Musical Interlude

 In lieu of any sewing related content, as there hasn't been much of late around here, how about some new-ish (and old) holiday songs I've been enjoying this year:

For enjoying today, (Happy Solstice by the way), here's a great one to celebrate with: Winter Solstice Song by Lisa Thiel.

Leslie Odom Jr. (he played Aaron Burr in Hamilton on Broadway) and Cynthia Erivo (she plays Elphaba in the new movie Wicked), two divine voices on Winter Song.

Somehow I missed this song from 2008, it's The Hives with Cyndi Lauper, A Christmas Duel

I recommend the entire Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings album, It's A Holiday Soul Party, but here's just one of the songs, God Rest Ye Merry Gents. There's even a great version of Little Drummer Boy on here too. 

Tim Minchin's White Wine in the Sun always makes me cry, but it's so very good.

From the Guardians of the Galaxy Christmas Special, the "kidnapped" Kevin Bacon and the Old 97's with a pretty good and new Christmas song. Mostly fun to watch if you liked the GoG movies.

And last but not least, a short history on The Waitresses and their very excellent song, Christmas Wrapping.

Final Fabric

 

I very much enjoyed my slightly postponed birthday lunch with friends Jaye and Tim last week. I still can't believe that I'm sixty now, but that's a whole 'nother blog post. After lunch we had a look around at the nearby Granary quilt store. I was very restrained and didn't buy the FIGO space dyes fat quarter pack that I was drooling over. Instead I opted for just one single FQ of this really interesting purple (that they had in lots of other colors) and 1/2 yard of the teal tracks fabric. 

I also got another bottle of unscented Best Press as mine is finally running out. I think I go through a bottle a year. Tim told me about using a vodka and water mixture to press out wrinkles in fabric and I am very intrigued to try this. Sometimes even Best Press won't work on some wrinkles. He also mentioned to only use very cheap vodka like the stuff for sale in plastic bottles, don't waste the good stuff, got it.

I also picked up a little mini windsock pattern. It has the metal rings included, it looked like a fun thing to make. They had some of them made up as examples in the shop and I thought they were pretty cute.

Will this be the final fabric purchase of the year? Most likely yes. Unless you count the pre-order I made of the beautiful Kona color of the year, Nocturne.

New Hobby

 

Reporting in today on my DH's new hobby. After many years of threatening to get one, he finally got a personal recommendation for a 3-D printer from a friend at work. He's very very excited about it which is all kinds of cute. It's a little bit smelly but not too terrible even with the heated up plastic.

The first thing he made was a scraper for the platten (the base that gets printed upon).  The second thing was this very cute bookmark.

Here it is at work holding my place in my latest read, the novel that the great TV series was based on, The Old Man.

It does a pretty great job, very flexible but strong.

His second effort was a holiday decoration of baby Yoda (aka Grogru) holding an ornament (an orb?). This is a character that I really really love, so it was nice that he picked that out for his second make. The stuff in the forefront is little bits of excess plastic that are left on the piece when it's done. Looks a bit like dry rice noodles. Unfortunately Lee-loo tried to eat it, so we'll have to be careful to keep it cleaned up.

There's all kinds of things he can make now, it's kind of endless. Let me know if you think of anything quilt-related he can make that would be useful. Hooray for new hobbies!

Old Town Geese

 

I've been plugging away at the Clue #1 on the Old Town Mystery quilt, a whole lot of sets of matching flying geese in neutral and aqua/turquoise. Quite a few left to make though. It'll be a whole flock of geese once I'm finally done with making them.

I'm finding I like working with the aqua and turquoise colors. The white on white printed neutrals not so much, but they look pretty nice.

I feel like I'm getting enough variation in these, but who knows as it is a mystery quilt design...

Free And Giving

 

There were a lot of choices on the free table at Sew Day. Friend Cindy had bought an estate sale lot of fabrics, and she brought in a literal table full for us to choose from. I was happy to snag a bunch of neutrals to use for the Old Town mystery quilt. The reds and oranges are also for that quilt. That black and white print was just cool.

There was also a bag of big cones of purple rayon embroidery threads. I snagged these two beauties. Not sure who contributed those, but I'll be happy to get my purple on with these. It's so nice to be in a quilt guild with such giving people.

And then over at the Community Giving table, I turned in the quilt that I had just finished the binding on and picked up another quilt to do the binding for. There were also some quilt block packets that will be good to use as leaders and enders

Old Town at Sew Day

More sewing of blocks for the Old Town mystery quilt happened at the BAMQ Sew Day. I got some more sets of flying geese done.

I also cut out and sewed together red and neutral strips for the second clue which is making a whole bunch of four-patches. I made quite a few of them, but then I got too busy socializing and made a mistake of sewing together two pairs of the two-strip pairs the long way instead of cutting segments and sewing. Whoops!

After some un-sewing and then cutting and sewing together into four patches a whole lot of them got finished at home. I really have to remember to bring more boring projects to Sew Day. Not that this is super intricate piecing of course, but I was trying to read the pattern directions on my phone and then I'd get interrupted between steps and...mistakes were made. No worries, it was well worth the time getting to talk to people.

And when I actually followed the great directions in the pattern, there's this very cool thing that happens at the four-patch intersection. I look forward to seeing how that helps when I sew all these blocks together further on into the quilt.
 

Color(s) of the Year

I always enjoy when the Color of the Year is announced for the upcoming year. There's a whole lot that goes into choosing the Pantone one, and it's used in all sorts of industries, from fashion to furnishings and beyond.  They're supposedly "capturing the zeitgeist" with this color choice. Not sure how true or useful that is, but it's still a fun exercise. The choice this year is a really lovely one to my eye (especially compared to last year's).

Pantone: Mocha Mousse is a warm mid to light brown. Spoonflower has a great selection of fabric and wallflower prints using this color. I'm not sure which solid color fabric that's out there is closest, I'm going to go through my solid stash and see. And also look through the Pantone Project postcards to see if there's a close one, there were a lot of browns represented. Some would say too many!

I think that Mocha Mousse will go quite well with the Kona cotton solid color of the year choice of:

Kona: Nocturne  which is a fairly dark purple. I think it would be fun to use this color as a neutral in some modern quilts. It reminds me of darker purple I used for the Trinket quilt.