Postcards, Seeds, Spiders, Color Study

 

No quilting happened today, instead I used my energy up writing a whole lot of Postcards to Voters and actually getting them into the mail. I had planned and ahead and last week I bought a new roll of fall leafy postcard stamps and blank postcards with a printed message on one side that says: 

BE A VOTER 

Your Voice Matters  

🌟---Really---🌟

My goal is to write and send out all 100 postcards for the upcoming mid-term election.

I also harvested some Day Lily seeds from my garden that I'm going to attempt to sprout and grow. Usually you buy them as small bare roots with crowns. I was pulling out the dry flower stalks with the dried pods and heard the seeds rattling. I looked it up right then and there on my phone to see if the seeds were worth planting or not before I tossed the stalks into the composter. It sounded to me like it's definitely worth a try. The more Day Lilies the better, right? I'll be sure and report back here in spring to let you know if it worked or not.

We also have finished off our Halloween decorating. I really liked how this picture turned out. One of our couch-side lamps temporarily has a purple LED bulb, and the other one has a red bulb. Both have BIG hairy spiders, and it's rather SpoOoOooky just as intended.

Oh, and I signed myself up for another Alison Glass quilt along, Color Study. I think it's a really interesting looking quilt.

Five Pantone Project Blocks

 

Now that I've made two of each type of block for the Pantone Project, I'm going back around for round 3. 

After making these five blocks, I'm up to having made 60 now (out of 100). I really like how this group of colors looks together.

I think I'm really into this using the same background on each block that we're doing in this project. It really sets off the fabrics so well. Even with all the varied colors it's cohesive.

Some of these blocks are quite simple which is nice. No paper piecing required.

I did this Chevron with templates, including sewing a Y-Seam (eek!)

This wide stripe was paper pieced so that the stripe would end up in the right place to play well with the other blocks.

Ahhh the simplicity of the good ol' four patch. 

While sewing together the five Pantone Project blocks, I used the squares of the 9-patch donation blocks as leaders and enders.And voilá all 8 are done and ready to turn in.

As I was piecing the last of these blocks I noticed that the fabric on the lower left featured a logo for the Roaring Camp Railroads, our local steam train. It either takes you up into the redwoods or down to the beach. I thought it made for a funny block when use along with the Cal fabric.Very specific to me personally and quite local yokel-ish.

And speaking of local yokel stuff, c'mon, pumpkins for sale on 9/4/23?!? That's too soon by several weeks, maybe a month? I love Halloween a whole lot, but really, early September?

Cornucopia For October

Happy Halloween! This past month, I've gotten around online, and here's some of the links to useful or interesting things I've consumed, enjoyed and/or learned from.

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Happy Sew Lucky has another great topical and timely paper pieced pattern to support the incredibly brave women's protests going on in Iran right now. 

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Join in and help create large-scale crocheted murals with Love Across the USA.

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Personal and collaborative art about climate data representation, knitted, crocheted, etc. with The Tempestry Project. The National Parks Tempestry Project photo album is absolutely beautiful.

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Some possibly useful advice about getting out of a creative rut.

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Here's an interesting combination of Meditation and art.

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Repurposing old quilts, some ideas are hmmm, but some are pretty cool/innovative.

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An alternative to the now unfortunately Muskified twitter is CounterSocial aka CoSo, it's a lot more actually social for a social media app, surprising and refreshing! You can find me over there: @JulieZS

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This was a nice and spooooky surprise from Neil Gaiman, if you're reading this post today, check it out.

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I really recommend re-watching It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown Halloween tv special from the 1960's, it definitely holds up. Supposedly free to stream on that Apple TV link.

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Also, go watch WolfWalkers, one of the most beautiful animated films I've seen in a while. Very unique.This is the third in the trilogy of Irish myths and legends movies made by the same Irish studio, The Book of Kells and Song of the Sea are the first two. 

The trailer:

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Have

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A

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Happy

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Halloween!

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Halloween Again

 With having the Circuit around, I figure I pretty much have to make something Halloween-ish every year. I had my eye on this project last year but I didn't have enough of the right colors of cardstock. But this year I do....mwahaha.

Soooo many layers and colors, this is the most complicated project I've attempted so far. This is just four of them assembled here.

The fun thing with these Cricut projects is that you can change so many things, like the purple here was a dark grey in the project pictures. But I was out of colors of grey, and I liked how the purple looked against the black on the frame.

This slightly angled shot shows all the layers.

One of the greys is actually colored penciled a slightly darker color . 

Here's a view of the final piece against a backdrop of Halloween fabric.

 It's complicated and has a lot of depth.

Seaside Top Done

It took a few hours, but I got the Seaside table runner top sewn together yesterday. I had zero problems with fitting all the diamonds together, it went very smoothly. All because the diamonds were cut out accurately with the Sidekick ruler.

 It looks SO different with the pointy edges trimmed off. I kind of wish I was better at bindings, it would have been cool to have it remain pointy. I could have done some sort of SpOoKy raw edge treatment, but I chose to make it more stabilized with a "normal" binding.

Onto getting the quilting and binding completed and this baby on the table.

Beginning Seaside

 I really enjoy working on Halloween projects during the month of October, it's kind of like getting to decorate my workroom to go with the rest of the house. So this year, I decided to do the Seaside table runner pattern for Journey to Nebula in a variety of Halloween prints.

This pattern uses the Sidekick ruler, which I found very easy to use. I especially liked the trick of trimming off the points of the diamonds to make it easier to sew them together.

It really didn't take as long as I thought it would to cut out all the diamonds. And they ended up being being pretty accurate.

Here's how the somewhat random layout worked out. 

I even had enough time left over to sew four rows together. I was happy to have it all go together so easily, and that's because of the ruler making it easy to cut the shapes accurately.

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!

Halloween Banner

Happy Halloween!
Here's the new decoration I made to celebrate, a pennant banner complete with Edgar Allen Poe "The Raven" quotes.

I bought this panel at the recent PIQF, my friend that I was with already had one and we challenged each other to actually get it made before Halloween. I have to find out if she did or not....I did momentarily entertain the notion of using the triangles to piece something (a wall hanging maybe?) but I went with the intended pennants as you can see.

And here's a fun reading of The Raven:

Halloweenie Halloween

 Our pumpkin carving this year was late again, by one day, becoming a Stiller family tradition.  The timing brought back memories of my unfortunate hand injury two years' ago.  I only was able to bring myself to carve out one eye, (I'm such a Halloweenie!)  so Alex and Marc had to slice up the rest.  I scooped out the insides, roasted the pumpkin seeds and drew three of the faces.

 This was Alex's, those round teeth are awesome, but they took forevvvveeeerrrr for him to carve.  But he didn't give up and it looks great.

 I liked this shot because of the light effects.  I actually used a tripod with my new camera so I could get some non-blurry dark shots.

 These two pumpkins are different for a good reason, the rind on them was almost two inches thick and super hard!  Too tough to cut safely, so we decided that trying to carve was crazy.  We got out the electric screwdriver and did dot-to-dot holes around the designs, but it turned out the bit wasn't long enough and the holes didn't go all the way through so the pumpkins were dark even with a lit candle inside :-(

 Alex tried using a skewer to poke on through.  Here's our pumpkin carving table complete with screwdriver, knives, sharpies, skull goblets of pomegranate grape juice and a sack of Halloween candy.

Skewering in action.  I love how intensely orange this picture is.   The final solution was to find a longer bit for the electric screwdriver, that finally worked and the candle light could shine through the dot-to-dot design.  It was worth it, I liked how they looked when lit up.

I was lame and didn't take pictures of the three of us dressed up for Halloween.  Too bad because I finally finished my gold fairy costume and it looked pretty fancy with gold hairspray and makeup, etc.  I got Alex to put a ton of gel in his hair,he went as a character from a webcomic that he likes that has pretty straight hair, didn't work at all on his very curly hair, but it at least looked different than his usual style.  I also got Marc to wear eye liner for his wizard costume which was rather a surprise at how good it looked on him.  So booo, for no pictures.

Hope you had a fun Halloween this year!

One New House, Better Than None

 Here's the next six word quiltlet, number 43.  This was for the week of Halloween, which I was sad to have been too checked-out to participate much in, oh well there is always this year, right?!.

 The words say: "One New House. Better Than None."   Which refers to the one and only new block that I managed to make for my very long in-process Halloween Houses quilt.  The scraps from making that were what made up most of this week's quiltlet.   
Also the writing is on this almost satin ribbon material that made up one of the bandages I was sent home with (an unused one!), it was sticky one side and the ribbon surface was easy to write.

October Cornucopia

I made only a very few attempts at sewing in October besides the six-word memoir quiltlets.  First of all, I made this Halloween House quilt block for my Halloween Houses quilt-in-progress.  Yes, it is definitely supposed to wonky.  No I didn't measure or use a pattern.  I like this fabric combination a whole lot.  I've found there are two distinct colorways in my personal Halloween fabric collection.  The slightly dusky, muted, yet still bright  and then the just plain obnoxious, almost too bright.  Turns out they are hard to combine.  Going forward on this project I may have to rethink using them all together.  Or maybe one side of the quilt can be bright, and the other side can be dusky.

That makes 8 total house made now.  This Halloween Houses quilt is really taking a while to come together.  I know, I know, I write about it every year.  Some year (hopefully soon) I'll make a big effort and actually finish it.  (Hey, I have almost a year to get it done, right?!)  

 I especially still want to make houses with pictures of my boys in the costumes I've made them over the years in the doorways and windows.  Until then, it makes a nice, colorful, seasonal decoration in the studio when there isn't much else up on the design wall. 

Speaking of costumes I was only asked to make two this year for my son Alex and his friend CJ.  Alex found me the pattern online and we made these so he and his buddy could go as Finn the Human and Jake the Dog from their favorite cartoon show Adventure Time.  Have you ever seen this show? It is deeply strange, and very funny.  I can see why they like it!

 I had to do something with my favorite orange t-shirt, the collar was frayed all of a sudden.  The rest of it still looked fine.  This was one I overdyed a while ago, I think it used to be bright yellow and got very faded, very quickly, but the fabric was still in very good shape .

I just turned over the t-shirt neckline and stitched it down.  Mostly straight. ahem, don't look too closely please.  I'm pleased that it extends the use of one of my favorite shirts for a little bit longer.

Falling For Inspiration

Regular inspiration luckily comes in the mail, which is the fun of subscribing to the Equilter's Monthly Stash Club.  I'm currently getting the Batik & Bali Hand-Dyes version, but have gotten the Creative Juices before, both are useful and inspiring and useful!  Some of these will most likely make it into my long-in-process Halloween Houses quilt.

 

They also make a nice background for photographing random stuff, like this cool colored glitter.  Yes, I know, I know, Martha Stewart, but still, look at these colors!I know I've put this up before, but  I like the combination of the fat quarter fabrics, thiis notecard/envelope and my stamped eye.Now to think of some way to combine them all, instead of random happenstance on top of my worktable!

And lastly,of course an October must not be allowed to pass without the purchase of additional Halloween-themed fabric of some kind.  This year it is scary and Haunted Wizard of Oz.  It just cracked me up and I liked the way the design is done on this one.

I had so much fun last year participating in this blog-tour-Halloween Party, I'll be doing it once again, so be sure to come back on October 16th to see what I come up with.  And if you want to also participate (yes, do it!), go sign up at A Fanciful Twist.