October Cornucopia

Happy Halloween!

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This is a little late now for Halloween decorating this year, but I thought this video about making fabric pumpkins was very fun.

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Time to make a Welcome Blanket, a 40"x40" quilt or crocheted or knitted blanket to welcome new immigrants to our country.

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Here's a really cute cross-body bag with a helpful video, how to make a RoliPoli.

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A fabulous garden and home that I wish I could buy and move to immediately. Can you imagine the quilt retreats??

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Free Spirit Fabrics is holding a contest called Coat Story, making a quilted Tamarack Jacket from Grainline.

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Redistricting is happening right now in most states in the US. Here's an interesting article from the ACLU, get educated about what's happening where you live. I especially enjoyed the District Time Machine visualization time lapse of my area and how substantially the district boundaries have changed over the years.

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Since it's the end of spooky season, I enjoyed this list of the 20 best Lovecraftian horror movies. There's a few on there I still need to see.

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Check out the exhibit "Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Words of Women's Suffrage" at Visions Art Museum, and then also watch the 3 part video series discussing the historical context.

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A gift idea to make, scalloped edge placemats.

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A vegan main course salad for Thanksgiving to try.

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Prism Design Start

Starting my work on making three quilts to enter in Prism Play. The assignment is color, based on the Joen Wolfrom Ultimate 3-in-1 Color Tool.

The size is long and kinda skinny. I want my three quilts to be a triptych in a way. Yes they'll be for sale, but if they don't get sold, I'll hang them together.

There's going to be a Yellow Green/Chartreuse, Aqua Blue, and an Orange quilt. I like the starting place I'm launching from.
 

Holding On

Here's my current SewTites collection, just recently received the Libs Elliot "Watcher" version. I thought it'd be good to show them all together so you can see just how different the sizes and shapes are from each other. It's really nice to have a variety of shapes and sizes to choose from depending on what I'm using them for.

I'm currently working on making a holder for them, instead of keeping them on their cards.

Rain Again

We've had this cool weather station set up since April this year, it was our anniversary present to ourselves. And it hadn't gotten much of a workout besides telling us how darn hot it was this year. But this past weekend, we found out it has an actual sense of humor. "It's raining cats n dogs." Indeed.

There was a lot of rain forecasted, the media is using new terms like atmospheric river, and bomb cyclone. But it turned out to just be a rain storm "just like we used to have." We've missed having rainstorms like this, really and truly, it was just part of life and part of the fun of living in the mountains. A bit of an adventure or whatever. But now, there's the worry of the steep mountainsides that burned in the fire coming down in a debris flow with too much rain at once. That means evacuation orders or warnings for a lot of people in our town. Not us, thankfully, as our home is on the other side of the highway and river. 

We did all the usual things to prepare, put away the outdoor cushions, took down the sun shades we put up for the summer, tarped up equipment, cut some firewood, cleared our drainage ditches, that sort of thing. Then we hunkered down inside, nice and cozy and hoped for the best. We expected to lose power, but we only did very briefly. Our neighbors down the street are out though, they are on a different power transmission line that we are. 

It's fun having the weather station, our total for the storm of 7.47" was a little less than some of the other measurements in our town that I've seen, but I think the spot where our station is located is a bit protected from rain (and wind too).  It's remarkable to me that on October 3rd, it was 100F, and we hadn't had any rain at all since April 25th. It's been a long, hot, dry summer, and all this rain is so very welcome.

As I woke up this morning, it was absolutely pouring, at an inch an hour rate according to the weather station. And then it stopped as the sun rose higher. Then this was the view out our front door. Pshew, we made it. No big slides happened, our power stayed on (?!?), and the roads are mostly open. I'm glad that our county is playing it safe and issuing evacuation orders, just in case, but it's going to get old for the people affected, especially as they aren't providing vouchers for housing like they did during the fire evacuation. We had a bad slide back in 1982, and ten people were buried in their homes in mud. And that was without a burn scar on steep hillsides, just an epic amount of rain. I expect that if we continue to have normal rainstorms, the just-in-case evacuations will continue.

Enough about the weather, back to getting some sewing done!

Happy 17th!

 Happy 17th birthday to my blog.

What? 

2,278 posts? 

Wow, that's a lot!

134 a year, about 11 a month.

Thank you to my loyal readers and subscribers, for keeping up with me for all or some of these years.

I've ranged all over the place in time and attention to blog writing and subjects, so I appreciate it more than you can ever know.

A Last Layer

Added a last layer of quilting as discussed yesterday. And it's the last one necessary.

I used a yellow that doesn't stand out too terribly much.

It's not too bright, but adds a bit of sparkle.

I love this texture so much.

I can't stop petting this one.

Now the question, to square up or leave the wonky edges.

 

Layers of Stitch

There was a small piece hanging around that I'd pinned together way back when I was first pulling together solids to use in the Kitchen Sink Quilt. It happened as an accidental design when I laid out the strips I'd cut out. 

I got it sandwiched up and then realized that orange was too see-through compared to everything else. I put a piece of batting behind it and all was well. 

First up, an edge to edge perpendicular grid of light blue, just to get everything held down.

There's a few tucks here and there, but that'll be okay once I'm done stitching.

It definitely needs more stitching, and I don't want to do the zig-zag the raw edges thing. I'm liking the thread-i-ness of this so far.

The next color I added is a darker teal-ish green, but this time from corner to corner. Note that none of this is marked, all eye-balled.

It's looking a lot closer to done.

I think another color is needed.

So why not a layer of orange grid too? The whole thing is very flat now. But I think I might add a shade of yellow too.
 

In Remembrance: Linda Hewitt

I finished my Remembrance Project block for the Social Justice Sewing Academy. For some reason I thought I took a picture of the final final form, but alas, I didn't. This is pretty close though and it will have to do as I've mailed it off to them. 

Here's what I wrote about the person the block is made to honor:

Linda Hewitt was a twenty-eight year old woman, who was murdered in San Diego, California in 1978. She is included along with 507 others on the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls list. 

Linda worked as a babysitter for two school age children and was raising her infant son on her own. 

She died bravely defending her baby from her killer. Nothing more was available on her life, although the details of her death and her killer were well covered in the press. Unfortunately she died in an era where the identity and life of the victim wasn't considered newsworthy. Evidence obtained at the crime scene of her death was key to convicting the serial killer who is still serving several life sentences. 

Rest In Power, Linda Hewitt

 A few details about the making of the block. I was really pleased with how the letters turned out in the end.

I used a pretty tight zig-zag stitch on the edges even though they were also attached with fusible. Just in case, as these blocks get displayed and handled quite a bit.

I couched the braided blue yarns in a double spiral on the lower blue part. That's what I don't have a picture of, it blended in pretty nicely and wasn't too crazy of a contrast.

 

Initial Ink Experiment

I finally tried out the Infusible Ink pens I bought to use with my Cricut. This is the back of a piece of  white printer paper that has the design inked on it by the machine. I noticed that it actually bled through onto the sticky mat a little bit. I guess I have to figure out how to clean that ink off before I use that mat again.

Then I ironed it onto the turquoise fabric. It definitely transferred, but it's a lot of steps lighter than the image on the paper. My iron probably doesn't get hot enough. Of course they sell an additional pressing gizmo that gets hotter, and nope not buying that.

I'm glad that I remembered to use a press cloth because it bled through to the other side and it would have gotten the ink on my iron.

I'm going to try this with another iron that we have that I know gets to a higher temperature than my Oliso iron does. I might also try our paint-stripping heat gun to see if I can get it hot enough to really transfer. 

Hopefully without setting anything on fire or scorching the material.

 

Almost Disaster Letters

Here's a little more about the letters for the Remembrance Project. This shows the difference between the color of the card stock and the fabric. 

I followed all the directions to cut pre-fused fabric, but for some reason, it didn't work out. Fabric pre-fused, with the paper still on, fabric side down, on the pink fabric mat (below).

As it cut, the paper layer separated and started getting dragged around, but it kept going. It didn't seem to be a catastrophic thing so I let it keep going. But yikes on bikes, right?!

I was surprised to find that most of the letters survived or were close enough to use. I have a feeling that Steam-a-Seam is not what this is calibrated for, probably one of the thicker ones like Heat n' Bond or something would work. The paper on Steam-a-Seam always comes off very easily instead of being really stuck on like the others.
 

Remembrance Project Start

I've been working on a Remembrance Project block for the Social Justice Sewing Academy. 

I spent a lot of time trying in vain to find a photo of my assigned murder victim, Linda Hewitt so that I could depict her face. There's lots and lots on her murderer because he was a serial murderer in California in the 1970's. But I didn't want to focus on him of course, and instead try to make something beautiful for this young mother that evoked the beauty of then place where she died, San Diego.  I did a fairly simple sketch that evoked some of the city iconography, a sunset. 

I decided to use some of my precious hand-dyes.

I hand braided a cording that I'll use on the "ocean" part of the blue.

The setting sun shape really disappears into the background in the picture, it has a lot more contrast in person.

I worked out the approximate size I needed the letters to be and cut them out on the CriCut out of card stock to figure out the placement before cutting them out in fabric. The requirements are that the name be legible from across the room, so they've got to be big and have a lot of contrast.

Still working on the placement of the letters. And I might add the years of the span of her life to the lower section.
 

Fall Quilty

 Another Quilty Box arrived and had just what I needed--two new wool dryer balls. I literally had them in my shopping cart. If you haven't started using these instead of dryer sheets, I totally recommend them. Your dryer load will come out plenty soft and mostly de-staticky-ed. The other stuff in the box was great too. A handy size of ruler, I love these Creative Grids ones, they really don't slip. A nice shade of blue thread. And an interesting pattern too.

I think this is very innovative way of making a fat quarter pack. Just print it all out on yardage. I think that it'll be a whole lot easier to pre-wash too. I'm trying to work out a way to use the printed join-ups in a pattern, it would save me a seam if I could figure it out. 

Spray Away

 

Well, I actually tried out Christa Watson's spray basting on a table method. I didn't take any in-process pics as I was otherwise occupied and rather sticky-fingered. These pictures were taken before I ironed the quilt sandwich, so it's even flatter now.

 It seemed to work out really well. The spray went on smoothly without blobs and was fairly easy to see where more was needed as long as you were quick enough. The smell of it didn't bother me at all which was a relief, I tried it masked with an N-95 at first, but then removed the mask to take a phone call while I continued spraying and realized it wasn't too bad as I was spraying out doors. I used the Odif 505 spray.

The only part I had any trouble with was folding the pieces up to carry them back up to my studio, then it was a little hard to get them unstuck and apart from themselves. I pinned the backing up on the design wall and the batting stuck just fine without ironing. Then the top stuck just fine to the batting. Now that it's been ironed on both sides, I'm finally ready to try quilting this thing. Hopefully the stick-i-ness doesn't bother the quilting process or gunk up the needle.