Stash Report and 3-D fabric

I bought 6 yards of fabric this week to use as backing for my BIL's quilt.  I usually buy backings after making the quilt, but couldn't pass this one up. The selvage says "Coming At You 3D S#J8610 by Hoffman California Internation Fabrics".

My BIL is a believer in aliens, or at least he says he is!  The cool thing about this fabric is that it comes with 3-D glasses, and when you wear them, the space ships and planets appear to be floating.

                                                                                                                    

Stash Report:
Used this week: 0 yards
Used year to date: 0 yards
Added this week: 6 yards
Added year to date: 5 yards
Net used for 2012: +11 yards

I took 3 quilts to the long arm quilter this week (http://www.virginialongarm.com/).  I am hoping that my yards used will soon be in the negative.

I finished 3 hats this week.

The blue and brown ones are for my sister.  The gray one is going to be too small for her, so I'm planning to donate it to  www.Knots-of-Love.org.

Orca Bay Continued

Orca Bay is coming along slowly.  I've had to do a lot of ripping and resewing, but I think I have the hang of it now.  Is anyone else unhappy about the amount of bulk in the seams?  There are lots of little pieces, and sometimes there isn't a good way to press the seams flat.  Other than that, I like the way the busy pattern hides piecing flaws.  Some of my star points aren't quite right, but it is really hard to tell when the quilt has so much going on in it.

 My sewing area is a corner of my bedroom, and I don't have room for a design wall in there.  I use our bed when I need to lay things out. I really thought I'd have the whole thing together this month, but it may be February before it is finished. I still need to cut the white triangles for the border, and I'm going to resew some of the flying geese units that don't look quite right.

How many color catchers do you need?

If you were going to wash this quilt, how many color catchers would you need?

Here's the back:

This quilt has already been washed at least once.  It is a twin sized quilt.  I thought 4 color catchers would be overkill, but they aren't expensive,and I had 2 boxes of them so I threw in 11.  This is what they looked like:

It is obvious from the pinky purple color that it wasn't just the reds in this quilt that ran.  The blues don't seem to be colorfast either!  I expect this from batiks but not for regular quilt-shop quilty fabric.  The good news is the excess color is on the color catchers not on the quilt.  But if I had known so much color was going to bleed, I would have added a few more.

How many color catchers do you need?  More than you think!

Linking up:  http://myplvl.blogspot.com/2018/06/hello-hello-and-happy-tuesday-archives.html

Stash Report Update

 I added 5 yards to my stash this week, backing and binding for my I Spy quilts. I looked at JoAnn's for flannel, but it all seemed very thin to me.  Minkie was too expensive.  I finally settled for 60 inch wide corduroy, which I ordered from fabric.com.  One quilt will have bright orange backing and one will have  peacock blue.  I like the blue best, but I think it is a good idea for the quilts to be easy to tell apart.  The binding is a stripe that has orange, blue, yellow, red and white in it.  Still trying to decide if I'll cut the binding on the bias.

Stash Report:
Used this week: 0 yards
Used year to date: 0 yards
Added this week: 5 yards
Added year to date: 5 yards
Net used for 2012:  +5 yards

Because I think each blog post should contain a picture, here's my favorite quilt, a scrappy spider web.

Starbella Scarf

When I was in a yarn shop a couple of weeks ago, they had what they called 'self ruffling' yarn.  The owner showed my friend and me  how to cast on and knit with it, but she only had one skein that she was using for demos, none for sale, and she was having a hard time getting it in.  I found a similar yarn called Starbella this week when I was in Ben Franklin.  They had skeins and skeins of it in several colors.  I bought one skein to try.

Knitting with this yarn was painfully slow.  I watched you tube videos to understand the technique a little better.  I had a lot of problems with the tape twisting and spent about as much time untwisting and stretching out the tape as I did knitting.  One video showed a way to turn the work so that everything didn't get twisted, but by the time I discovered this, I was about 1/2 way through the scarf and wasn't going to rip out everything out.  I'm glad I tried this yarn, but I think their must be a better way than knitting to work with it.  Maybe crocheting or weaving would be more efficient.

Let me know if you have ever tried Starbella and if you have any tricks for working with it.

Race for Hope - DC:

This picture of my family was taken Thanksgiving Day.

We  have been hit hard by cancer in the last 5 years.  I have had breast cancer, my sister has lymphoma, and my five-year-old nephew has a brain tumor.  My family (Aidan's Army) is participating in the Race for Hope on May 6 to support brain cancer research.

Race for Hope - DC:

Pincushion Parade

Beth of Lovelaughquilt.blogspot.com is hosting a pincushion parade.  Here are most of mine:

I have workhorses:

I use this one, but I removed the pins, so you can read it:

The rest are decorative.  Christmas:

Halloween:

Beaded:

A gift from my sister, who went to China last year: 

The classic shoe:

This one is unprocessed wool. The lanolin keeps needles from rusting.

Several are too pretty to use:

My tomato pincushion has disappeared.  It is probably under something on my sewing table.  I try to keep one pincushion on the ironing baord, one  by the sewing machine, one on the cutting table, and one by the chair where I do my hand stitching.

I Spy

Sometime last year I participated in Carla's (Lollyquiltz) I Spy charm square exchange.  I was planning to make a twin sized quilt out of them, but last week a friend of ours had twins, so I split the blocks in half and made two baby sized quilts. Each quilt is 48 inches square, hopefully big enough for the girls to use them for several years.  Here is the tutorial I used:

http://lollyquiltz.blogspot.com/2011/05/lulas-i-spy-block-tutorial.html

I chose orange scraps instead the white Carla used because I had a lot of white blocks and wanted some contrast.  Also, I rarely use white in  a child's quilt.  I have 3 boys and know how dirty white gets!

Early Valentine's Day

I went up to Fredericksburg yesterday and met my friend Jen for lunch.  She gave me an early Valentine's gift.  Jen is an excellent stitcher, and her finishing is perfect.  I don't know if you can tell from the picture or not, but around the edges of the cushion are red glass head pins.  The stitching is done in a red variegated thread. 

I had a minor disaster yesterday when I set off my sister's home alarm.  She had forgotten not to set it and went to work.  Then she had given me an old code, so I couldn't get the alarm to turn off even though I thought I was pushing the right buttons.  I ended up calling 911 and telling them I set off the alarm because I thought the police would come anyway, and that maybe I should fess up first.

Then the alarm stopped blaring for no particular reason.  Jen and I came inside to wait for the police to come, and all was well until I walked into the bathroom and the alarm went off again.  When we left the house the alarm was still blaring away.

I got back after lunch, and the house was quiet until I walked upstairs and set off another motion sensor.  I gave up and went to the mall.  It was truly sit-com worthy.

When my BIL came home, he said the problem was that one of the buttons was halfway pushed in.  Because it wasn't popped out right, even if I had had the right code, the alarm still would have gone off.

I am staying with my sister in Fredericksburg while she has her second round of chemotherapy.  She had one infusion today, and she did great.  Last week she had a reaction and they had to give her infusion very slowly.  She said she didn't get out of there last time until after 6.  Today she finished by 1:00 and was feeling good, so we went downtown and ate lunch at a little cafe called Here and Abroad.  The soup, roasted red pepper with Gouda, was excellent!  I also had half a ham and brie sandwich with raspberry mayo on the side.  The owner gave us a taste of his chocolate mousse, which was also excellent, so we bought some to take home.  Then we walked around downtown and went into some of the antique shops.  It was a great afternoon!

This past Christmas I gave my sister St. Peter's Fair by Shepherds Bush. My sister and her husband like to go to Renaissance fairs, so I thought she would like this sampler. Jill Rensel painted the mat and framed it.

Here's the sampler.  I'm not sure how to flip it right side up. It was all I could manage to get it from my cell phone to the computer. 

Slow Progress on Orca Bay

Stash Report:
Used this week: 0 yards
Used year to date: 0 yards
Added this week: 0 yards
Added year to date: 0 yards
Net used for 2012:  0 yards

Not a great start for 2012!

I spent 3 hours today working on Orca Bay.  I finished sewing the black and white 'wing'
 units and stitched a few to the red string triangles.  I also made one block with a black nine patch and one with a white to make sure my wing units were going to work out.  I am not thrilled with the accuracy of my piecing, but it is not bad enough to redo the work. 

I wish there were a way to get rid of some of the bulk in the seams.  There are so many little pieces intersecting, I am having a hard time getting the seams flat even though I am pressing the heck out of them.  I could press everything open, but I don't think it is worth the trouble.  Once the long armer is finished quilting it, I don't think the bulk will bother me so much.  Quilting Muggles (as Frances from The Off Kilter Quilt calls non-quilters) will not even be able to tell there is an issue. 

                                      

Birthday Decorations

I hadn't planned to post personal stuff on this blog.  It was just going to be about my sewing, quilting, knitting and stitching projects.  But today I turned 50, and woke up to this.

The crowning touch was the enema bottles hanging in the tree.

Lest anyone think this is the work of my crazy husband who sent a stripper dressed as the grim reaper to my bunko group when I turned 40, hanging underwear in public just isn't his style. I know who the culprits are.                                                                                                                                                 

Janie and Curt, this has Unger written all over it! I am open to suggestions on how to decorate for their birthdays!

Quilter in the Gap Finish-A-Long

I've decided I need to join Rhonda's FAL in order to get some of these UFO's completed.  So for the first quarter of the year I'd like to get my king sized sampler quilt to the long arm quilter and get it bound. I've been seriously quilting since 2007, but we still don't have a quilt on our bed.  Time to change that. 

I'm not going to unfold this because it is so big and heavy, and I don't want to stretch out the borders.  I have the batting and the batting.  Just need to make the time to get it to the longarmer. 


The second project in the FAL will be Moria Blackburn's Time and Season Sampler.  I started it in 2010 and stitched it as a round robin with a group of on-line friends.  You can see their initials in the bottom row.  This sampler has been to Germany, Canada and around the US.  All I need to do is the backstitching in the grapevine and a little cross stitching in the bottom floral. For some reason, I can't make myself work on it.  Maybe this FAL is the motivation I need.

I'm doing Bonnie Hunter's Orca Bay quilt, and I need to finish the piecing before it turns into a UFO.  I have to finish this before I lose interest in it.

Three UFO's will be enough to start, though I certainly have many more than three. 

Chemo Caps Complete

I finished knitting two hats for my sister this week.  I haven't knitted much in the past 5 years, and I was really happy with the way they turned out.  I went on Ravelry to get free patterns for the hats.  They have lots of free patterns:hats, scarves, sweaters, toys, even  bras!  My old computer was so slow, I never did much looking around the site, but I can understand now how people can spend hours on it.

Let's see if I can figure out how to post a picture.  Looking at pictures is what I like best about blogs.

New Year, New Blog

I have been reading quilting blogs for about a year now, and am feeling a little left out since there are so many quilt-a-longs and activities that require participants to link to their own blog.  I just got a new computer and a new camera for Christmas, so I'm going to see if I can figure out all this technical stuff. I  need a place to post pictures of my quilting, knitting and stitching progress.  Wish me luck!