Work in Progress, March 7, 2012

A sneak peek at something I'm working on and hope to finish by tomorrow.

Totoro!

My daughter is a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki's animated movie My Neighbor Totoro. Totoro is a big gray forest troll who befriends two girls and helps them in a time of crisis. It's a lovely little movie and I thought Ally might like to have a totoro of her own.

This Totoro plushie is about a foot tall and made from a super-soft gray felted lambswool sweater. All of his features are also made from recycled felted wool clothes. I did use polyfill stuffing in him as I thought my usual felted wool scraps would be too heavy for a toy.

The main body is machine stitched for durability. After I made the main body I appliqued Totoro's arms and fat tail with a blanket stitch. His arms and tail have additional stuffing (scrap polyfill quilt batting) in them for a dimensional effect.

Totoro's whiskers and claws are done in black embroidery floss. Really, he's constructed  using the same techniques I use with all of my primitive crafts. That Cheshire Cat smile just kept reminding me of my jack o'lantern penny rug. 

In the end, I ended up making what may be the world's first primitive plushie based on a anime character.

Free Motion Quilting Fail, or Why I'm Sewing Christmas Stockings in February

I have a quilt that I've pieced and assembled into a quilt sandwich (top, flannel sheet batting, and backing) but I haven't quilted it yet. This particular quilt is calling for something different than my usual cross-hatch or parallel row quilting and I want to use a more organic quilt pattern on it. Something with loops or wavy lines. Something I haven't tried yet. I've been waiting to master the art of free motion quilting before finishing this particular quilt. (And to perfectly honest, I've been procrastinating on learning how to free motion quilt by trying to organize my fabrics and felted wool before the produces of "Hoarders" came knocking at the door. Now that I've dragged all that stuff out and haven't found a good way to organize it, I'm tired of messing with fabric and want to complete some unfinished projects, like that quilt. The piles of fabric and wool can just stay on the floor for a while longer.)

In theory I know how to free motion quilt. I've read articles on it and watched videos on YouTube showing how it's done. I have a darning foot and my machine allows me to drop the feed dogs. However, as often is the case, *knowing* how to do something and actually *doing* it can be two different beasts. I started practicing free motion quilting yesterday morning and had some difficulty with it. The foot kept bouncing around and I thought it was much harder to maneuver my test piece around than it should have been.

Poking around on the web led me to a website devoted to free motion quilting, Leah Day's The Free Motion Quilting Project, which has some GREAT teaching videos on it. (Even if you don't quilt, take at look at Leah's website and see the beautiful quilting patterns she's produced and illustrated.) In particular, I found this video on modifying your darning foot to be very useful. Following Leah's suggestions, I hacked my darning foot and voila! That annoying bounce disappeared and I was able to maneuver my fabric around much more smoothly. I spent another hour practicing and felt much more confident in my ability to free motion quilt.

Then this morning I sat down to practice again and had nothing but problems with thread tension. Snarls with excessive loops of thread on both the top and the bottom of my practice piece. I adjusted the tension up and down, trying to get rid of those ugly bird's nests, but nothing seemed to work. 

I've learned from past mistakes that you can't force a project that doesn't want to cooperate. It's best to set it aside and try again later. And that's how I wound up sewing a couple of Christmas stockings and attempting to make fleece socks today instead of free motion quilting. The stockings had been in my work-in-progress pile for awhile, so at least that counts as cleaning up!

A Quilt for Mother's Day

It's taken me forever, but I finally finished a quilt that's been a work in progress for quite some time.



When I first started quilting I wanted very much to do a half-square triangle block quilt. I also had some linen fabric that I wanted to use, so I began making half-square triangle blocks with it. I used a solid sage green and a floral print with sage green, yellow, and natural linen. Both fabrics were taken from recycled linen clothing I found at my local thrift store.

Anyone who's worked with half-square triangle blocks and/or linen is probably shaking their heads right now. Half-square triangles can be tricky for a novice, and linen...well, linen tends to stretch out of shape when you work with it. Especially if you're making half-square triangles out of it without any regard to the fabric's bias.

I knew the linen seemed to warp easily as I made my half-square triangle blocks, but I decided to forge ahead and see what I could make out of it. Pinwheel blocks!, I thought in blissful ignorance. Because if half-square triangle blocks made of linen seem a get a little out of shape a little too easily, you should realize that linen pinwheel blocks are downright finicky.

But I kept at it, making those half-square triangle blocks and then the pinwheel blocks. Then I realized that not all of my pinwheel blocks were turning in the same direction. I had assembled half of them turning clockwise and the other half turning counter clockwise. I really didn't want to rip the seams out to remake all the blocks turning in the same direction, but I didn't have enough solid sage green material left over to make additional blocks.

That's when I set the whole project aside for half a year. Then last fall I realized that I could make some blocks using the floral print linen with some oatmeal-colored linen that I had on hand. I made up the half-square triangle blocks, but never got around to assembling them into pinwheel blocks before the holidays.

Fast forward to late winter. I decided it was time to get this quilt finished. I laid out the blocks that I had assembled and then realized that I didn't really have enough of the floral print/oatmeal half-triangle squares completed to make enough pinwheel blocks. I threw my hands up in the air and set the project aside once more.

Finally, the week after Mother's Day, I forced myself to re-evaluate this project and find some way to complete it. This time the stars came into alignment and I quickly found an arrangement of blocks that 1) I liked, and 2) didn't require any addition block assembly. I set the clockwise-turning pinwheels on the left and the counter-clockwise turning pinwheels on the right. In the center I alternated the oatmeal and floral print half-square triangles in a flying goose pyramid and a divided triangle pattern. I used solid oatmeal-colored linen on the sides to make the throw-sized quilt a decent size and then assembled my quilt top. I used an old flannel sheet for batting, and for the backing, I decided to use a spectacular vintage 1970s cotton-poly blend sheet.

There's a story behind this sheet. My grandmother, my mom's mom, loved the color yellow. And she adored butterflies and plants. When I found this particular bedsheet with yellow and orange butterflies and ferns, I immediately thought of Memaw. It was a perfect backing for a Mother's Day quilt for my mom (even at that point it was well past Mother's Day and I hadn't even finished assembling it yet) and the colors were a nice counterpoint to the sage greens on the front of the quilt.

So there I was, congratulating myself on wrapping up an unfinished project when it occurred to me that I had not even considered how I was going to bind this quilt. We were leaving to visit my parents the day after the next and there really wasn't enough time to make a binding, quilt the quilt, and attach the binding before we were going to leave. That's when I decided to cheat a little. I layered the quilt so that I could stitch all around except for about a 5 inch gap, then flip it inside out and close the seam with a ladder stitch. Voila! A self-seamed quilt. I ran a top stitch all around the inside edge of the quilt, then stitched in the ditch around each half-square triangle block. Not the most sophisticated quilting, but it finished the quilt nicely in the amount of time I had left. I popped the quilt in the washer and then dried it while I rushed around packing for our upcoming trip.

See that butterfly applique on the top of the quilt? When I took the quilt out of the dryer I saw that the seams had separated in one place on the quilt top. One half-square triangle block had really stretched beyond my seam allowance. No matter at this point in the game! I cut out a butterfly from a remnant of the backing fabric and appliqued it to the front to cover the popped seam. I use Steam-A-Seam for my appliques, which adheres really well. I also ran a machine stitch around the outside of the applique for good measure. The sheet fabric will fray up some with time, but it still suits this particular quilt.

I made a label for the quilt and then I was done! One less UFO (UnFinished Object) in my work-in-progress pile!

I'm not really happy with the way my labels look, but I still would like to write them by hand. I'd like something a little neater, but my indelible pens seem to skip and drag on the fabric when I write on it. I think I'm going to try putting the fabric on a piece of sandpaper before writing my next label. Hopefully that will hold the fabric in place and allow me to write more smoothly.

And of course my mom loved the quilt when I gave it to her, even with its quirky flaws. One of the first things she said was, "I think your grandmother had those sheets."

Sometimes it's the quilt that you mess up that teaches you the most.

Crazy at Work, Part 2

I recently got Ally a Disney Princess book on being polite and using good manners. A devious maneuver on my part, as Ally's a sucker for anything Disney Princess. But truthfully, she's more likely to listen to Ariel telling her to not interrupt a conversation than Mom and Dad telling her the same thing.

So I'm reading the book to Ally and we get to this page with Snow White.

"Snow White always cleans up after herself."

Hey, I'm all for that! Ally's got toys all over the house and they rarely make it back to their home at the end of the day.

Then we look at the next page with Cinderella.

"Cinderella always puts away the materials for one project before she starts something new."

Uh oh. 'Cause Mommy sure doesn't do that. Mommy's got stuff stashed all over the house.

The dining room table.

Spare chairs.

At least Oscar doesn't mind the piles on the floor.

(I know, I know. I'm working on it.)

Crazy at Work

Steve found this on the stovetop last Sunday and wondered what the heck I was cooking. He posted a picture of this to Facebook, and a mutual friend of ours asked if I had gone crazy.

No crazier than usual. I was coffee staining some quilted ornaments. Mom had found me three panels at a garage sale that were apparently leftover from a quilting project that had gone awry. The piecing wasn't bad, but the quilting itself was a little crude. The colors in the panels were peach, natural, and a blue and peach patterned material very reminiscent of the 1980s and too bright for my liking. So I cut a Pennsylvania Dutch heart shape from the panels and soaked them in warm strong coffee for a while. You can see the difference in color between the dyed and undyed hearts in the picture below.

After the hearts dried, I finished the edges with a cranberry red embroidery floss in a blanket stitch. I added a simple hanging loop made with the same embroidery floss.

Now they look a little more 1880s instead of 1980s.

The coffee stain highlights the stitching on the backside of the hearts.

And yep, they smell like coffee. So much that I find myself wanting a cup and a cookie when I smell them. It's driving me crazy.