One sock down, one to go!
Heide gave me this sock yarn when I visited last month and after frogging it back to the toenails, I cast on a new sock. Last night I finished the first one and cast on the second. This has been a great purse project although I have found that I'm doing less sitting & knitting in the car and more dashing back and forth between school campuses. I'm thinking I may have to juggle the schedule around to accommodate other after school activities. The Anime club meets Wednesday after school which conflicts with karate.
UFO challenge: Three quilts.
One of my online quilt friends decided to challenge us to find three UFOs and focus on only those to finish. With those three, write down all the steps that need to be accomplished and when you have time to quilt, pick one and work on one step. This, if nothing else, makes it easier to see the bite sizes instead of the entire elephant.
Given that I have three kids and haven't made any of them a quilt in a while, I chose these three:
For Emma, a One-Block Wonder made from a Japanese print. These 60 degree pieces are made from cutting the fabric yardage at where the fabric repeats, stacking six layers of this repeat and then cutting into triangles. Sewing into two sets of three, you then lay them out into a pleasing arrangement and sew the half-hexes into rows. The fabric itself was pretty, but after cutting it into triangles, I'm not sure she'll be into it. I'll finish the top and then decide. It may end up being Ebay fodder or donated to the guild. We'll see how it goes.
For Cammie, a Girl Scout strip-pieced technique where long cuts of fabric are sewn together then cut into triangles, and twisted into squares. I have a few more one-yard cuts to be used for borders, binding, backing...whatever it tells me. This last couple of days, I've added the cream colored bits for sashing to calm down all the colors and movement. It makes the rest of the yellow pop!
Cammie chose the yellow for the corner stones, which still have to be cut and added to the sashing strips. Of course, as I was cutting the necessary 60 strips, I realized I was only 90% there...6 strips short of a quilt top. I dug around in the stash and found another fabric that was very close--just slightly more yellow, but hard to pick out in the spread of strips. ("One of these things is not like the other....")
For Ben, a Monster quilt! I handed out patterns more than a year ago for a friendship block and although I handed out 20, I only got 13 back. I want to make a few more to make it 20 blocks, so I'll have to go back to the 101 Monsters You Can Draw book that I found in a discount bin at a grocery store a few years back. From that, I had made a bunch of patterns and handed them out. Unfortunately, I didn't get back the unused patterns, so I'll have to make them up again, and find a couple of fabrics to coordinate with it for sashing, borders and binding. I had picked up some monster fabric during shop hop, I think...I'll have to figure out where I tucked it and see if it actually works as a border, or maybe as a backing.
Other projects:
UFO for my 12th anniversary. I started this just before our dozen-year mark to hang on the wall of our bedroom. We have since moved and celebrated 6 more anniversaries and I still haven't gotten it put up on the wall. I put it on the long arm and quilted it up, so now it's ready for binding.
The Pirate Round Robin. I ended up with three quilt tops at my house--I have no idea why I got so many of them dumped on me at once, but I finally was able to finish up two of them and have hung up the third on my "design wall" to interview fabrics. I'm thinking about adding the blue strip and map fabric on the right. I know what I'd like to do after that, but I'm not sure I want to technically do two borders or save that for the next quilter to do. I think it needs some really bright checkerboard strips, like the center block. Either that or I can ditch the map fabric and do the checkerboard instead. I have enough bright squares cut up in my stash now that I can pull a lot of pre-cut pieces without a lot of fuss. Math will be difficult to figure out exactly how many I'd need.
I also finished working on Sherry's beach scenes quilt, which I believe she wanted to attach together herself. This feels like it needs something more on the right to balance it out, or perhaps some kind of activity on the water, but I have run out of time and momentum on the project.
Finally, I have several quilts waiting for quilting on the long arm. This is for Laura, Lauri's mother in law. Her favorite colors are green and lavender, so this is perfect for her. I was hoping to have it done for her by tomorrow, but I need a little direction as to what thread to use and what pattern I should quilt on it.
Girl Scouts starts on Tuesday, so we'll see how that goes. Our troop has merged with another one to increase the numbers (we have about six each), and to spread the work load out. I'm pretty sure this will be the last year I'll run it since I've already spread myself too thin. Which reminds me, I need to write to a couple of other people I had formerly volunteered with to let them know that I am going to politely decline helping this year. I know I have a lot of volunteer hours to complete for two schools now. Wish me luck.
I'm actually considering replacing one of the UFOs--the Japanese One-Block-Wonder that I had chosen for Emma's quilt. I'm not very inspired to work on it, and I don't think she'll like it much...the colors are a little odd--lots of oranges. I think she'd prefer the Kimono and Lanterns quilt for which I have only one block made. I picked up the pattern for the kimonos but need to copy the pattern a bunch of times to make the blocks. The pattern looks a little bit like this one by Betty Blais (or maybe exactly like this...I don't know for sure). Unfortunately, I don't have many Japanese fabrics. Maybe I need to make a bunch of the patterns and hand them out as a friendship block. I think that's the winner. It'll get a lot more variety and cut down on the amount of work I'd have to do.
