bekka

moda charm packs giveaway

Back in October I commented on a post at Quilters Buzz and won a Sweet Roll, one of Moda's new line of Pre-Cuts that they unveiled at Quilt Market that fall. It, along with several other charm packs, arrived a few weeks ago. I'm keeping half of the things from Moda, but the other half I'm giving away, because the colors aren't my favorite.

Here's where you come in. If they're you're favorite, you're in luck! Leave a comment with your favorite, or your preference and if there are enough comments, then I'll try to give you your preference, k?

Ruby's Flower Garden

 Portobello Market

Now, what to do with that Sweet Roll? I can't find anything online that anyone has done with them, yet, in my cursory search. But I read that they can be used in strip quilts, log cabin quilts, and for pinwheels. It's likely I'll try one of the first two aformentioned options. SUrely you can google those charm packs to get a better idea of the fabrics included in those charm packs to see the full range of colors.

Happy weekend. I'm off to smocking class and then a Chocolatfest afterwards!

P.S. Comments I'll leave open for a week from this post, so a week from today until noon EST on the 28th.

Rachel's mountain baby blankets project

If you don't know about Rachel's Mountain Baby Blankets Project inspired by the Diane Sawyer Hidden America special that ran about children in the mountains of rural Eastern Kentucky, and you're searching for a project to commit to, then you're in luck. She's collecting twin-sized handmade blankets to send to teen aged mothers in Appalachian Kentucky for their babies and toddlers. They  live in such poverty that there is no money to buy something as simple as a blanket for their bed to keep them warm each night.

I don't know that it's something I could contribute to, just because of my own limited time and over committedness, but I want to share information about the project to those who might have time or interest, especially since it is something that affects my region.

keep on smocking in the free world

One of the reasons I hoped for a girl while I was pregnant was so I could justify learning to smock. There just aren't that many great boy outfits that feature smocked panels, you know? I had my first smocking class last Saturday and almost cried. It was dreadful. I did not catch on. I was the worst student in the class. Of course, part of it, surely, is the medication I'm taking for my migraines, which makes it difficult to concentrate on anything, so that could be it.

It could just be that smocking is beyond my capabilities. I picked up the first bit quickly. Or so I thought, until my teacher, Myra stopped by and said that I threw my embroidery floss up or down or the wrong direction entirely on that whole row. I'm ashamed for you to see it. It's not pretty. I'm not crowing about anything here. You can see for yourself just how messy a smocker I'm turning out to be. She went through cable stitch so quickly that I never learned it and so I was completely lost when we went over some next stitch that used that as a basis to build upon.

Egads! So then tomorrow we're supposed to bring our sewn-together dress pieces so that Myra can put them through the pleater and then we begin the whole smocking on the real thing process. Whew. But, my sewing machines are torn up.  There was another woman (most others in the class are grandmothers, smocking for their grandchildren, not mothers, because what mother has TIME to smock?) in the same boat as I, with a busted up sewing machine. Myra said she and I could bring our cut out pieces to the shop and she'd sew them up and put them in the pleater, etc.

That's what I did yesterday, bring by the pattern pieces. Elsa and I showed up at 10am when the shop opened, but Myra wasn't there. I won't bore you with all the mishaps that went into the cutting out of pattern pieces, the night before with a splitting headache and her crying inconsolably, but there was blood on my behalf, which stained part of the fabric,  and other problems, too, like not enough fabric. It all came out in the end, and another woman at the shop (a Bernina dealership) let me sew the pieces together on one of the Berninas in the store, the 440 and lemme tell you, that was a dream, to sew on a Bernina. Sigh.

Later, when Myra rolled the pieces of the sewn-together dress on what appeared to be a flat wooden dowel, she remarked the edges of my fabric and asked if  I used my scissors exclusively on fabric.  I told her yes, that I have separate scissors for paper and for fabric. She thought my fabric scissors were dull because the edges on the fabric were not so precise. Oh dear. Guess it's time to have those sharpened.

Elsa and I hung out (hanged out?) for a while and I worked on my smocking stitches. I understand the theory behind the cable stitch, but don't understand the technique. Myra corrected that, and I still have quite a ways to go before that is anywhere near passable. But then again, class is tomorrow, and I doubt I'll have time to practice before then.

This dress I'm making, by the way, is for Elsa, and will be her first Easter dress.

like a hole in the head

All I need is to sign up for another swap. Let's see. There was the needlecase swap on Swap-bot. There's an Amy Butler bag/purse swap, a redwork cushion swap, an owl swap, and a quilt block swap. I think that's all. Unless I've forgotten something. Oh, the mobile swap, too. And when is the next DQS? Sign ups are the end of February, I've been told. 

I was busy earlier this week finishing up the Amy Butler bag/purse swap. The fabric was AB, not the purse/bag pattern, but I ended up using AB's Swing bag pattern which I purchased long ago.  My partner loves purple, AB does not. Her second favorite is pink, so I found a pink AB fabric and then used a Kaffee Fasset fabric ironically called Bekah, for the reversible lining. How about that?

Making it was trickier than I thought. Once it was done, I actually liked it, enough so that I may make one for myself, eventually. It's deep and roomy, which can also be a problem for me because objects can easily get lost and become difficult to retrieve.

That is, once I get my sewing machines working, again. Yep, both are torn up, again. I broke needles on both working on the owl swap project and then on the AB purse. It's just me, I'm sure. I'm rough on sewing machines. They ARE Singers, and nowadays that name is synonymous with sucks, if you know what I mean. But seriously, I really want a new machine. Just one good machine.

But I couldn't resist this one. I found it at Messy Karen's. It's called Pay It Forward, and here's how it works:

Three people will be chosen to participate with me when they leave a comment on this post asking to join.

Since I signed up on Karen's blog, Karen sends a handmade item made by her to me, as well as the other two people who signed up with her. So that's where the three comes into it.

I send a handmade item made by me to the three people who sign up with me on my blog.

I get 12 months to complete this endeavor.

So, should you sign up,  you agree to post a similar announcement on your blog inviting three more people to join you.

Then you'll send a handmade item made by you to each of the three people who sign up with you.

The twelve month deadline begins once you have three people.

And just like Karen, international o.k. by me.

strippity doo dah

Tah dah! I started and finished a quilt top last night. But it was cheating anyway. It's a coin stack. I found the fabric ages ago. It's a stripe and when I saw it, I thought CHEATER! What a great way to make a coin stack without going through all the work of actually making all those coin stacks. Yeah.

So I thought I'd use this to make a small crib quilt, as well as burpie cloths and bibs for a baby on her way, Ashleigh Raeann. Her mother and I were acquainted and were pregnant at the same time. Amy, her mom, attends my Dad's church and I followed Amy's pregnancy closely because she had some problems with bleeding and cramps and early contractions and weird due dates and such. I so looked forward to meeting her little girl and hoped that she and Elsa would be great friends.

You may want to skip the next few paragraphs because it gets tragic and depressing for a bit. Start again at the *****

And then my step-mom called to tell me that Amy was in the hospital and they were on their way to visit her. Later that day they visited us. Really, Elsa, because what grandparent can stay away from their new granddaughter, and that's when they told me that Amy lost Ashleigh. I was heartbroken for her. Apparently, Amy heard Ashleigh's heartbeat early that morning and had a regular doctor's appointment that day. While she was there, they found Ashleigh's heartbeat on the Doppler, but then lost it, so they did an ultrasound and then determined that she strangled on her umbilical cord while trying to turn and ready herself for the birth canal. It's just the most tragic thing I've ever heard.

Attending Ashleigh's funeral was horrible. Listening to Amy sob for her daughter was dreadful. It made me feel both lucky and ashamed that my daughter was okay. And I was such a procrastinator that I didn't have Ashleigh's quilt made for her. I had been putting back all of Elsa's newborn clothes to give to Amy for Ashleigh to wear because once you have a baby you know how often they need changing into fresh clothes, and Amy's next door neighbor, Susan, told me that Elsa and I were the first people  Amy thought of to give Ashleigh's now unneeded things to. Oh, the irony.

*****And so I have this fabric meant for Ashleigh's crib quilt. I feel so helpless with Amy's suffering and want to make a gesture other than a card of sympathy or a casserole delivered to her doorstep, and so I thought I'd go ahead and make a quilt, but make it a lap quilt for her, instead. Now that I've finished the top, I have the rest of it to make, and you know how that goes. I'll show you the rest as I assemble it. Just had to share.

honeycomb's big yeah, yeah, yeah

Ever since Elsa arrived I've itched to knit things for her. Never mind the unfinished knitted projects I started before she was born, I want to make something fresh and new! After scouring Ravelry for baby projects I decided to start Judy's Grandmother's Baby Sweater from Greetings from Knit Cafe.

Its texture appealed to me and I am a sucker for a wrap sweater, a wrap skirt, a wrap dress; wish they made wrap pants. I bought the plum-colored yarn at Hobby Lobby in early summer, thinking that I might make a February baby sweater for my baby. But then I waited because I wasn't sure that a boy should wear purple, even though it was a deep color. Silly, I know. But girl babies can get away with wearing every color of the rainbow. Poor boy babies.

Once I started knitting this I realized that it was the dread honeycomb pattern from a dishcloth I made, but that one was called Chinese Waves. Ugh. So the texture is lovely, but it's such a pain to knit, all that K1, slip 1, ad infinitum. And takes so much time. And frankly, too much attention. I need something really simple, like garter stitch, or stockinette. Remembering whether I K1 or K2 on the previous row was a chore. However, it wasn't something that I could really mess up if I got it wrong. It's not terribly obvious to the untrained eye, but an adept knitter could see where I went off a bit here and there.

What else? Oh, the edging was interesting. And the three needle bind off on the sleeves was cool. I picked up stitches along what would become the outside seams' edges and then bound those off to join the sleeve together.

Three needle bind off is one of my favorite techniques. Also got reacquainted with elastic bind off. That's where you knit two together, then slip that knitted stitch back onto the left needle, then knit those two together. Makes a prettier bound off edge. Probably elastic, too, like it says.

When Ian saw the finished sweater he thought it looked short. Yup. Short. It is that. And actually, too small for Elsa to get much wear out of. So that is a major bummer. I made the infant size because all her other hand knitted items swallow her as if her name was Jonah. That's right.My baby's been eaten by a whale.

All that work and she might wear it once or twice. Sheesh. The sleeves were tight, too. And I noticed that as well on the One-Piece Baby Kimono that I made years ago for a random baby and then never gave it away, so Elsa wears it. I close it with diaper pins and it looks cute. The shoulders are too wide and open. I wish I could find knitted baby wear that fits. She weighs 10.6 and this wrap is too small. Maybe two pounds ago it would have worked. If you plan to knit it, check baby's weight first and if he/she is over 10 pounds, make the larger one.

While I'm on that subject I'll rant on about the hooded carrying bag I knitted for Elsa. I suppose it's only good for carrying her around the house. Because unless you have the foresight to make corresponding slits in the front and back, you cannot have baby wear this while she is in a car seat. So this project is seemingly useless. I have yet to sew in the zipper and I'm tempted to rip the darned thing out completely and use the yarn for something else. It was expensive enough.

Besides the overwhelming daily joy of having a baby in my life it's also fabulous to have a willing and pliable model for my knitwear. She cannot sit up by herself yet; Ian is holding her upright in that top photo. But just you wait!

Now I can't wait to pick out which pattern I'll knit for her next, with better luck with the fit, I hope.

that needlecase i made

There's something about a needlecase that appeals to me. Usually I jab my sewing needles into a pincushion (or I'll stick it into the arm of the couch or chair I'm sitting in, and that's way dangerous).  Sometimes I leave a trail of thread in its eye to easily distinguish it from pins. My eyes aren't so great anymore, so it's a bit like looking for a needle in a pincushion. Har har.

I have a cross stitch pattern for a needlecase I picked up a few years ago. Have the linen and thread to make it, but something about it stymies me. Probably the centering of the whole thing correctly on the swatch of linen. But I'll get to it eventually. But that's Not the needlecase I made.

And I bought a lovely one from TQ to use, and also to use as a pattern, eventually. Thought about doing that for the needlecase swap on Swap-bot that I signed up for, but then I decided that might be close to cheating. I like this one because it folds together like one of those cootie catchers I made and plagued my friends with in grade school. But I don't remember calling them cootie catchers. Maybe they were fortune tellers?

Sarah made this for me. I can't find a URL for her blog, but she is a youth services librarian, so she's a-ok in my book. Okay, so I don't have a photo to pop above this paragraph because I cannot find that needlecase . It's bright orange, almost hunter orange, if you can imagine. She dyed the fabric and embellished it with a darling polymer clay thing she made. Describing it escapes me. Herein lies one of the problems with needlecases: They're easily mislaid. It was visible one moment and then gone the next in the mad frenzy of de-cluttering the house for Julie to come take her photos.

Instead of the typical bi-fold needlecase, I did a tri-fold. The brown corduroy is fabric I've had for a few years that I imagined making a pea coat for my now three-year old nephew. But I never found a peacoat pattern and I am not adventurous enough to just wing it.  The pink I bought Saturday because Jenni said she really likes a pink & brown color scheme.

And a total aside: Saturday Tracy and Laura and I met at TQ to pick out fabric for a quilt that Laura is making. And to pick out fabric for lap quilts that Tracy is making for her wedding attendants. TQ has a 20% off sale through the month of January, so Elsa and I have stopped in there almost every Saturday this month.  Brenda, one of the co-owners of TQ pieced together one of the quilts from Kaffe Fassett's Country Garden Quilts that I love and want to make for Elsa's big girl bed.

Tracy said I'm lucky I've got a couple years to work on it. I'll most likely have it machine quilted. At least, that's what I think at this point. Tracy bought the book for me as a replacement Christmas gift. I already had the Amy Butler baby sewing book that she gave me. She was sweet to give me something else. Someday I'll learn how to accept gifts graciously. Ian still rides me about how I should have just smiled and enjoyed an extra copy.

And here's a plug for TQ: They have several quilt kits put together from that Fassett book. The Yellow S Quilt kit was $91 with 20% off; that doesn't include backing and binding, yet all their fabrics are 20% off, so there was a deal on the backing as well. Pennington Quilt World sells the same kit for $119 which also does not include backing and binding. Apparently TQ does a huge online business, which I had no clue about until I saw Sandra cutting yardage for an order. Who knew?

Back to the needlecase... It was a quick project. It turned out half as well as it did because I turned on my iron and pressed the seams. Silly how the simple things, that I sometimes find so odious and easily dismissible, are one of the basics of good craftsmanship. Or craftswomanship, but adding that extra syllable makes the word a mouthful.

Elsa's stirring, gotta dash and cuddle her some.

your comments

One of the reasons I started blogging was to create relationships with like minded folks. Regular correspondence with you is one aspect of those relationships that I actively cultivate. I'm trying this new typepad feature that allows the tracking of "conversations." So instead of replying personally to your comments via email, when I hit reply, it pops my response in below your comment on that blog post. Surely I can turn it off if it doesn't please me. I'll try it for a while and maybe return to my regular way of doing things. This is just a heads up to let you know that if I don't respond to your comment via email, that I'm not ignoring you. I read every comment and love them all. Thanks so much!

placeholder for a 'real' post

Each day, I promise myself to update this blog, yet I don't find time for it.  I made a needlecase. I've almost finished a knitted wrap sweater for Elsa. I signed up for a few swaps. I got a new lens for my camera, and played with that quite a bit, but my photos cannot compare to the ones a professional photographer, Julie Roberts, took Monday. To tide you over, until I can write a real post that shares the projects I mentioned earlier, as well as photos taken with my new lens, here's a link to our preview of the shots Julie edited first thing.

The interesting thing is that before seeing Julie's photos, I took the exact shot of the guitar in Elsa's room. My dad gave me the guitar when I was a girl. He said to have my mom teach me to play it. They sang together in a gospel trio before I was born and my mom plays piano and guitar by ear. She never taught me to play that guitar, but I told Elsa's Papaw, my dad, that he could teach her to play when she's old enough.

And, speaking of her room/nursery, it's finally finished. We worked up to the minute that we expected Julie at our house hanging those bird cards and doll quilts and the bunny mobile. I'm happy with the nursery though, how it eventually turned out. Elsa seems stimulated by it, at least. At this point. While I've cultivated a closer relationship with the color pink over the past year or two, simply because I think that hating a color is not something one should do, just you wait until she's old enough to express color preferences. What if she loves pink?

itty bitty knitty steps

When Blueprint folded the publisher sent me Martha Stewart Living to make up for it. It's been 8 or 10 years since I regularly looked through MSL and I was surprised to see two knitting projects in the January 2009 issue. One for mittens and the other for a neck scarf.

The neck scarf project appealed to me mostly because of how the photo was styled, plus it appeared to be a quick knit and I needed something to give to Tracy for Christmas, something that would keep her warm on cold morning horseback rides or farm chores.

My LYSO suggested Frog Tree a 100% alpaca yarn. It's quite soft and sheds a bit, a bit like angora, while working with it. The odd thing was that she, the LYSO, immediately showed me something grey and that was exactly the color I thought of for Tracy. That, or blue. Freaky.

The project knitted up in no time. Garter stitch was a breeze, a perfect project for a new mother to undertake; not much thinking to it, just routine knit every stitch. And dividing the stitches to make the center tube that you tuck the other side through wasn't difficult, but it didn't conform to my "quick and dirty" conception of the pattern.

Couldn't find the pattern listed in Ravelry. But, I found at least 2 or 3 exact projects in Ravelry. Guess MSL isn't intersted in being original. Then, too, perhaps those patterns aren't protected by copyright. But now that she published one, it is. I'll just not even think about that despite it's sketchiness.

Also worked on Elsa's ancestral stocking. Took her to LYS this afternoon where she got her first whiff of fibers and came home covered in them. Funny how everything sticks to baby skin and clothes. Learned that I don't like duplicate stitch at all. LYSO showed me how to do that. And I mucked around with duplicate stitching Elsa's name to her stocking with the lamb's pride the stocking is knit with, but it is so bulky and odious to manipulate that I may go with LYSO's suggestion and use embroidery floss instead, which will lay better anyway. Guess her stocking won't be ready for her first Christmas, but that's no biggie since we didn't erect a tree or hang stockings and put a small cap on gifts for one another this year.