A special quilt, finally quilted

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Suzanne

A couple of weeks ago, I was teasing my blog readers with pictures of a quilt that I was working on. I had to pull it off because (a) I had some customer quilts to do and (b) I had to figure out how to fix the crosshatching math mess I had gotten in to.

After finishing some other stuff this weekend, I fixed my math problem by pretending it didn’t exist: I frogged out the cross-hatching. Luckily, it was straight line stitching, and the thread slid out pretty easily.

The light is terrible, so I should probably wait until tomorrow to take better pictures, but I’m so excited, I don’t want to wait…

See, I’ve been teasing you with pictures that show things like this:

Which is a little misleading, because it doesn’t reflect the fact that the quilt is actually a medallion with this creature gazing at you:

For perspective, here’s most of the quilt:

Last year, when I was making quilts for my youngest niece and nephew, I realized that these youngster’s had older siblings who hadn’t had quilts from me in awhile, and I asked my brother and sister-in-law for an update on favorite colors.

My niece’s favorite color was reported to be: HORSE. I knew that she was horse-mad, but I didn’t realize it was that bad.

I got a good laugh, filed it away for future reference and promptly got busy with who knows what.

Oh, that’s not true: I did order the pattern for the center. And then I moved everything home from the store and it got all piled up and…

Anyway, sometimes things just have to simmer for just the right amount of time, and things finally came together for Sofia’s horse quilt: several years ago, at a quilt show, I bought a kit from Sew Batik to make a Jewel Box quilt. It had a chocolate brown background, and the jewel-toned batiks. I would pick it up every so often and put it back down, finding that I wasn’t quit in the right mood for it. Good thing, as it turned out to be the perfect fabric for this quilt. I had to supplement the jewel tones with some bits and bobs of leftover Sew Batik that I had floating around, the border fabric was originally the backing fabric from the kit.

It needs to be washed, blocked and bound, but having the quilting done is a big hurdle.

Can you see why I was so pleased? I hope Sofia loves it as much as I do.

Now I Need Mittens

Posted on January 7, 2011 by Suzanne

Pattern is Winter Leaf Slouchy Tam (<–Ravelry Link). Yarn is Cascade Cash Vero DK, a Merino/Cashmere/Acrylic blend. The pattern was pretty straightforward, and the yarn is so yummy to work with. There were a couple of spots where the written pattern was slightly different from the chart, but it was minor stuff and I just did what I thought was best.

It is symmetrical, it was just sitting slouched funny on the ironing board.

I should probably make Mark’s mittens first, though. And it sounds like I have plenty of people that would let me knit hats for them, but I’m not knitting one for my Mom. She can knit her own.

I’m working on this super-cute applique quilt today. I just discovered, though, that the bird on the right — his tail feather is missing it’s machine zigzag. Of course, I didn’t realize this until he was completely surrounded by quilting, so I’m waiting to see how my customer would like me to proceed. It needs yellow stitching, adn the back is yellow, so if it goes through all of the layers, I don’t think it will be that noticeable.

I sent an e-mail — and she might read my blog, so, Linda, if you are out there — read your e-mail!

Moving On

Posted on January 6, 2011 by Suzanne

No burned food today: we ate leftover ham, so no opportunity to screw anything up.

I was hoping to get the Super Secret Quilt done, but my border problems caused me to step back and realize that I really need to get some customer quilts done, so it’s been pulled off while I ponder and this quilt is now finished:

The color is not true, its much deeper and richer in person. The fabric is not Cherrywood, but it’s something similar. Very yummy.

And thanks to some late night knitting sessions, I’m racing through my hat. Hats! Faster than socks, really practical, and tons of options: I see more knitted hats in my future. I refuse to hand-knit socks for people: if I’m going to go that much work, I want to wear them, but hats? Not that I know that many people that actually need hats.

Hmmm.

Hats in every color of the rainbow, to suit my mood and/or outfit. Plus, if I have lots of knitted hats, maybe I can actually find one when I need one.

Darned math

Posted on January 5, 2011 by Suzanne

I was trying to do this crosshatched border as mathlessly as possible, however, I just dove in and didn’t think about the corners, and as you can see: when I did get to a corner, I horked it up. I’m using the IQ to actually do the cross-hatching, which is awesome, but it’s only smart enough to do what I tell it do, it can’t say “You moron, you did something stupid there and your lines aren’t going to come out even.”

Of course, it probably SHOWED me that on the screen, but on the screen, I thought it looked right. And even though I’ve remeasured my tick marks several times, I still can’t figure out what I did wrong.

So, I’m going to channel Scarlett and worry about it tomorrow.

Well, maybe not tomorrow, but definitely later. When I figure out what I did wrong, I’ll be sure to report in, so none of my fellow quilters repeat my mistake. Not that they would be tempted to make the mistake to begin with. They are all smart enough to make sure the corners work out before they blindly start quilting an entire border.

Another quilt teaser

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Suzanne

I’ve got a mountain of bookkeeping to catch up on (there’s another lesson I keep having to relearn: if I did it as I went along I wouldn’t have these soul-killing marathon bookkeeping sessions to suffer through…), which means that I got exactly ZERO quilting done yesterday (plus I had to go shopping, didn’t I just feed everyone yesterday?), but today I got a little more done on my quilt. I have the outer border and the center section left to go.

For the record, the knitting I did was LATE last night, I was up until midnight, and I suppose I could have quilted instead, but I decided it would be fun to surprise Mark with his hat — I had told him it wasn’t going to happen (see above, many things to do yesterday…).

Today was another busy day and included a Lego League practice. I know, I know. We were done with that before Christmas.

Except, oops, we weren’t: we got randomly selected to be a wild card entry at the state competition in Ames on the 15th of January. Unfortunately, we found this out two days AFTER we took the robot apart, but luckily my boys were able to put it back together over the break.

At least that means we’ll get to wear those crazy orange hats I made one more time. And then we really will be done.

And with any luck I’ll be done with this quilt I’ve been teasing you with tomorrow, and will be able to show it off in all it’s glory!