A busy week

Usually I try to post something covering my weekend quilting/knitting/gardening activity, but this week has been somewhat hectic for me.  Over the weekend I worked on a baby quilt for one of my husband's colleagues and finished the quilt top. This stage is also known as a "flimsy".  I kept careful note of all my cutting, piecing and pressing time on this so I can come up with a suitable selling price for similar items in my "real-soon-now" etsy shop.  All the coloured pieces came from scraps and charms so this is a great way to use small pieces in a larger contrast background.

A couple of weeks ago my little plastic card authorizing me to work arrived from the US government and since then my SSN has also arrived.  It is so good to feel like a "real" person! With these in hand I was invited to give some training this week on the equipment that I helped build, test and worked with for 20 years.  Those days coincided with the winter storm that brought 8" (20cm) of snow overnight Monday/Tuesday and school closures Tuesday & Wednesday as the temperatures and wind chill remained somewhat low.  To top it off yesterday the battery in the family car gave every impression of quitting, but after messing me about and having been given a good charging played nicely this morning for my husband!  All of this took priority over my quilting time so there isn't much to show from during the week until today.

The snow is melting, but somebody still isn't impressed...

 
On the yarn front there has been more progress as last Saturday I took a class on knitting socks from the toe upwards, using this pattern entitled Toe-Up Socks.  I'm sure I could have figured out the pattern on my own, but the class gave me confidence and it was fun knitting along with other people. Over the next two classes we will learn to turn the heel and finally cast off (bind off) the top edge.  I had done a little knitting in the round both with a circular needle and double pointed needles (DPNS) on previous projects, but this was certainly more challenging and has added to my knitting skill set.

Today I cleared and cleaned the lounge floor (Design Floor Friday again!) and tried out a couple of layouts for Christa's Colors. What do you think? Rows together or with some black between? Squiggly black or mottled black?

I am going to let these options rattle in my mind for a few days and then take it all to my in-town retreat next week. The quilting group I belong to hires a meeting room at a local motel for 4 days twice a year. We all take our machines and project with us an can sew from 8 in the morning till 10 at night each day but still go home and sleep in our own beds. Any regular commitments can still be made but we can sew for all of the rest of the time. I think it is a wonderful idea and I love it.  Room hire cost per quilter is about $10 for the week!

Today I am linking up with:

Quilting is more fun than Housework: Oh Scrap!

Busy Hands Quilts: Finished or not Friday

Confessions of a Fabric Addict: Can I get a Whoop Whoop?

My Quilt Infatuation: Needle and Thread Thursday

Make scraps, use scraps, make scraps...

I am not sure whether I have used more scraps or made more scraps with Christa's Colors (that still looks odd without a u in it).  I did dig into my strip boxes and use fabric from those, but I also trimmed off lots of pieces that got dropped into the scrap bag.  Those odd shaped bits will get used in crumb blocks as and when I get around to them.  All my blocks for this quilt are now made so now I can play with the layout, after all it is Design Floor Friday :)

I love working in the diffuse light on a snowy day

There will be a black or other dark border around the outside and I am toying with the idea of a narrow black/dark strip between each row.  I shall offer that idea up once the blocks are joined into rows.

In other news, I have made progress towards my OMG - the smaller table runner is no longer a UFO and now in its new home just awaiting a label.  The larger one still needs to have the binding hand stitched to the back and have a label made and attached.

Tested and approved!

So far this week we have had rain (put the tender herbs out to get some moisture), sunshine (also good for the plants) and on Thursday night we were back to snow and the plants need to come back in... It certainly felt like all four seasons in one week!

 

Today I am linking up with:

Quilting is more fun than Housework: Oh Scrap!

Busy Hands Quilts: Finished or not Friday

Confessions of a Fabric Addict: Can I get a Whoop Whoop?

My Quilt Infatuation: Needle and Thread Thursday

Rainbow crumbs

I have a confession to make, I can't throw away a piece of fabric that I just might be able to use however small it happens to be. This is my bin, see how small the trimmings have to be to make it into there?

Essentially if it is larger than 3/4" square I keep it. Occasionally pieces larger than that go into the bin, but sometimes they creep back out!  I keep my binding offcuts separated by width and strings (random/varying width long pieces) live in their own shoe box.  I also cut down leftovers into regular sized squares, particularly 2.5" squares. The other tiny bits end up classed as crumbs.  For last year's RSC I started making crumb blocks that I squared up to 4.5", but when my quilting mojo went walk about those few blocks just languished in a little box with some scraps and crumbs sorted by colour.  This week I revisited that box and added to it with 8 purple (January) blocks and 8 turquoise (February) blocks.

Now I have TWO rainbow scrap projects on the go.  It was easy to find the crumbs for these new blocks as I had already sorted out my scraps by colour to make the Dresden plates.  I have also pre-sorted more of my scraps into ziplock bags ready for future months.  Only another week and we find out what the colour is for March, I really don't want to wait! For even more great scrap ideas check out the Oh Scrap! link up.

Weatherwise this last week has been unseasonably warm with a record high today!  Our outdoor Christmas lights are now down (they have been off for a bit) and I did a little preparation in the raised bed ready for planting out later in the year.  There are still leaves to rake, so that has gone onto the list for the weekend. Last week we had lots of wind and rain so I have also picked up the small branches from the garden and set them out to be collected by the township. Many of the verges in our subdivision now have piles of sticks waiting for pick up looking like giant twiggy nests.  We have a few brave crocuses already in bloom and I belatedly planted a bag of grape hyacinth bulbs that had been forgotten, oops!

Weekend progress

By the end of Saturday I had all my En Provence units sewn, though not all pressed and trimmed to exact size.  On Sunday I pressed all the four patch units and finished spinning the seams to make assembly of the quilt top easier.  I did a quick calculation and the quilt top as designed will have 2868 pieces of fabric in it! Wow! Next I need to trim all these to 3.5" square then I can start putting it together.

All the units for En Provence

For a bit of light relief I organised my small scraps into bags of the same colour, this will help with the rainbow scrap challenge during the coming months, and also made 3 turquoise Dresden plates to meet the February colour choice of teal/aqua/turquoise.  All the "petals" came out of the scrap bag, no yardage was harmed in making these so I can also link to Oh Scrap! :)

The weather turned almost warm on Saturday with temperatures of over 50F (over 10C) and as the daylight faded there was much less snow on the ground than we awoke to. My tender herbs got moved out of the garage to get some light and, possibly, some rain, but I expect to need to move them back inside during the week as more cold air, and possibly snow, comes our way.

At the moment I am holding off starting any new knitting projects, though I can hear the siren song of various balls of yarn, as I have at least 4 projects that need to be finished. Of the four things one of them only needs seams and a neckband, the others need a little more, but they are all at least 80% done so I must finish at least one of them before casting on again.  I also have a barely started scarf, but as that is for me there is no great rush to carry on with that at the moment, it will probably become my in-car project when we are driving to places in the better weather.

Cold weather, warm hands

With the snow and below freezing temperatures reappearing mid-week and giving me great light to work in I have managed a couple of knitting finishes this week - a baby blanket for a friend of a friend and some cosy fingerless mittens.

The blanket was a rescue mission as the friend who was making it fell up some steps and broke her hand a week before Christmas and still can't knit, meanwhile the baby it is for keep on growing (as they do), so I just carried on with it until the yarn was used up. Easy knitting for watching TV and taking to my craft group.

The mittens are from this Really Clear pattern and I took a class at Stitch Your Art Out to help me with the techniques for knitting on lots of double-pointed needles. It is actually only a set of 5 (or 4 if you prefer) but feels like 20 when you first start! Now I shall have warm hands as I sit at my PC in our basement.

First mitt completed

Second mitt in progress

My sewing machine has not been totally ignored. I made 3 Dresden plates in varied purples for the January's Rainbow Scrap Challenge and have made progress on my remaining sub-units for my En Provence quilt.
 

I hope to get those final sub-units finished over the weekend, then I can get onto assembling the blocks.  The purple petals came from leftover fabric from En Provence.

Scrap taming

Firstly a couple of pictures of my spring bulbs in flower, three weeks earlier than the same varieties last year!

As well as trying to reduce the UFO list I am also attempting to keep my fabric scraps under some semblance of control.  I know all quilters consider different sizes to be "scraps", for me it is probably anything less than 1/8th of a yard.  Above a yard it is yardage, between 1/8 yard (fat or long/thin) and a yard it is a piece, but so long as it is bigger than 3/4" in one dimension it is worth keeping.  Of course if I bought a stack of precuts of whatever size they would also be pieces not scraps.  I hope that is all as clear as mud.

A great help in dealing with my scraps is Bonnie Hunter's scrap user's system though I think of it more as a scrap tamer's system :)  I don't follow Bonnie's system with every piece of fabric, but as I come to the end of the cutting phase for a project I do, usually, cut the smaller pieces into strips, squares & strings and put them into boxes.  I used to use cardboard shoeboxes but have now discovered Sterilite 6 quart clear plastic boxes, which my local Home Depot has at 98 cents per box, including the lid!  Slowly I am putting my larger volumes of scraps into those and I can see what I have.  I also keep a box of all the odd shaped bits that I can't be bothered into sorting more formally, including all the triangles that I trim as I make binding strips and other little itty bitty pieces almost too small to use.  These small pieces end up in crumb blocks which in turn make the scrappiest, most colorful quilts full of all my quilting history.  Anything less than 3/4" square does eventually end up in the bin.

This week I have continued working on the elephant quilt for my granddaughter and now have 15 pink heffalumps partially sewn together. In making this I have also ended up with lots of little HSTs* made by sewing an extra line of stitching before trimming off the corner triangles - maybe in this instance these  could be called elephant droppings?  I think I shall press and trim them, sew them together in little blocks and make some pincushions using Amanda Jean's method over at Crazy Mom Quilts in the hope that using up the scraps as I create them will help keep them under control.  All I'll have to do is work out what to do with all the pincushions!

A quick note on another difference between the UK & the USA: driving! My younger son turned 16 at the beginning of the month and I now have TWO teenage sons with learner's permits. Eeeek!

Back in the UK I would have paid to send them out with a driving instructor in a dual control car for him/her to deal with their awkward kangaroo hops in a manual transmission (stick shift) as they learned clutch control and I would only have taken them out once they had already developed some skills, also they would have had to display "L plates" (as in the image to the left) on the front and back of the vehicle whenever they were driving to let other road users know the car was in the "control" of a learner driver.  Here it has been up to me to do the initial skills transfer, starting in DH's work place car park/parking lot and soon they will be on the real roads with no warning to other drivers that they are inexperienced drivers.  Admittedly, starting to drive in an automatic is more straightforward, but I know there are all sorts of skills and habits that a UK certified driving school instills in a young driver that I will not remember to pass on to my sons.  In due course they will be taught how to drive using a clutch, so one thing they already know is not to put their left foot anywhere other than flat on the floor or the foot rest!  From my quick internet search for L plates it seems that even our UK armed forces are not exempt from the L plate rule.



* HST = Half Square Triangle

Alphabet Soup - or a post full of TLAs

In 2016 I am aiming to move things from my UFO list to my completed list - in this instance a UFO is an UnFinished Object as at 1st January 2016.  To count as a UFO the project has to actually have been started in some way, i.e. at least some cutting and/or sewing must have been done.  This means a WIP* at the beginning of the year counts, but PIGS, PITs & PIWs don't, nor do USOs or WHIMs.  My UFO count at the start of the year was about 15 and I would like to get at least one completed each month.

This week I managed to complete a UFO from 2013, unfortunately this is not my oldest UFO, but it is now quilted, bound, labelled and has a hanging rod fitted so I can display it when I decide on where it will look best.  This was a class project from a workshop I took in October 2013 with Jenni Dobson.  The central panel was a joint exercise with another of the ladies taking the class.  I think I may yet replace the letters in the word "contrast" with black fabric, but I shall let that idea mature for a while.....  However it is finished and ready to hang so I have completed my OMG for March!

Of course having completed a UFO I didn't pull out the next one to work on, oh no, I started a new project instead!  This time an elephant quilt for my grand-daughter from Quilter's World magazine Spring 2016 issue.

I am using up pink fabrics for the elephants, many of which are from the scrap box and some yellow scraps for the ears.  The stash and scrap raid yielded sufficient fabrics for fifteen pink elephants and by the end of the weekend the five small ones had been assembled and placed on my design "wall" aka my ironing board.  All the pieces for five medium and five large ones are cut and ready to go.

A bonus this week has been some warm sunny weather meaning I was able to get out into the garden and carry on clearing last autumn's leaves from the flower beds and my plant pots where they have helped shelter my herbs from the coldest winter weather. The herbs were all pushed up against the wall of the house to aid their survival but now they have been moved out into the open to benefit from the rain we are promised next week.  My spring bulbs are also looking good, some of the crocuses are blooming and the daffodils are pushing up leaves and flower buds.  Now I have to be patient before planting my vegetable seeds for the year - last year I was a bit too impatient and the seedlings were getting too big before it was safe to put them outside, this year I shall hang on a bit longer before starting them inside.

This week I am linking up with:
Design Wall Monday and
Oh Scrap!


* WIP = work in progress
PIGS = project in grocery sack
PIT = project in tote
PIW = project in waiting
USO = UnStarted Object
WHIM = work hidden in (my) mind
TLA = Three Letter Acronym :)

Halfway around the world and back again

I thought I had published this entry on 9th Feb as per the heading, but somehow I managed to delete it from the blog during editing, so here it is about three and a half weeks later than intended!

As I mentioned last time I have travel scheduled for half of February. My first trip was to Lithuania, specifically to the Baltic coast. There is no quick route so, on Monday afternoon I flew first to Chicago, then overnight to London Heathrow in England, arriving Tuesday morning, where I waited 6 hours for a plane to Copenhagen in Denmark, there I should have only had a 3 hour layover, but that eventually became 5 hours after technical issues with the plane (something to do with a door!). I finally exited my destination airport at 3 a.m. local time on Wednesday morning or 8 p.m. EST, and arrived at the hotel half an hour later, 27 hours after my first plane took off and 37 1/2 hours after my alarm went off at home on Monday morning. Rarely has a hotel bedroom looked so inviting!  During my outward travel I completed knitting one scarf, started another and also continued with a summer weight sweater for my grandson. This is the back pinned out on my ironing board after I got home.

I had been expecting to be met by cold weather but by the time I arrived it was a balmy 6°C, as opposed to the -15°C of two weeks earlier! Strong gusty winds, grey and wet are in some ways better than 2 feet of snow and bitter cold, especially as there would almost certainly have been a cutting wind with that too.  However I was still very glad not to be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time.  After I had completed the job I had flown out to do I had a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon to wander around Klaipeda by which time the wind had dropped and the sun had come out. This is one of the older buildings in the town.

Now for the important bit of the travelogue: the food! My chosen hotel was home to an Armenian restaurant and the dishes were excellent. I enjoyed salads that had never seen a lettuce leaf in their existence, aromatically spiced meats served with fragrant fluffy rice and a delicious filo, honey and pistachio dessert.  Definitely a cuisine to investigate further.

Travelling home on the Friday I essentially reversed my route, though with shorter stopovers at the various airports along the way. The icing on the cake for the journey home was clearing immigration at Chicago O'Hare in about 10 minutes (as opposed to the, at least, 2 hours it took me on one previous trip) and being able to catch an earlier plane for my final flight, getting both me and my luggage home 4 hours earlier than expected!  More knitting on the homeward legs led to completed scarves for my sons.

An unexpected bonus on the transatlantic flight was flying over the southern tip of Greenland - only the second time I have done that in 20 years of travel between Europe and the USA.

Burning the candle at both ends

Last week was another complete wash-out for all things sewing and craft related, even Storm Jonas didn't dent the pressures of other stuff that had deadlines and so had to be done.  In fact he only brought us about 4" of snow which was starting to recede within 24 hours due to the temperatures hovering around and above freezing.  I keep telling myself that the recent efforts will be worth it in the end.

There was a glimpse of hope this week on Wednesday when, in between loads of laundry, I managed to insert an extra piece of fabric into the backing for my table runner, get it pin basted and started on the quilting.....

After that it was time to head out for an evening of ten pin bowling. Although a complete novice in September last year, I now bowl twice a week - Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings. Ostensibly this is exercise, but it is mainly good fun, an opportunity for some gossip and a way to make new friends even though my scores are nothing to write home about. Further efforts on the quilting front, and a trip to Stitch Your Art Out for the binding fabric, led to completion of the table runner on Sunday evening. Here it is in place:

Sadly my OMG is just not going to be achieved this month, nor probably next as I know I will be away for two of the four weeks February graces us with. My knitting will travel with me so I hope to have something to show next week.

A Winter's Tale (part 1).....

Wow! Winter arrived with a bite this week!  UK winters tend to be mild and damp, with a January average high of 6.6°C and average low of 1.1°C (43.9°F & 34.0°F respectively) so the overnight low of 6°F or -14.4°C was a bit of a shock to the system, particularly for Smokey who wanted, nay needed, to nip outside to do kitty things, but certainly didn't want to hang around any longer than absolutely necessary. To put this in perspective the record low at Manchester Airport is about -17°C or 0°F.  I was here for some of the winter last year, but this cold snap still came as a surprise; it was definitely time to break out the hats, gloves and scarves. A couple of milder (and wetter) days gave some relief, but this evening we are back to windy and cold conditions. Brrr!

Nevertheless the weather was largely bright and sunny which made ideal conditions for sewing.  On Monday I got one quilt sandwiched and pin basted and part of Tuesday was spent removing a border from a quilt top, inserting an extra column of blocks, adding some extra border pieces and finally reattaching the removed border.  All this to use up another 8 blocks which turned up as I organised my fabric and projects, but they do add 10" to the width of the quilt, which does make the quilt a better size.

The pattern is Frugal Patch from Marcia Hohn's Quilter's Cache site and I have been using my scraps to make these blocks on and off for more years than I care to remember! Now this top is completed and there are no blocks left I need to choose a new scrap block to make. I am thinking of Simply Woven from the Moda Bake Shop as in addition to fabric pieces I have a box of binding strip remants to use up.

I now have 2 quilts basted ready to quilt and this flimsy ready to sandwich and baste next week now I have bought some backing fabric. Backing fabric is an exception to the "shop the stash" rule as I much prefer working with single piece backings if I can and I didn't have any extra wide "in stock".  Progress was also made on Circle in a Square - all the circles for the border blocks are cut out and ready to fuse to the background squares.

In news from the non quilty part of my life: both of our sons have settled in well in the local school system and our younger son has been immersing himself in the high school music scene.  This weekend he was part of the pit band for the senior thespians' production of Return to the Forbidden Planet which was most enjoyable and well produced, though it was a shame that the Friday evening show was cancelled due to the forecast of freezing rain.

Today I am linking up with:

Oh Scrap!

Truly a Quilter in a Strange Land

Firstly, my apologies that there has been a ten month hiatus in this very intermittent blog.

Secondly, I have finally moved properly to the USA together with my sewing machines, fabrics, notions, patterns, magazines, books etc.!!!  I arrived on 6th August 2015 and the (second) container with all the (rest of the) stuff arrived exactly one week later and was unloaded (note, not unpacked) in 2 hours.  Since then we have been doing a lot of that unpacking and I have been hunting out the essentials so that I can use my sewing machines for the first time in well over a year!  During that year and a bit I have not been idle on the crafting front as I have been knitting for myself, my children, my grandchildren and friends.

The last fifteen months have been a long hard slog and the final 3 month stint in the UK was especially difficult as I frequently felt I was in the wrong place when family occasions and other events happened in Pennsylvania and elsewhere without me.  However, that is now over and I can move forward with our new life across the pond.  Being back together again as a family is a wonderful feeling.

During my stay in the US between mid-February and the end of April I was welcomed by the local quilters and spent some very pleasant Tuesday mornings knitting and chatting with them, I also found an evening drop-in knitting group at the local library and I am looking forward to rejoining both these groups as time permits.

Since my most recent arrival the weather was initially warm and sunny and a real treat for an Englishwoman I can assure you.  The fresh vegetables from the local farmers' markets were an eye-opener too, especially the sweetcorn, which was the best I have ever tasted. The last few weeks have been cooler with a few frosty nights, the leaves have largely fallen from our trees and autumn is well under way.

A sad note is that Rocky, our black cat, started to suffer from pancreatitis and despite the most valiant efforts of our new veterinarian we had to say farewell to him at the end of September.  Smokey continues to enjoy his new world, though he was not so confident when we stayed in a friend's place for a couple of days and decided that the highest place in the kitchen was the best vantage point!

Now I have got my sewing machine plugged in and running I can share the first quilted thing I have completed since I arrived here in the USA.

The pattern is available at http://lilysquilts.blogspot.com/2013/05/pam-kitty-tea-cosy-tutorial.html