Cafting for my Nephew

My wee nephew turned one last week! I got to spend a little bit of time with him at the tail end of his birthday party (via skype) and got to see him interact enthusiastically with the wooden snail pull toy I sent, and flail happily with his handmade gifts.

First up was his own, monogrammed Christmas stocking.

 

This was knit from a Judy's Colors Kit (Skiing) that I purchased a long time ago from an online fundraiser for my friend's Waldorf school in San Francisco. I knit everything according to the pattern (which could, in my opinion, have been much more clearly written), using this online tutorial for the braids. The first few braids I messed up, and to recover the look I chain stitched in crochet on top of the knitting where the braid should have been. I also added an applied i-cord contrast edge to the top to finish it off, and to add the hanging loop.

His second gift was a teeny person sweater vest made using the Pembroke pattern from Kirsten Kapur at Petite Purls.

I knit the 18month size in a turquoise superwash wool I believe was gifted to me by HPNY Knits a very long time ago. I've already received one photograph of Will in it, and it is adorably old man-esque on him.

I have a few more knits I made for Christmas to show once the big day has passed :)

Naughty and Nice

Words have been slowly finding their way back to me from my Quilt Bee members...

I'm highly amused by the words chosen and I'm loving the different piecing methods people have employed. I know of two more packages on their way to me and I'm excited to get the rest to start piecing this thing together!

I made a couple of words myself a few nights ago to add to the pile.

Baby turd. Heh. I made these with the scraps people sent back to me and they are quite addictive once you get the hang of them. I have another naughty word in my head to make next but I'm struggling with nice words. I guess that explains a lot about me :)

I remember knitting, it's that thing I used to do...

A little while ago my sister started dropping things that can't really be called hints. "William needs a hat", "William really doesn't have much hair and could really do with a hat", and "why don't you knit William a hat?"

So of course I knit him a sweater.

Just kidding, I knit him a hat. Ha.

This is the "Stella Pixie Hat" pattern, available for free from Etsy, knit in Socks That Rock medium weight (Niqually) bought specially for this project at Rhinebeck this year. I made the 4-12 month size and ahem, didn't check my gauge. Maybe the hat is supposed to be this big, I don't know because I also didn't retroactively check my gauge, but hopefully it will last my nephew for a couple of winters!

Since I had quite a lot of yarn leftover from the skein, probably about half the yardage, I immediately deployed my knitting needles to make a baby hat for Grad School classmates who had a baby boy a month or so ago.

 

I used another free pattern (Swirl Hat - Ravelry), knitting the 4-12 month size and I love the way the pattern looks in the self striping yarn. There is still yarn left over. probably enough for a second baby hat, but for now I'm letting the skein take a well deserved rest in my stash!

Queen Bee's Tutorial

It's my bee month, and I've decided to make a word quilt with each participant making three words.

1) Your favorite nice thing to call someone with the light colour as background. For example, my favourite would be "sweetness".

2) Your favourite naughty thing to call someone with the dark colour as background. For example, I have been known to enjoy calling people "turd". I am fully on board with swear/curse words. Be honest! If you aren't comfortable piecing a curse word, judicious use of *!# etc are welcome.

3) Your name with your choice of background, light or dark. Or your initials if your name is monstrously long :)

To give some inspiration I put together a pinterest board with examples of both upper and lower case pieced letters http://www.pinterest.com/publicpom/word-quilts/ many of which are by my friend Chawne (cauchy09 on flickr) who is an AMAZING quilter, I'd highly recommend you look at her blog (http://cauchycomplete.wordpress.com/). I'm going to include a sample pieced alphabet schematic with the fabric and to help a little bit more I've put together a quick tutorial based on my own playing with fabric. The pictures are terrible because the only spare time I had to do this was past 9pm!

I want to preface this tutorial by saying that I am aware of Tonya Ricucci's book "Word Play Quilts", but I do not own this book nor have I ever read it. But in deference to the fact that many of the examples I've studied to be able to reverse engineer the technique are based on her book, I'm not going to include the entire alphabet piecing scheme on my blog.

I am going to walk through two different methods for piecing a word using a single letter as the base example, both paper piecing and free style piecing. I've included suggested configurations for the letters in the bee packet but feel free to get wonky, vary the thickness of the pieces and invent your own methods of making letters!  The individual letters in your word don't all need to be uniform height, you can play around a little!

Paper Pieced Letters

 

Plan out how big you want your letter, and a guide to how it will be pieced on some thin paper, drawing in the position of all the seams. Identify the center of your letter, here the background in the middle of the letter A. This is the foundation piece to which all other parts of the block will be sewn. I'm going to show white fabric for the background (helpful!) and red for the letters.

Place a piece of fabric large enough to cover the center section plus 1/4" seam allowance all the way round.  Overlap a piece of the contrasting color fabric that is large enough to cover the top bar of the "A" plus 1/4" seam allowance, then sew the two strips together onto the paper along the line you drew.

Press the red strip you just sewed up and continue adding a strip of red for the middle bar of the "A" to the bottom edge of the background fabric. As you can see I didn't strictly adhere to my free-handed pattern.

Add a final strip of the background fabric to fill in the remaining negative space. You can trim excess fabric in the seams by folding the foundation paper out of the way.

 

Add a strip of red to the left hand side to make an "F"....

... and then to the right to make an "A". Press everything flat and trim to get square/straight edges.

Flip the block over and tear away the paper.

Free-style Pieced Letters

 

Cut several strips of background and foreground fabric. From my own noodling, 3/4" will give you a very skinny strip and is really annoying to press so this is the smallest I would recommend cutting.

 Cut your strips into smaller sections to map out your letter (in this case "t").

 Start sewing the smaller sections together to form larger units.

Straightening up the edges as you go makes this much easier, then attach the long piece on the left.

And square up.

I'm not the biggest fan of this method for two reasons. One, I had to keep a mental picture of the final letter in my head instead of right in front of me on the paper, and two, OMG the seams. There are a lot of seams and it gets annoying to press them all neatly. Paper piecing really reduced the seam bulk.

Assembling Your Word

Once you've pieced all you letters you need to sew them up into a word. I used 3/4"-1" strips of background fabric attached the the right side of the first letter (t). Then I added background to the top and bottom of the next letter (i)...

 

... and attached it to the "t" so it was slightly offset.

Then just keep going adding spacers and letters...

That's me!

Catching up on my Quilt Bee Blocks

Another round of the NYC Metro Mod's Lucky 13 Bee started in spring, and I signed up knowing I'd be pushed to get the early blocks done due to the dreaded thesis. But I managed to complete all of them so far, even if a few were mailed late with apologies.

February - A scrappy hexagonal log cabin. We were provided the center piece and several scraps to which we were to add as many of out own as we liked.

March - Two 6.5" squares made from mid blues. We were sent some scraps and asked to add our own.

 April - We were sent the paper templates, the red bunting fabric and several strips. We were asked to have the bunting central and either a red corner or a black and white corner. I didn't manage to get very wonky with these but hopefully they work!

May - Pink HSTs that I didn't photograph for some reason....

June -  We were sent the fussy cut center fabric and asked to make wonky log cabins with colours that were not those dominant in the center.

July - Kaffe Fassett stripes and dark Japanese prints to be combined with solids of our choosing into straight log cabins.

 

August - A water themed block making use of beautiful hand-dyed fabric. I took inspiration from here.

September - We were asked to sew up this variation on a drunkards path using fabrics that told something about who we were as a quilter, and using the Essex Linen in black for the background. Before making a quilt for my friend Jeff, I had zero orange fabric in my stash but since then it's become something of my signature colour with these three prints in particular cropping up time and time again. I only shattered one needle while sewing this, all those pins were more than my machine could take!

October is my Bee Month. I ran out to the fabric store yesterday to pick up some yardage and I'm going to make a quick tutorial over the next day or so. I'm excited.

Dazzled by the barely noticable

Over the weekend I moved from my home of 5 years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to a pretty little corner of Elmhurst. Touching everything I own, making decisions about what to keep and what to donate/sell/recycle has left me exhausted. I'm now on the flip side making decisions with my boyfriend about where my things will go, other ways to organize the kitchen and bedroom and just about everything in between which is equally exhausting but a lot of fun :)

As part of the moving process, I noticed that some of my pine furniture was looking a little drab and for want of a better word, dry. So I looked up a recipe for DIY beeswax furniture polish (because why yes, I did bring my pound of beeswax with me over the Ed Koch Bridge), found an old rag hiding out under the kitchen sink and went to town on my old bookcase.

This surprisingly sturdy, well made Ikea solid pine bookcase has been in my possession since 2003, bought from Craigslist not long after I moved here from the UK. It's been my faithful companion ever since living in Hoboken, Astoria, two apartments in Manhattan and now another neighborhood in Queens. It's been a bookshelf, a liquor cabinet, a necklace stand and now...

... After a generous coating of furniture polish and it's positively gleaming and back to corralling all my books. At the top cookbooks, then fiction and non-fiction, with the last two shelves reserved for knitting and crafting books and magazines. I know it might not look like a huge difference in the pictures but it makes me so happy every time I walk past to see how good this guy looks now.

Sorbetto!

I printed out the Colette free pattern for Sorbetto quite a while ago but stalled out after all that taping together of endless paper. OK, 12 sheets of paper wasn't so much but I'm lazy. Anywoot, I finally got around to making myself a shirt this weekend from some fabric I bought for cheap-as-chips on Fabric.com a while ago, vintage bias tape and and old button.

Tucked into these 80s throw-back linen shorts and with a vintage belt (both from Goodwill) I think it looks pretty nifty!

However, for the bah-humbug section of the post, I'm not really happy with the fit or the fabric. The shirting is polyester and looks it, and the bias tape is super shiny vintage crappiness. The armholes are a smidge too tight and even though the 4 is the right fit across the bust, there is about 10" of ease in the waist which is not that flattering, tucked or untucked, and finally it's too short. See?

 

I am happy with how much I learned, and how good the overall finish is. So I suspect there will be another Sorbetto in my future!

Another T-shirt Refashion

I'm moving apartment at the end of the month which is prompting me to clear out old clothing and to rediscover items hidden at the back I'm reserved for later refashioning. Including this bright t-shirt I bought at Housing Works for about $2 quite a while ago.

 

First I pinned a shirt to the front, then sewed up the sides again using a French seam. Then I folded in half and cut off the original sleeves. I could have been a little more accurate in making sure the resulting shape was more symmetrical.

Again I added a thin lace to the raw edges to stabilize. I also did this at the neck after I'd finished the sleeves.

 

Then I sewed under twice using the lace as a guide, and did two rows of top stitching for a neat edge.
Outside:

Inside:

Next time I might reverse the folding to end up with this finish on the outside....

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, it's not the most refined of clothing items but it's fun!

Reason #1,049,823,975 why I love Housing Works

I've posted previously about my love of thrifting, and even though I'll admit to having recently bought a few things from stores, I'm probably still at 80/20 thrifting. The day after I handed my PhD thesis to my committee, I took a day to "indulge" myself at the Housing Works Buy The Bag store in Brooklyn.

Housing Works (particularly the Chelsea and Park Slope stores) are my absolute favourite thrift stores for one very good reason, they extensively sort donations so that the items on offer are consistently good quality and reasonably priced. The Buy the Bag store is where everything else ends up. It's not for the faint of heart, a warehouse with multiple deep wire bins of everything all jumbled together, but if you are gung-ho about it, it's a great experience!

Besides the shoes and two panels of fabric way over on the right, EVERYTHING on the couch cost me $25. Including multiple canvas shopping bags, two belts, a purse, a laptop bag, a vintage wool sweater, a sweater for my boyfriend, three t-shirts, one shirt for refashioning, Rogan jeans, two skirts, new PJ pants, a jacket and a hand knit cowl I frogged for the pretty yarn. And the shoes and fabric? $18 from the Park Slope store :) I have a game I play where I google what I bought when I come home and those DKNY shoes retail for $120 and the jeans around $200. WHUT?!

Today I finally got around to slicing up the t-shirt for refashioning, a XL Gap Red t-shirt with a print of a girl riding a T-Rex. I have no before pictures but that should be pretty easy to visualize (basically a boxy, white tee). After laying the tee out as flat as I could, allowing the fabric to follow it's natural bias (why are t-shirts always cut out so badly that the seams twist?!), I pinned a shirt I like centered over the dino-girl and sewed the sides right side out and cut off the excess fabric. Then I cut neck and armholes, turned the whole thing inside out and french seamed the sides. For the neck and armhole facings, I sewed on a narrow strip of vintage lace to stabilize fabric then folded under once at the arms and twice at the neck before top-stitching down. I've never done this before but it prevented the lettuce-edge I've had before when trying to sew thin knits.

 I'm pretty happy with how it turned out! Always good to have a new shirt to add into rotation :)

A PhD and Free-Motion Quilting, all in a week!

Hello Blog, long time no see. I've been in a thesis hole for the past few months focused on nothing but microRNAs, RNA binding proteins and metastasis. But now! Now! Well, if you'd like to call my Dr. Pom I really wouldn't object.

Part of my thesis-hole survival involved many cookies, more instant mac and cheese cups than I'd like to admit, and frequent perusals on eBay for vintage quilt tops with the idea that one day in the distant future I'd learn how to free-motion quilt on something that I was not emotionally invested in.

I lost many, many quilt top auctions before I finally won one, and on the same day I also impulse purchased a new pre-made top on sale for $12. It turned out that the vintage top (a subject for another post) was GORGEOUS but in need of some TLC, so I decided to go ahead and do my worst on the cheap top. I spray basted onto a bed sheet from Etsy, then did my best impression of free-motion quilting. For a first pass I think I did pretty well!

Initially I was aiming for tear drops but my hands want to make villi so that's what I got, wider in the sashing and tighter to frame the bunnies.

I'm actually pretty proud of myself, the stitching has a few uneven spots of super tiny and super big stitches but not as many as I expected. I found that going fairly fast helped me with evenness.  I did have occassional tension problems on the bobbin side, I'm not sure how to fix that, but again they were intermittent.

 I think this quilt will be donated to Bumble Beans Basics at my next Quilt Guild Meeting :)

Get Well Soon!

This coaster will help!

A friend of mine (one of my fellow Mermaid Paraders) had to have some pretty gnarly surgery to try to unblock the arteries leading to his hand. As he was semi-live Facebook-ing the event, he revealed that he would be undergoing surgery without knowing whether his hand would make it out the other side still attached. The absolute horror of that scenario had me hitting refresh more times than I'd like to admit to get a post-surgical update. Although things are not going as smoothly as anyone would like, the surgeons were able to open one artery so he still has his hand but will likely lose at a minimum a fingertip. So I made him a get well card. By first making a coaster, then velcro-ing that onto card stock.

This was completely improvised, using scraps in my friend and his wife's favourite red and black. Hopefully it will have a nice restorative beer resting on it soon.

Old Knits, New Photographs!

Somehow in the intervening 2 YEARS since I knit myself this looped loop I have never photographed it. I've worn it, and washed it and worn it some more, but never stopped to plonk it in front of the lens. So while I still had my tripod out I decided to take a quick snap. I knit this out of 3.5 skeins of Mirasol Miski, a wonderful 100% llama yarn in a beautiful copper colour that I got on sale in England. It's warm and soft and wonderful. As is the coat, a French Connection knee length wool number that I got for $36 from Goodwill. Thrifting FTW!

I knit the loop for myself a week after knitting a grey cashmere version for my boyfriend, which, gasp! I never blogged about either.

The yarn for this came from a thrifted sweater that I frogged a very, very long time ago. When I lived in Astoria. In 2005-6. I have a lot of yarn, what can I say. Every time I touch this scarf I want to steal it back because it is like butter it's so soft. My boyfriend wears it all the time so I think he likes it. I still have several large balls of the yarn leftover for some special use in the future, perhaps some mitts for myself, or a hat, or a shawl, or... or... or...