Duvet Doings

 I've been working on the duvet cover I'm making for my daughter's birthday gift (a weighted blanket). I want to be able to give it to her on Thanksgiving next week, so I'm buckling down to get it done. Since it'll likely get washed a lot, I've taken the extra time involved to do French seams. I was very out of practice, but it really is easy and looks so nice when it's finished.

 Here's how the two sides look now that I've gotten them sewn together. The fabric that looks white is a pale pink with white circle-ish absract batik roses. I thought having one side be lighter than the other would be nice so she can have some variation in how her bed looks with the blanket on it.

Now to decide on snap tap, buttons, velcro or??? as the closure.

Wandering Wednesday: My Own Backyard

Our Japanese Maple has finally decided it is indeed Fall. This is seen from my studio window through the Improbable Two Story Tall Palm.

 Rubarb is suddenly going again?! I was shocked, especially since it's barely gotten any water all this long dry summer. But there it is getting all pretty and pink again. Maybe enough to make a strawberry rhubarb pie for my husband's birthday coming up soon?

One of our old old apple trees, still so very productive and this glorious yellow.

More Merriment

 I cut out the pieces from the Merriment panel, and was surprised by how cute the ghostly antlers look on this fox.

There are pairs of the animals facing left and right, and in two sizes also, so I'm playing with a design that will feature that left right thing. In my mind it would look a bit like the animals are talking to one another. But we'll see what I come up with. I'm also considering making the animal the center of a snowflake/star with some contrasting fabrics instead of just sashing them.

So much for sticking to my to-do list, but I'm enjoying with these images so far, I find them peaceful for some reason.

Snagged Thread Print Error

 I was washing my new fabrics and then trimming the thready edges yesterday when I noticed this.  At first I thought it was a misprinted part of the fabric and a thread lying on the top that needed to be trimmed or brushed off.

But then I looked closer and it was a thread coming directly from that spot. 

 This is how the back looks.

You can see that it leads over to the selvedge edge right there like a little almost dotted line.

So either a pulled thread on the existing greige goods when it was going through the printing process, and it essentially acted as a resist. Or maybe a pulled thread from the selvedge somehow pulling out the design? I think it's the first one, because the fabric feels smooth to me, not like there's a thread missing. But then I look at the back and it's clearly something to do with the threads of the fabric themselves.

Who really knows, but it's an oddity, usually the fabrics are pretty darn boring and predictable.

Weird, huh?

Gray vs. Grey

On the hunt for some of the fuchsia polka dot fabric for the back of my Kaffe Blue Squares quilt, I found some other things instead at two LQS. At least several were from the sale table. The green upholstery thread and zippers are for the green couch cushions I'm working on, one of the items on my Finish-a-Long list. I was unable to find any. So now, I get to decide whether to do a little rippit-stitching and replace the fuchsia polka dot fabric with the fabric in the upper left corner, or order some of the dots fabric online or just use something else for the binding.

The fabric on the upper right hand is a strange blue almost grey, it really depends on the lighting to see the color. So that will be fun to try to use.

Maybe with all these greys or almost greys I've been buying I should put them all in one quilt to fight each other. No I'm grey! No I'm grey! No I'm Gray! etc. I will call it "The Battle of The Greys" or maybe "Gray vs. Grey". This will be in honor of a friend from high school, a trombone player and his first name was Gray but Not Grey as he always had to correct people. I always felt badly for him having to constantly fight just to have his name spelled the right way.

When You're A Wildcat

According to the quiz, My dæmon is a wildcat.

"Your decisions have led you here. Your daemon is the wildcat. You are independent, brave and logical. You have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and are extremely diligent. You weigh up your options without acting impulsively, but you never let this get in the way of a good adventure! You take your responsibilities seriously, acting with great care and tact. You are very protective of those you love and have a great desire to do good in this world."

I can't wait to start watching this BBC/HBO series made from one of my favorite book series ever, His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman. In the stories, everyone has a dæmon which can take many forms of various animal until it settles on being just one animal when you hit puberty. In some sense, a dæmon is like an external manifestation of one's soul. It's one of the most captivating and inventive things I've come across in a lifetime of reading fantasy and science fiction. I really hope that the show is well done, this is such a timely story for the days we currently find ourselves living through.

Body Double Bound

 I made the plunge and squared up a very large wall quilt I've been working on for a very long time. It was quite askew, and it wasn't going to hang well because of that. So cutting it down to an actual rectangle meant giving up some of the image. I actually like it better now, so that's good, phew.

I had already made the binding so it was easy to get it sewn on to the quilt. The dot grunge grey fabric that I chose really did work well with the color variations in this piece.
 These pictures show the texture from both the quilting and from the layers of Setacolor paint.

Here's the fourcorners, I think that they turned out pretty well!

Saturday Night Stitching

Had a Saturday Night Stitching session last night and got the free motion quilting done on one of the smaller projects on my finish a long list. Even though I'm still a little rusty, I'm pleased with how the stitch length is coming out, and how my improvised designs are working out.

Next up on this piece is doing a binding of some sort, maybe a facing, and also putting on some embellishment, perhaps beads. It's been a while since I've done beading on a wall quilt.

More Tula

Bought some older Tula Pink fabrics on big sale from I Love Fabric, they're closing down and selling off the remaining stock. Maybe there will be some fabrics you need on their site.  I'm going to be using all Tula Pink fabrics to make a border for my City Sampler to bring it up to king-size so I can use it on our bed.
There are also two others in here that are non Tula, the bees, and one with irons that's hiding under the bees.

Blue Back Done

 Got the back pieced together for the Kaffe Blue Squares done. Only to find that the binding I made is too short. And I used the last of the polka dot in the upper right hand corner there. Sigh.

I really like how this corner turned out with the stripes and solids.

Pink Really Really Pink

We gave our daughter a weighted blanket for her birthday last weekend, and I offered to make her a duvet cover for it as it's not washable. She asked for pink, so I had her go through my box of pink fat quarters and pick ones she liked. I made a little swatch card and took it to my LQS and found these fabrics. The two fabrics on the right will be on one side and the two on the left will be on the reverse. That's the plan as of now. 

The store I went to is the local Kaffe Fassett place, and so they carry his design wall flannel. I bought a piece to try out. His comments on using a white design wall go something along the lines of "How can you see anything, it's like looking into a snowstorm?" I'm not sure if I'll like the white lines, but I do like the grey. I'm going to pin it up onto my all-white design wall and take some comparison pictures of a project side by side to see if I see a difference.

On To November

Onto the month of November. Already?
Ready for all the family birthdays this month? Almost.
Ready for Thanksgiving? Getting there, bought a gravy boat so there's that.
Ready for some quilting? Yes please.

SpooOoooky Halloween

 Happy Halloween! This witch needed fixing, so I was gluing her up and she ended up staying on my worktable to keep me company through all the power outages.

Someday I'll do a Maleficent costume for myself, but this is not happening this year. My daughter and her partner are coming over and we're going to wear all of my witch hats and go downtown to hand out candy.
Hope you have a SpooOoooky Halloween!

Wandering Wednesday - English Countryside on my teacup

We took a load of donations to our local Goodwill and then we decided to look around. Just for fun you know. And what do you know, there was a bunch of Wedgwood china on the racks. The lovely and intricate images of the English countryside are very relaxing. The cups feel nice to hold.

 Two cups and saucers came home with us. Intentionally chose one that was a little different looking than the other.

I started looking into the potential age of the particular pieces we'd just bought.

 And it's all over the map. But fun to delve into all those china websites.

Each makers mark is different.

 So I haven't determined exactly, but it was fun traveling through the web and learning about Wedgwood and so forth.

Turns out the two saucers aren't even shaped the same.

One is more of a bowl.

This all made me think of one of the pitchers I inherited from my Grandma.

Interesting.

Sewing With Generator

 Well so our power did go out, at 9:12 pm on Saturday night. Five minutes and 39 second before the end of the movie we we're watching! If you haven't see it, highly recommend watching on Netflix: "The Man Who Knew Too Little" with Bill Murray. It's 1997 Bill Murray, and very very funny and very very 90's. Anyways...our power just went back on at 11:30AM today, Tuesday, so that's been a few days of running our generator.

I finally broke down and plugged my sewing machine and one light into the many many extension cords my husband ran upstairs for us to use. And what do you know it worked! I was a little hesitant because of blowing up the machine's brain in China due to different power wiring. But this was fine and worked very well.

It was so nice getting to sew a little, it's in the room furthest from the generator so I could enjoy a bit of quiet. I got about half of the back for the Kaffe Blue Squares quilt sewn together, but not pressed as I had no iron plugged in.

How do you like my Halloween manicure? One side is grey/black and the other is orange, you can tell I got bored with the power off if I'm painting my nails!

Okay, off to the sewing room to get what I sewed together pressed and carry on. We've been informed that our power goes off again tonight at 9pm for another "wind event". sigh.

Body Double Binding

 I was deciding on binding fabric for a quilt I've working on finishing up, Body Double. It's sun-printed with Setacolor, gray, pink and a bit blueish. It has dark bits and lighter bits, and lots of shading. The grey tends to the brown side of things. So I decided on the Grunge Dots fabric as I thought it suited that color way a bit better than the more charcoal-fish one.

I think it looks pretty great so far before stitching it on the quilt.

And that's the last thing I'll get done on the sewing machine before the power gets shut off in an hour or so, depending on when PG&E decides to throw us back into the stone-age.

Binding Blue

All I got done yesterday was making the binding for the Kaffe Blue Squares. I think it'll work better than this picture shows, the colors are weird again.

Just heard that our power is scheduled to go out again(!) tomorrow sometime. Guess it'll be back to handwork. Fingers crossed for no more wildfires.

Finishing Blue Squares Top

 Getting closer to done with the Blue Squares quilt top.

 Next up the top and bottom sashing and final border get added on.

Ahhhh, my second purchase of the Amy Butler fabric doesn't exactly match. At least it's all going around the outside edge so hopefully it won't be too noticeable.

And there it is all done! Once it gets quilted I'll try to take a better picture.

Wandering Wednesday - Santa Clara

 Palm trees why why why, Santa Clara Convention Center? Out of all the trees you could choose from?

So much concrete.
And a surprise self portrait in the reflection.

 At least there were airplanes.

PIQF Purchases

 

I didn't go too crazy buying stuff at PIQF this year, but I did grab a few things. Right on top is a small-ish new ruler from The Stitchin' Post. It has the no slip dots and is a nice compact usable size. Do I have enough rulers now? Yes, yes I do.
Some Renaissance Ribbons, Tula Pink style. Aren't these fun? Their booth was very colorful and I wanted to buy everything. They had some of the designs printed out on this 3" wide velvet low nap ribbon. It was lovely but I refrained from buying any.
The grey honeycomb thing is a silicone mini-iron rest. Since I have one of those, I thought it'd be good to have a place to rest it when it's in use.
I've been on the lookout for a particular grey to use for a binding on the Body Double quilt, so I bought two things that might work. I just need to hold it up to the actual quilt and see how it looks.
Of course I had to get some of the Tula Pink purple monkey fabric to go with the ribbons. And another ruler fabric and a blue on blue interesting print.