ICAD - Final Week

Another year of ICAD is done and in the flip book. Here's the final week of index cards. 

This one is a color catcher that went through the wash with some new batiks, and turned up a a nice grey. I used it as an impromptu pattern piece and added it in here with watercolor pencil and colored pencil.

Ink pad, marker, colored pencil, pencil, watercolor pencil, piece of cardboard with a circle a cross mark.

Leftover card bit plus marker, colored pencils, watercolor pencils.

A leftover balloon from a card I made with my Cricut, used as a mask and also painted and added into pencil, ink, colored pencil, watercolor pencil.

Bits leftover from card making plus watercolor pencils and pen.

Torn magazine pictures + piece of elastic bandage.

More leftover bits from card making.

Old strike patch from a box of matches + torn magazine picture.

ICAD Week 7

The seventh week of ICAD was mostly pens and watercolor pencil.

I kinda like this one a lot.

Bits and pieces of fabric from the CriCut exploration.

The JFC is from noodle wrappers from our soba noodles that we ate for lunch. But JFC of course is an acronym that sums up how I'm feeling about the world--thus all the exclamation points.

I wasn't feeling good this day, can you tell?

This one has a bootlegged pattern piece I made on a used color catcher and a golden bee sticker from a nice honey salve. There are three small pieces of the same fabric used in one of the cards above.

Not Much Wandering-Wandering Wednesday

There hasn't been a whole lot of wandering lately, obviously due to the extended shut down of California. 

But we at least got to have one meal, sitting down, at a restaurant for the first time since March. Our favorite teeny little Thai place had two tables set up outside, so we got to have some of their great Pad Thai which I hadn't realized I'd missed so much. What a treat to sit down and enjoy someone else's cooking, somewhere other than our own house. 

We wandered over the hill to my parent's house for an outdoor, mask-wearing, mostly socially distanced family party for my mom's 80th birthday. (My mom is 80? What?! How is this even possible?) 

We sat outside and watched the crows in the sycamore trees, chatted with each other, drank some champagne and had a bbq lunch. It was awesome and weird but at least we got to see each other. And now we wait two weeks and hope and pray and worry that no one got sick. sigh.

Wandering, well walking the dog up and down our street, it's beginning to look a lot like berry season! So there's that to look forward to.

Sizing It Up

I've been working on using my CriCut to cut out the fabric pieces for a SewSweetness Cotton Candy pouch. Mostly because friend Jaye asked me to because she was curious to see how it worked. I was curious too, and am trying to learn more about this fancy and useful gizmo.

 

It was very easy to import the .SVG file into the maker space canvas in CriCut, but unfortunately, it didn't translate to the intended size. Look at how cute and teeny this is?!? 

In addition to the size issue, it was automatically cutting out all of the letters involved in spelling out: 

1 " s q u a r e .  That's what those little bits to the right of the square are.

Taking out the latter was very easy, but getting the main part of the pattern resized correctly was harder. At first I tried eyeballing the 1" square to the gridlines in the maker space program, and it got pretty close, but still wasn't exactly right. And that would mean the pieces wouldn't quite fit together, which would honestly be accomplished by me cutting it all out manually!

I hunted around online and thankfully came across a helpful article that explained what to do to solve this problem. I downloaded a free vector program called Inkscape, opened the files and noted down the actual size by the original pattern maker (in this case, SewSweetness). Then back in the CriCut maker space, after importing the file and selecting all, I typed in those numbers into the sizing box, and voila' instantly adjusted to the correct size.

Now to cut out an entire set and see if it goes together correctly or not!

Two Cards for Two Ages

I'm trying to keep on using my CriCut maker when I need a card. That way I'm not out shopping and touching cards that other folks have touched. And I'm learning how to use this machine too. I don't have zillions of colors of cardstock but I'm mixing and matching for unusual combinations.

This first card is for my niece's 15th birthday. I can't believe I have a niece that is 15! 

She likes weird stuff so I figured she'd like a monster. It's a very 3-d construction with a folded bridge in-between the two pieces. I had to use colored pencil on the balloons because I didn't like how they looked in the white.

I liked the clever envelope on this one. The balloons are attached with a little brad so they can swivel around and fit inside the envelope.

Here's the card I made for my mom. She loves green and southwest designs, so I thought she'd appreciate this one. I tore the envelope when I was pulling it off the mat so I used Washi tape to hide that error. We had a discussion about glitter, and she said usually she doesn't like it in the house because it gets everywhere, but she'd make an exception since I made the card for her. I told her I understood as glitter is widely known as the herpes of crafting. She laughed for quite a while at that one.

She just turned 80! I can't believe my mom is 80!

QuiltCon 2021

I signed up for some QuiltCon classes for next year's online version of the event. It's going to be interesting to do this online and I'm really looking forward to it. Note: when I posted this over on Instagram, I used a filter and it changed the image below into something more my color range.

I'm taking two EQ8 classes and one about Boro Mending. I'm on the waitlist for a class about matchstick quilting and one on bias tape appliqué. I also splurged on an all-access pass so I can check out the lectures.

In Person Shopping

I actually went to a quilt shop the other day, in person and everything! It was really nice to compare in person the various greys that I was considering for augmenting the background fabric for my Safe at Home quilt.

Modern Handmade's new online teaching setup: Modern Quilter's Studio. We're making a quilt with these gorgeous fabrics. They happened to be cutting them up to package and send out, so I snagged mine and got my shipping fee refunded. I'm looking forward to trying out this new learning some new quilting techniques.

ICAD Week Six

Another week of ICAD work, this first one, I'm surprised at how much I like it.

Playing with transparency of watercolor pencils.

The next four are collage from the same magazine article. 

I wanted to try using several different things with the same imagery.

This one combines pen with the magazine images.

This one got more colorful but still has the same black white imagery.

I had this tea bag (Stash Jasmine) from the Modern Quilter's Box on my worktable. And I realized the green/teal was almost the same as some Washi Tape that I happened to have. It was good tea as well. 

Some almost white on white action here. I think this one might be one of my favorites.

Combination of torn packing receipt with Chinese characters with images from an article about the Dalai Lama's journey from China to India.

Safe at Home Row 5

Safe at Home row number 5 wasn't too exciting so I didn't take any process pictures. It's just a checkerboard, but I think it suits the quilt so far. I'm really liking how this whole thing is looking. 

I'm running out of grey background fabric and might have to buy some more. 

I may even go into an actual quilt store *gasp*. It's been a really long time, I haven't been in one since March!

Safe at Home Row 4

Last week I worked on getting the fourth row of the Safe at Home quilt done. As I cut the various colored pieces I laid them out to make sure I had a good mixture.

I got to use some of my tools like the Seams Easy, alas this seems to no longer be an available product but this Omnigrid/Fons&Porter version would work well too.

This block is almost all half-square triangles so there were a lot to size up. I finally got to use my Bloc-Loc half-square triangle trimmer, and boy oh boy does this thing ever help!

After getting all those HST trimmed to size, it was time to lay out some blocks and get sewing.

I like this one!

I took snapshots of the preferred layouts of each block before I started sewing. That way I could make sure they ended up together as planned.

I'm glad I took the time to cut out a lot of prints for this one, it was worth it.

I am really liking the mixture of batiks with more modern prints and solids.

There are two colors of grey in this too, can you tell? The corner squares are a different fabric, it's a slightly different shade as well as texture. It's got a much rougher surface and looser weave.

All five blocks came together well.

Here's how all four rows look hanging up together. I haven't sewn them to each other yet, waiting to get all the rows done and see if I like the final layout.