail fence blocks. The quilt tops went together so easy-peasy, even I was surprised at how fast I got these 2 quilt tops together!

Now a quick run through the machine for quilting, and I can hopefully get these quilts to Mary before her little bundles are ready for the world!

And it turned out great! The parents had just found out they were having a baby boy and the new grandma was ecstatic — we decided on a simple block design of just squares, rectangles and triangles and I found several blue fabrics that would go with the bedding that the mom-to-be had picked out. What a fun project!

Next project to tackle — an auction quilt for a friend who is having a heart transplant soon. His family is holding a benefit to help with expenses and he asked if I could possibly “make a little something quilty”. For you, Shawn, definitely.

Of course, this means Geoff’s quilt will have to be next. He’s been less than patient about me making quilts for everyone else and not diving in to the quilt he designed for me. lol. That might have something to do with the fact that the quilt he designed is going to be an absolute bear to make! I’ve been making other people easy quilts. Or quilts I’ve been getting paid for. Not gigantic art quilts that will probably take me at least a year to make.

Come to think of it, I think I’ll have to clean up my sewing room first so I can find all the bits of fabric I’ve already bought for it and do some tests to see what’s going tobe the best technique for it. Recently I found a book on Molas in the library that I’m fascinated by. I think Geoff’s project might look very interesting with some reverse applique in it. I could definitely take the project in a more primative direction. Could be very interesting.

When I had half of the foot done, I tried it on and thought it was a little loose. I took a deep breath and knit on, knowing the pattern involved levels of math I only vaguely comprehended and didn’t want to try to understand. I decided I would knit one sock to completion and evaluate then. It’s a bother to try on socks on the needle, especially after the heel is in. So I got to the end of the sock, finished up the ribbing, and bound off.

And I can’t get them over my heel.

So to the frogpond they go…

The pattern designer has a few notes for modifications on her blog which I may try to muddle through, or I might wait til she comes out with different sizes (so I don’t have to understand the math!). Either way, Skew is no more.

T-shirts and hockey jerseys

His mom was planning to give it to him for his graduation - I hope he likes it!

We’ve also been building a deck onto the house, which is a project that’s taking longer than I’d like. Right after we got the holes dug for concrete piers, it started raining and filled our holes with mud and water. Once they’d dried out, Geoff got sick for a week.

Things have gotten a little better since then, with my folks coming to help us out this weekend, and there has actually been progress. But sometimes it’s seemed like one step forward, two steps back.

I got into my sewing room for a bit this weekend. The plan was to clean it up a little so I could start my next project with a clean slate, but I really needed to finish something. So I got out my ball winder and swift and made some tidy little yarn cakes.

I had ordered some Kauni yarn a while back to make a cardigan sweater with, and had also picked up some sock yarn on a yarn crawl a few months back — I’m hoping this summer there will be some knitting and relaxing along with the project deadlines and home improvements.

Kauni yarn for cardigan

Sock yarn

Photo by MyArtfulLife

My mother and grandmother didn’t crochet on a regular basis, but there was evidence that they had crocheted in the past – granny square afghans resided in cedar chests in both their homes. After finishing their massive projects, they both put down their hooks and moved on to other things. But one day, when I was probably driving my grandmother insane with my intense desire to “do something” while at her house, she found her hooks and some yarn and showed me how to chain and single crochet.

After I had played around with these a while and crocheted several “snakes”, my grandmother gave me a booklet with instructions for crochet, knitting, embroidery, and tatting as well as several projects for each. Something clicked and I realized I could make anything I wanted. I took my allowance money to the local craft store and bought a rainbow of skeins and began an afghan of my own.

When I was a teenager, I was flipping through the how-to book I’d gotten as a child and I started trying to decipher the instructions for knitting. No one in my family knit, so I had no idea I was really messing it up – I couldn’t figure out the difference between knit and purl and how to move the yarn forward or backward and ended up taking the yarn front to back under the knitting instead of between the needles – disaster!

After several frustrated attempts and tangled yarn messes, I finally figured it out and began a summer sweater… I never got past the ribbing.

There were quite a few years after that where I only knit off and on, but when the internet bloomed and knitting patterns could be found on yarn companies websites, I began again. By this time, I had learned more about natural fibers and went to an actual yarn store (and was shocked at the prices!). Soon I was reading knitting blogs and learning more everyday. Eventually my taste and my pocketbook came to an understanding.

I met some online blog friends and started a blog of my own. My dad’s even learned to knit, thanks to a co-worker of his who’s now a blog friend of mine as well.

How did you learn to knit or crochet? Join the Knit & Crochet Blog Week at Eskimimi Knits and share something about your craft every day this week!