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.