Home Alone

Posted on December 28, 2009 by Suzanne

I hope you are all having a lovely holiday season. I am currently home alone, my family left me. They loaded up their snowboards and skis and I don’t know what-all and headed for Dubuque to go to Sundown Mountain.

(Shut up, we do too have mountains in Iowa. Sort of.)

I had thought about going and taking a sewing machine and hanging out in the hotel room, but I really need to get some stuff done in the shop tomorrow, so… I elected to stay home. Bummer. I’m so sad. No one here demanding to be fed (oh wait, the dogs are still here…), no one making rude bodily noises (um, yeah, I guess the dogs still do that, too…), no one playing endless video games (ha, the dogs don’t have opposable thumbs, so that one is true…)

What’s a girl to do? Well…go shopping of course!

I needed beads.

(Shut up, I really did need beads. Sure I already HAD beads, but, I needed to make sure I had a full palette of selections.)

OK, I didn’t strictly NEED the glitter ladybug buttons, but I couldn’t resist.

It’s really too dark to get adequate pictures of the beading I’ve done so far, but I’m plugging away at it.

It’s something of an experiment, and I’ve changed my mind about a gazillion times already on what I’m doing. I need to find the two books about beading that I own, but…my sewing room is such a disaster, I’m not even sure where to start looking for them.

Mark actually told the boys that the reason I wasn’t going skiing was because I had to stay home and clean my room.

You may recall that the whole quilt looks like this:

Well, it did before I quilted it. It’s now been quilted and with two layers of batting, does not qualify as a snuggly quilt. But…this one isn’t intended to be snuggly (especially not after I get the beading done…)

I just love that black and white polka dot fabric. I bought a whole bolt of it. I’ve used it before, and I’m sure I’ll use it again. I even used it to make myself a guitar strap:

I’m making progress on my guitar-playing skills, and have the start of a blister on my index finger to prove it!

I’ve also been working on my binding skills. In the last 4 days I have either partially or completely bound 6 quilts. Three were these crazy things:

You my recall that this fall I was involved with the musical at the high school. I never managed a picture of the finished product on stage, but I was in charge of decorating a bunk bed to look like a stack of mattresses. These three pieces — one long on the front, two short on the sides were the “mattresses” — after the show was over I stuck the wad of fake mattress in a pile intending to take it apart and finish the edges of the 3 pieces as quilts for the dogs. I don’t know what came over me over the weekend, but I started binding and I couldn’t seem to stop.

(if you are crazy enough to count, there are only 19 strips of fabric — there was an actual mattress on top of the bunk bed that counted as the 20th mattress…)

Oh! My beading is calling me.

(I can hear it, cause…there’s no hooligans making a racket…)

TTFN-

Suzanne

Holiday Concert 2009

Posted on December 16, 2009 by Suzanne

No pictures, because I forgot to take the camera. Plus, we were at the far end fo the gym, andf rankly, the boys need haircuts so badly right now, their pictures would probably scare you.

Oh wait, here’s one that shows how scary they are:

(taken Monday morning, school was delayed 2 hours.)

Anyway. Holiday Concert. The 5th grade band starts things off and they did pretty well.

After the 6th grade band is done, the Kindergartners come out and cute us all to death.

They sang Must be Santa (Dave and Deb, do you remember endless listens of Mitch Miller and the Gang?), with hand movements (too cute!), and then they did this really sweet medley of star poems and songs: star light, star bright, first star i see tonight…, a song I didn’t know, twinkle, twinkle, little star, and then they started saying “Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don’t Let the Bed Bugs bite” — and then they continued with one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard:

And if they do
Then take your shoe
And knock ‘em ‘til
They’re black and blue!

It was hilarious, especially because they were totally into it, acting it out. I nearly died.

After they leave, the First through Third graders come out and each grade sings several songs. After the 2nd graders were done, one of the little boys walked up to the edge of the stage and suddenly Mrs. Kent was turning him away and trying to sidestep: the poor thing threw up right there on stage. He’ll never forget this year’s concert, I’m sure.

After that, the rest of the event was pretty…uneventful. Oh, except for the part where most of the parents show how rude and inconsiderate they are. After the lower elementary kids are done, there’s a pause while the upper elementary kids come out. Most of the families who don’t have upper elementary kids get up and leave. Rude. Rude. Rude. This was our 6th holiday concert and it’s the same every year — and we have always stayed for the entire thing. They wouldn’t leave in the middle of a football game, but clearly this isn’t important enough.

Rant over. Sorry.

It’s been kind of a long obnoxious day, so I should probably quit while I’m ahead.

TTFN-

Suzanne

A few details about the Radiant Star

Posted on December 15, 2009 by Suzanne

Some of this is a repeat for those of you that have seen my post about this quilt on MQR.

I’m not necessarily answering specific questions that I’ve been asked: but these are some things that I’ve been thinking about and maybe you’ve been wondering about, and I thought I’d share.

1. How much thread? Short answer: I don’t know. I intended to count bobbins, but then I messed up. It’s a lot of thread. The top thread is Sew Fine and the bobbin thread is Bottom Line, both of which are from Superior Threads. My cone of Sew Fine 402 (the light cream) is a lot thinner than it used to be. Maybe half of a 3000 yard cone??

2. What kind of batting? I used Warm Bond, which is a blend (80% cotton 20% poly)

3. Is it stiff? Well, *I* don’t think it is, but I think we all have different standards for how we think a quilt should feel. It’s certainly not POOFY, but neither is it stiff as a board. I’ve now washed it, to soften it up a bit (and get rid of the rest of the chalk markings and the starch and the oils from my hands, and the whatever else it picked up from simply being around and worked on over the last few months), and I think it’s just about perfect, and it will only get softer with time and use. Using very fine thread certainly helps, and even with all of that pebbling, I bet it’s softer than you think it might be.

4. How much did the computer do? How much is freehand? On this particular quilt, my computerized system was only used for the sections in which I would have otherwise needed to use a tool of some kind: the circles for the wreath and border spines and the curved lines in the blue star points. That’s it.

Everything else was hand-guided. For the stitch in the ditch, I used a straight edge ruler, and the curved crosshatching was marked with a circle template, but the stitching was actually done freehand.

I did contemplate recording myself doing some of the feathered wreaths and then doing all of the repeats with the computer, but on this particular quilt I decided that I wanted all of the wreaths to be uniquely freehanded. And unique they are. From where you are sitting they might look perfect and identical, but I’d be happy to point out the spots where they vary. For those of you looking on this as a beginner quilter thinking “I could never do that” — guess what? I would have thought the same thing 8 years ago when I started this journey. When you look at THIS quilt you need to remember that I have 8 years and hundreds of quilts experience lined up behind it.

5. How many wreaths and stars and pebbles? There are 20 Feathered stars. That works out to 640 of those itsy-bitsy light blue and white half-square triangle units. In the quilting, there are 30 large wreaths (both full and partial) and 49 small wreaths (full and partial). If you want to come count pebbles, you are welcome to come on over and do so. My neck and shoulders tell me it was approaching about a bazillion.

6. How can you stand to give it away? I’ve been asked this one a bunch of times, but I’m not sure I can adequately explain that it doesn’t bother me. Having signed a contract helps. Here’s the thing: this quilt has never been MY quilt. It’s always been my customer’s quilt. Sure, if he decided not to honor his end of the bargain, I’d have no trouble keeping it, but I’m not as emotionally attached to this one as you might think.

7. Are you going to try to borrow it back to put in a show? No. I’m going to make a NEW quilt (smaller) and do some things differently, and I’m going to put THAT quilt in a show.

8. What are you going to do now? I have not been working on this continually since it started. I’ve pieced and quilted other quilts, and I’ve done plenty of customer work. But mentally, it’s sure consumed me. I’ve got a stack of larger quilts lined up waiting to be quilted (some are long-time UFOs that I’ve gotten finished in between other stuff), and I do have some customer work to finish in the next week. And then I have to inventory the shop, and finish my feather book and plan more online classes and yeah…Oh, and learn how to play my new guitar!

Right this minute, though, I need to go brush my teeth and work on getting the boys ready to go to school. The poor dears have had to sleep in the last 2 mornings, they’ve had 2 hour delays this week (the road conditions, particularly out in the country, are terrible. Ice, ice and more ice.)

***************************

Thanks for all of your kind comments about the Radiant Star. Even if it has sounded like I was grumbling at any point in the process, I’ve really enjoyed the whole thing, and honestly? I couldn’t be happier with how it went. I had no major piecing problems; the quilting, while time-consuming went well (the machine behaved, my tension was great, etc…), and even the binding went well.

My customer has been following along on the blog, and he has promised a picture of his wife with the quilt, so I can post that as a final wrap-up to the entire story.

Radiant Star Part 22: The Final product

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Suzanne

By now, I think I’ve said enough. If you have questions, post them or send me an e-mail and I can answer them in a separate post.

Radiant Star part 21: Auditioning bindings

Posted on December 14, 2009 by Suzanne

I thought I knew what I was going to do with the binding, and even washed up some red for it (one of the reds from the stars), but unfortunately, it looked like crap. I was either going to cut off part of that outside stripe:

Or I could have covered up that outside stripe:

But I didn’t like the way the red looked up against the stripe, and I preferred the look of the blue and green stripe on the outside edge.

Next up was a black fabric, that I thought I could use as just a frame:

Again, it was either cut off that outside stripe, go with the red at the edge, or cut the border narrower to end up with a blue green stripe on the edge.