Green Snake Stitching

 

There and back again to Spokane, so that meant a bit of time for some airport stitching. I started in on one of the very last bits of Snake in the Garden that need to be stitched, the spiral-ly green pool. Instead of doing random stitches, I chose to follow the spiral printed on the fabric. I might also add in some of the gold green on the other part of the fabric design. Getting close to the end. 

Waiting Snake

 

Yesterday was a traveling back from Spokane day, with an almost three-hour flight delay. At least I got this beautiful picture in the morning on Tuesday in San Francisco. Those glowing red squares are so interesting, especially with the offset squares and additionally offset circles inside them That plus all the lines on the pavement. A great start to a possible quilt design.

In the extra time I had to sit around and wait for our plane to even decide to show up, I got a whole lot of the sky stitched on the Snake in the Garden quilt. Just one more section of green left to go on this!

Travel Shop

 

The fabric shopping on the way to, and in Portland with friend Jaye, was pretty great. The above picture is  what I found at Sewlarium. First is the new Ruby Star toweling, I'll be making napkins out of this beautiful stuff. I think it'll go well with my pride month table runner. FQs of the PDX airport fabric, a black on grey houndstooth, and odd yellow grid, a pink/caramel ribbon print. A mushroom print that I plan to make a pillowcase with, a really interesting print with odd yellow shapes (I thought it looked like a tile floor), a beautiful (instead of ugly) Frida Kahlo print, and an on-sale pearl bracelets in a dark grey almost black. 

At Pioneer Quilts, I found more of the Ruby Star toweling, because I hadn't bought enough at Sewlarium. An odd grellow star print, a pretty purple halloween print and then the ingredients to make the witch hat "pin keeper" (not a pincushion I guess?). They have a great selection of wools in this shop.

At Mill End, I think I was fabric shopped out/overwhelmed with the vast array of choices, so I only got a couple buckles and a Tombow textile glue that I'd never seen.

In Eugene, we stopped in at Paramount Sew-Vac, a really great store, especially for sewing machine selections as they had all the brands and tons of room displaying them, I found a great remnant of this white and grey print, and then was excited to see Marcia Derse print on a lovely cotton jersey, I got enough to make myself a top.

In Ashland, we checked out Sew Creative and I found that I was really drawn to the Australian Aboriginal prints, they have a huge selection, but I managed to narrow it down and chose three and then found another print that I thought would work well with them.

The last shop we stopped at was Purple Frog Quilt Shop, where I found these 4 FQs, a Peanuts print, blue Grunge, and two lights on a string one dark green and one charcoal. They had a great selection of the American Made solids, so I bought the last of the light grey, a little over a yard. And a new nail file, because my travel one is worn out now and needs replacing.

And finally, at Powell's Books, I found this book, Ahead of the Curve(which includes 5 patterns!) by one of my fave curvy pattern designers, Jenny Rushmore of Cashmerette.

That was plenty of shopping to last me for quite a while, and now I get to add the new fabric purchases into my fabric tracker. At the last update, I was previously at a net increase of 11.8 yards. After adding all this new stuff in,  and subtracting out what I've been sewing since the last update, I'm up to a net of: 18.3 yards. I better get to finishing some big things before year's end to get that number down!

Circle Coralled

 One of the free P.O.T.S. (plastic organizer thingies) I got from the free table at Sew Day is now in use containing all the threads and most of the tools I'll be using for the Circle Sampler. 

Here's what it looks like with the label taken off.

Now that I have my felt cut to the right size, I can finally get started stitching.

Travel Stitching

I haven't worked on Snake in the Garden since our trip to San Francisco in April. We were in The City (as it's known around here) over the weekend for my DH's annual trip to do the SF Marathon with former co-workers. (To be clear, he didn't run the marathon, he walked/jogged the 5k.) As I wasn't participating, I brought along my to-go bag and stitched while he was walking. It was fun to walk around in the downtown and Embarcadero area afterwards and go to lunch with everyone.

I picked up right where I left off in April, using the celadon green sashiko thread I'd bought at Britex on that trip. It's not too great for embroidery through all the layers of a quilt though, it starts to shred a bit. It's meant for going through one layer of fabric, so I'll likely switch greens for the next thread choice. 
 

Dyed Threads

 I ordered some new hand-dyed embroidery threads from Deb Lacativa's Dirty Threads online shop. Aren't they beautiful? It was very very hard to choose which set to order, there were so many that were quite tempting. 

I'm planning to use these on the rest of the Snake in the Garden stitching that I have left to do. That made me chuckle when I saw the two stamps on the envelope celebrating the Year of the Snake. An auspicious year to finish up that long-in-process piece.

SF Stitching

 

I actually sat in the sunny window in our hotel room in SF and stitched on my go-to handwork project, Snake in the Garden. I used the newest color thread that I had at hand, thanks to the shopping I'd just done at Britex Fabrics. The green sashiko thread was used to fill in part of the dark blue leaf between the gold print. 

These are the two sashiko thread colors that I bought at Britex. I chose them because I hadn't seen colors like that on offer in other shops.

New Tools

 

A couple more things that I've sourced in preparation for doing the Toned-Down Circle Sampler. I now have all of the suggested types and sizes of needles. I'm also giving these two Sue Spargo designed embroidery tools a try, they looked like they'd be helpful with some of the harder embroidery stitches. I'll post about them once I try them out. 

I'm most excited about this Sewline Trio Colors marking pencil that was suggested in the pattern, I think this is pretty brilliant, it writes very easily on cotton fabric, and hopefully wool too. Now to get stitching.

To-Be Embroidered

 

I think I've found my wool for the background of the Toned-Down Circle Sampler. I snapped this up at the local Goodwill shop.

 A very nice quality but small-ish ladies wool coat. Perfect size for my uses.  The front was a bit worn but the back which I'll be using is in perfect shape. It's a good weight, heavy enough but still flexible enough.

I think it looks pretty good with the circles and threads. Now to get cutting to size and get down to start some stitching. And now I'm think how cool this project could be on a coat that someone would wear. I'd love to see that in real life.

Circling Round

 

I'm gathering the supplies to make the Sue Spargo embroidery sampler, Toned Down Circle Sampler. I had bought a bag of wool circles ages ago. I used some of these to make my 5-4-5-7 quilt earlier this year. The circles came in two sizes, 1" and 2". The pattern calls for 1" circles so I counted out all the 1" circles required. Almost enough to do the pattern.

I chose four of the 2" circles to cut down to 1", so now I have enough circles for the pattern.  I now need to find a piece of wool for the background to appliqué these onto. The only piece I have on hand is a FabMo sourced one that is a very bright orange and is quite heavy-weight. I haven't gone through my felted wool box yet though. 

I'm trying hard to use what I already have on hand, but as I said earlier I did buy this package of threads along with the pattern. They are a wool-acrylic blend thread called Ellana which I've never used before. The other three spools of Eleganza perlé cotton were previous purchases that happened to match up with the specific colors called for in the pattern. 

I still have to look through the rest of my embroidery threads to make sure I have a good enough assortment of colors and types that will work well enough with the colors of the circles. Hopefully I'll have enough of the embroidery threads of many of the types and weights that are called for. I think I'll likely have enough as I'm not trying to exactly match the sampler pattern. The actual Toned-Down Circles pattern is basically a recipe book of stitch combinations with fairly simple illustrations that refers to the Creative Stitching book by Sue Spargo. That's a book I've had for a while but haven't worked with too much yet. It's a really well-done presentation of a variety of stitches that I've seen but never tried myself.

The Last New and Circles

 

My order from Sewtopia for additional Ruby+Bee fabric to finish my challenge quilt arrived. And of course while I was there (on the website, not in the actual store in Utah), I had to order some sale fabrics, a pin and some checked webbing. That's it, no more fabric buying for the year. I'm officially full up of fabric now. 

I love Happy Sew Lucky patterns and was so happy to see this pin which I will wear during the next few months as I write my political postcards.

Two Ruby+Bee solids, Rain Cloud and Turmeric, two Carolyn Friedlander prints to add to my collection. Someday I'll make a quilt with just those fabrics, maybe one of her patterns. A button print in the oddest colors, the background is almost a match to the Turmeric solid. And a very cute tossed calendar print to use on the back of my calendar quilt.

A trip to a LQS with friend Jaye, The Granary led to two more fabrics getting tossed into the final new fabric purchases pile. One a really interesting layered print by Valori Wells, and a fabric that I'd resisted buying earlier, the completely made-up just-for-fun Crytptids of the National Parks. This will be the backing for my National Parks panel when DH and I go traveling when he retires.

An interesting table runner pattern from Atkinson Designs. I'm pleased to see it offered at the same price online and for the .pdf version too. Not sure which month this will be for in my monthly table runner rotation, depends on which fabrics I choose.

From Sue Spargo online, after resisting the Toned Down Circle Sampler pattern several times I broke down and got it. It is sold with a kit, which I didn't buy as I have a lot of embroidery threads and I don't need to exactly replicate the pattern's colors. That led to me making a database (of course) of which embroidery threads I do have on hand. That was quite a fun diversion to look through all of it! And yes, I have plenty to do this pattern. 

This wool/acrylic Ellana thread was the only type I didn't have so I bought the kit pack. I already have the Sue Spargo book, Creative Stitching, that explains the stitches that are combined in each circle.

Pictures of Plans

 

Alll of that new fabric has been washed and put away now, all that's left behind is a big ol' tangle of cut off thread tangles and lots of new projects to do.

It was a lot to put away, but I did take some more pictures of fabric groupings, etc. This is mostly just for reference for future projects.

I was looking more closely at some of the Tilda fabric that I'd purchased. This was a fat quarter which I hadn't unrolled in the store as it was tied. What is it about this designer that I like so much? I think it's the color palette as well as the combination of stylized yet not too abstracted flower forms with backgrounds like these polka dots. The dots are not just an impartial regimented background though, the placement of individual dots follow the shapes of the flowers instead of being in a grid.

Same idea here with the background of various sizes of ovals. and dots. This way of doing a background subtly emphasizes and also integrates the foreground figures. This is a lovely color palette as well. 

I confirmed that the chambray fat quarters that I bought will go well with the Tilda Bloomsville fabrics I'd 

gotten on a whim at the beginning of the year. 

I saw a quilt at the San Mateo County Fair that used them in a lantern pattern, which was great, but I want to do something different.  Maybe something like this big flower block pattern, so I can fussy cut the figures on the Bloomsville fabrics to be centered in the flower centers.

These are the group of proposed Medallion Quilt fabrics, with the "focus fabric" or maybe "instigating or inspiring" fabric there at the top. I've been wanting to make a medallion type of quilt for a while and SBAMQ just held a class that I almost signed up for as well. It's been fun to see what people in the class have come up with. I want to try to design one on EQ8, perhaps as a starting point, but maybe it would just help me improvise.

And finally a group picture of the embroidery threads that I bought. They don't really go together do they? Well, they're really for filling in the empty spots in my available color wheel.

Vacation Buying

This might get too long for one post, we'll see. I've taken some pictures of what I bought while on a short vacation with friend Jaye. We hit up a whole lot of quilt shops during our drive, the first of which I wrote a bit about yesterday, Pioneer Quilts, in Portland.

 I found this purple fabric with an op art sort of design of green and yellow circles and decided it would be a great thing to make a medallion quilt around. I also found some interesting kind of coordinating fabrics there.There was some Eleganza thread that I picked up and another pack of Chenille Needles that I really like to stitch with. We also saw this new Scanfil organic cotton thread and decided to split the package between us. I'll report back about how it stitches when I use it.

The second shop we visited in Portland was Sewlarium (love the name!). There was a great selection there, I found this Moda Halloween toweling, a Sasquatch print, and two more fabrics to possibly be players in my medallion quilt.

At Powell's City of Books, because I'd flown up, I hadn't brought along the usual journal kit. So I got a new journal, some Micron pens, a couple of cards and postcards. The two actual books that I bought were Japanese Quilting Piece by Piece - Yoko Saito and Patterns by Drusilla Cole. The first one, all the projects are super interesting (although quite brown!) and the patterns are included with the used book. The second is so interesting, apparently it's a series of books from this author, some of which are strictly focused on surface design. Very fun and inspiring stuff to see on every page.

On our way over to the Oregon coast we detoured to McMinnville to visit Boersma's. I found a pencil shavings in a bright yellow in the basement sale zone, and three purples to maybe be in my medallion quilt. They had a ton of Sashiko stuff and I bought an unusual thread that combines red and blue in it.

This is a converted downtown three story brick  building. I took this picture because I loved the  colors of the Boersma's sign along with the brick and the "love you" graffiti.

Check out that moving lit up arrow sign! Have you ever seen a quilt shop with one of those?!?!

They had some nice displays of completed quilts and hung up circles covered in various fabrics in the big front windows, very eye-catching. Inside, the top floor is classrooms, the middle floor offices, and the main and basement is all fabric.

Okay, that's probably enough for today, tomorrow I'll finish off documenting the vacation buying spree.

Pins Out

 

The Pantone Project Postcards (PPP) keep arriving from friend Jaye and I need to make some more blocks to go with them. I was sorting out some embroidery threads during the BAM meeting I was virtually attending yesterday and randomly made this very nice color arrangement.

It somewhat reminded me of this combination from the Stitch Happens quilt. 

I did some stitching on the Snake in the Garden piece during the meeting, it's coming along. I still have a lot of stitching left to do, but I'm getting there. This was started in a class with Pamela Allen way back in 2007.

Stitching through the "snakeskin" was pretty tough, that's a very weird fabric. It was the only piece of fabric on the whole piece that had pins holding it down, and I wanted to get those pins out before they rusted in place.

Whatever glue I used in 2007 really has stayed put. It might have been glue stick, I don't think it was fusible. Whichever it was, it worked, all the pieces are still in place. And the pins are out for good.