City Gym Shorts

It's taken me several years to rather begrudgingly embrace shorts as more than a loathed clothing item. I'm pale. I have thighs. I have issues with those two things combining in an unflattering way. But then I found a couple of pairs of shorts in thrift stores that fit and were flattering! Shorts! Who knew?!

I'm still not perfectly sold on short-shorts as regular day wear but it's hot here in New York and I like to be able to move about in the garden without flashing my neighbors, so when I saw the City Gym Shorts pattern on the Purl Bee, I thought, why not? At least I can make a try to make a wearable muslin and end up with a pair of PJ shorts in the process if I don't like the finished look on me.

In deference to the original pattern I picked my most Liberty-esque print (a Wamsutta scrap fat quarter from NYC Quilt Guild) and some coordinating solids for the back and waist band. For the bias tape I used the very last of the vintage stuff I bought many moons ago at an Astoria thrift store. I screwed up royally sewing it on, but I don't really care, it looks fine from even a small distance.

 

I made the 38-40" shorts because my hip measurement is somewhere around 38" but I think next time (yes, next time) I'll have to go a size up. These fit but with no stretch in the fabric they are a bit too snug. I have a feeling that my printer shrunk the pattern a smidge, so your mileage may vary when it comes to picking a size. I asked the designer whether it would be possible for her to insert a size guide in the pattern (a square of known size) to prevent this kind of thing, so hopefully that wont be a problem for anyone else.

 

I had a bear of a time getting the elastic into the waist. Again I was using something from the big bag of thrifted goods and probably it was a touch too wide. I'll have to cut the waist band a 1/2" wider on the next pair.

This was an extremely simple pattern and very quick to put together, and if I was really a shorts person rather than someone who just plays one on the weekends, I'd sew up a dozen!

Recycled Jewels Quilt

I've been collecting shot cotton items on my trips to Goodwill and Housing Works Buy The Bag. with the idea that I'd eventually make a quilt. I'd gathered two pairs of yoga pants, a torn queen sized fitted sheet and a few other odds and ends, including a floaty Indian cotton striped skirt with a brown lining.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago when 12 triangles of shot cotton plaid turned up on the scrap pile at NYC Metro Mod Quilt Guild" and I finally cut into a cotton Indian skirt to make eye patches for a certain fox...

In a frenzy of piecing I put this top together in one night. The super simple expanding borders made it go very fast and since I had no plan it grew very organically. I had to piece several of the strips to make the sashing long enough but that's hardly noticeable since I took a lot of care to match stripes.

It's positively luminous.

Seen here with corn.

 

I kept the quilting pretty simple, concentric rectangles in the borders, but had a bit of fun in the central medallion by adding three 8-point stars. The thread color matches the fabric on the front and is consistently dark green on the back. The backing fabric was one side of a king duvet cover from Goodwill. 

The only new fabrics are Kona solids (turquoise and dark blue for the binding), the central scraps and the batting. I'm glad that I allowed the fabric to tell me what to, it dictated how the final quilt was structured and which accent colors to add. It honestly feels like the only part I played was working the sewing machine!

Quilt Bee Catch Up.... Again

May and June kind of got away from me what with finishing up a paper for publication, my parents coming for my PhD graduation festivities, and then returning to the UK myself. Since being a good Bee participant is important to me, I e-mailed the May and June Queen Bees in advance to give them the option of having fabric returned or asked for a little leeway with more time. Both were gracious enough to allow more time, so jet-lag and coffee fueled I worked my way through the blocks on July 4th!

For May I made four more Amish Blocks for Judy. This quilt is going to be stunning, so much color and movement is packed into these teeny 4" squares. It's obviously taking a while to create all these blocks (at least since at least November last year) but I'm looking forward to seeing it once it's put together.

 

For June we were asked to use a provided 10" square plus 5" square of pale grey polka dot fabric plus a 10" square of our own plummy purple fabric to make a 13" churn dash block. I've never made on of these before and the tutorial provided was super clear and seemed to include a whole heap of short cuts that made assembling this block super quick.

I obviously drank enough coffee to also get a jump on July's block, four strip and paper pieced scrappy blocks using warm and cool colors and neutral corners. This was fun! I made use of the 45 degree cut-off sections from making the first block to start the second warm or cool strip to try to reduce waste. This is going to be really fun once it's completed.

Now August, I'M READY FOR YOU.

GCSE Art - My Early Adventures in Quilting

My parents finally decided to switch around the layout of the bedrooms in their house making my old bedroom the master since it's the biggest and has an en suite bathroom. This meant redecorating, rearranging furniture and archeological digs through the kind of things that get put at the back of deep closets by a 6-18 year old girl. While I was home I spent a few days digging through this stuff, throwing the majority out and making a small pile of things to keep for that indeterminate time in the future where I'll have space to take it.

A large portion of both piles was made up of my GCSE Art projects. I got an A in Art way back in 1999, specializing in fabric and textiles. It was a humorous and painful exercise to go through everything. I found a lot the the way Art was taught and the way work had to be done incredibly frustrating and still, 15 years later am slightly annoyed by it. A HUGE part of the "process" was showing development of ideas, creating sketchbooks of trial runs. I don't know about anyone else, but that it not how my ideas come to me. Yes I can see the point for developing new skills and what not, but my ideas tend to come to me fully formed or I experiment along the way within one piece. This meant that I spent a lot of time back-filling these "holes" in my "process" rather than actually making and doing, which in the end felt contrived and awkward to me. Looking at the work now, it still does. Still there are some things I do still like which I think show the fledgling quilter in me trying to break out.

I clearly remember the day that I drew my first still life of a pepper in pencil crayon. It was the day I decided I could draw. It was the day I decided to keep art as one of the 9 subjects I took at GCSE level, sacrificing Geography in favor if paint and glue and all kinds of creative things. For this project I believe we had to design a repeating pattern then transfer it to fabric (wax resist). I then quilted it using hand embroidery and embellished with little seed beads. I had not yet learned the importance of backing fabric. I might one day back and bind this to turn it into a proper wall hanging.

Whatever this was inspired by it was made in the same way as the pepper quilt above. This I did not keep because it's just so... ugly?

A marriage of two passions - Art and Science! This is still one of my favorite final pieces (yes, done before the two process predecessors) based on my own pseudo-coloring of microscopic images of plant cells. Given the folders of histological images I have sitting on my computer from my PhD, this might be an idea I could return to for future experimentation.

I've got more photographs of weaving, embroidery, some machine sewing experimentation on paper, but I'll save those for another post, hopefully when I'm over my jet lag...