Plain Trip Around the World (February 2016 UFO)

I'm keeping this image small because it was dark when I took the picture, and it's grainy. This is the February UFO for this year. It's finished according to my definition. There are still a few things to be done to it - wash out the markings, add a sleeve and a label, and maybe put a line of quilting between the border and the inside. But once I have the binding on and I can take a picture of it, I call it done.

Thanks to bygone astronomers for adding an extra day to February this year.

Home Deco

I made these large pillows over the weekend. I fell in love with the fabric when we reupholstered the sofa (the one in the picture). I bought enough for a few pillows but left it at the store for about a year, eventually picking it up last summer. I cut it into triangles that I sewed together to get the square pattern.

It's hard to see the actual color in this picture - the back is a fine grayish-brown corduroy. It was maddening to sew it to the squares, because it would crawl in the direction of the nap. The corduroy fibers were like thousands of little ratchets. Any movement would slide the back in one direction only. So I had to fight with it.

Eventually I prevailed. I didn't put a zipper in the back - I sewed together two half backs closely near the edges and loosely in the middle, and pressed the seam open. Then after I sewed the front to the back, I removed the loose stitching, inserted the pillow, and sewed it shut by hand. I love these pillows but I caught myself repeating "The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good" many times. But it's true, these are good pillows with a few imperfections.

January 2016 UFO - Finished!

Two years ago we had our floors sanded, and when I put the boxes back on the shelves in the sewing room, I was unhappy. Too many odds and ends were simply being collected, and the boxes weren't beautiful to look at. So I made large and small quilt tops out of all the three inch strips and everything in the box labeled "large squares and triangles." This is one of the latter. I had saved all the triangles from the mitered corners of the borders of many quilts, and I had some other large triangles left over from bias bindings.

The layout of this quilt was insanely complicated. It's not hard to find ways to fit five squares into a rectangle when the two smaller ones are the same size. It's just a matter of arithmetic. There is always a gap in the middle that is filled with another rectangle or a square. There are four such rectangles in this layout. The difficulty is in fitting 20 pinwheels into four rectangles so that the four rectangles fill a larger rectangle with no space along the sides. I had to use a spreadsheet and run through all the possibilities by hand to figure out which combination of smaller rectangles would fit into a large rectangle. There were only two or three ways to do this, and this is the way that looked the best.

I broke a few rules with this quilt. First of all, because triangles trimmed from borders come in eights, I have pairs of same pinwheels. This is a compositional faux pas! You are supposed to have odd numbers of same things. So sorry. Next, I don't normally use a fabric for the binding that is as striking as this. My old teacher Kathleen Weinheimer taught us that we don't want the viewer staring at the binding. But I liked this, it matched the colors, and it was from a piece of fabric that I used to make the binding for my dad's quilt. Also it was easy to cut and prepare. So, win win win. And it looks great. I already know what I'm doing in February, and there's no chance of breaking rules. So you can all rest easy.

Almost to full rows

Normally I wait until I've finished something before putting it in a post. But this project is going to take a long time to piece, and I work on it every day. Well almost every day. My goal is to sew two stacks together every day. In this picture, I am down to four stacks. So in two days I will have two stacks, and in three days I will have exactly 57 rows. Then I'll start sewing the rows together. But I did miss a day. I had to work late a week ago to finish the books for the thrift shop. I am the new bookkeeper, and the books are due on Wednesday morning. So I thought, what could it hurt, if I don't sew two stacks together, just once? Well the result was, I didn't want to continue. The next day, when it was time to sew the usual two stacks, I had so much resistance, it was scary. But I did what I needed to do and have struggled to sew my quota every day since. I even made up the day that I missed by sewing extra over the weekend. So that is the real reason for working on something daily, other than that it gets done. Momentum occurs. It does seem a little rigid, I suppose, to insist that I sew together two stacks every day, but I've come a long way, and it's going to be a stunning piece of work. I was going to lay it out when I got to this point. I tried laying out the stack at the top. It was a lot of work, and I don't think it'll be any harder to lay out when I get to two stacks in two days. So I'll wait until then. I've already seen a square that I might want to turn before I start sewing the rows together.

2016, Year of the UFO

I'm very excited about the new year. In 2011 I finished 12 UFOs, one per month. They can be seen on the 2011 page of this blog. Now, five years later, it's time to do it again. This time I'll be working by myself, but I'll have my crochet friends on Instagram to show the finished products.

I chose 12 UFOs (out of many more, sad to say) and listed them in a spreadsheet. In another column, I added 12 random numbers using the rand() function. This function refreshes with new random numbers every time something changes. So I sort by the random number column, and the first quilt in the list is the one that I will finish in the next month. The sort changes the random numbers, so every time I sort, I will get a new order.

The first quilt that came up was my irregular pinwheel quilt. Amazingly, it was in a bin together with the right size backing and the right batting! A while ago I matched lots of batting and backing to many of my quilt tops. So it will be a breeze to finish.

At the same time I intend to keep working on my giant trip around the world and to have my Boston Commons quilt professionally quilted.

Raffle Quilt Blocks

After a long stretch of crocheting, I finally used my sewing machine again. In two days I have to turn in my raffle quilt blocks, so I had to actually make them. I had taken home three packets, but I wanted four so that I could make better use of the leftovers, so the blue-violet star is extra. I hope it works for the raffle quilt. The block is basically a nine-patch, with the star points being the sides and the center the same color as the star points. Little triangles are generated in the process of making the star points, and I used these to make two bonus blocks.

The colors didn't come out true in this picture, in spite of my efforts at post- processing. But these are the blocks, a very nice way to make LeMoyne stars without having eight points in the middle.

The first step is to mark a 2 1/4 inch colored square on the diagonal, place it on the corner of a 3 inch black square, sew along the diagonal, and trim away the triangles outside of the seam. I sew the triangles together before I cut them off to get little half-square triangles. Sixteen of them make this block. (The colors here are much closer to the actual colors.)

The next step is to mark another 2 1/4 inch colored square on the diagonal, place it on the left bottom corner of the square from step 1, then sew and trim as before. These little half-square triangles include a little corner of the first triangle. So I made pinwheel blocks with diamonds in the middle.

Paintbrush holder

This paintbrush holder was very easy to make. I bought this fabric in St. Thomas the year we went to Tortola with my mother-in-law and all her kids and grandkids. The ribbon is lovely, but it was only by chance that it was the one that most closely matched the colors in the fabric.

It's hard to see exactly what I did here, but I'll try to explain. I used a decorator-width fabric (54 inches rather than 42) about 25 inches wide. I folded it in half right sides together, lengthwise, selvage edges touching. I folded back the selvages about an inch and sewed the side seams. Then I turned it inside out, sort of like a pillowcase. Then I sewed the open end shut. That is what you see on the top. This was a unique piece of fabric. It was only printed up to a certain point. So it looks like it's lined. I made a similar small pocket for the little brushes, except for that I didn't fold the raw edges under. I just sewed it onto the big piece so that the raw edges are covered.
Then I folded up about nine inches to form the pockets, sewed up the sides, and sewed eight interior lines from the bottom to the opening to make nine compartments. I used my brushes as a guide. They were mostly 12 inches long. If I make another one of these, I'll take pictures and provide more detailed directions. I sewed the ribbon just through the middle of the ribbon to the right side only. When I roll up the holder, I fold the top down over the brushes and then roll it up starting from the left side where the smaller brushes are. When it is all rolled up, the ribbon is on the outside and I just tie it around. When I'm using the brushes, I fold the top back and tie the ribbon to the easel. The whole thing just hangs there with a little slant so that the brushes don't fall out, and I can pull out whatever size brush I need. For this to happen the ribbon has to be closer to the top than to the bottom.