Wool Plans

 

One of the places we checked out in Portland was the Pendleton Wool Mill store.They had a very nice traditional Pendleton design painted on the outside, very eye-catching.

We were stopped in our tracks by this enormous and gorgeous wool quilt .

I found some great wool in the header bin, about two yards worth for $9.

Buy 1 get 1 Worm Free!! I think these are the edge trimmings, basically the wool schnibbles.

The worms bins were fascinating, and they had examples of rag rugs made out of them. It made me very sneezy there was a lot of fiber floating around in the air.

I knew I wanted wool to make a messenger bag style purse from a Charlie’s Aunt t pattern I bought last year. I snapped a picture of the back of this pattern (I think it’s close) to get the yardage requirements.

Here’s the purple and green wool I found in the headers bin. My plan is to machine wash it (on purpose) to felt it so it’ll be sturdier. But I have to read the actual pattern first. I may use the stitching and color changes in the design of the purse.

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!

Poetic Supplies

I'm taking a class, called Poetic Cloth from Jane Dunnewold which is really fun so far, but it required me to source some new fabric from a new supplier that she suggested. Online Fabric Store (yes, that's actually the name of it). For the class I bought two fabrics to try printing with, two yards of 60" white cotton broadcloth, and 2 yards of 45" bleached cotton muslin. What an interesting picture this is for white on white, right? I tried my best and held the two fabrics up to the window. I need to wash and dry them before I actually get started on pulling prints.

These fabrics will be used along with the new and much bigger Gelli Plate that was suggested that I just invested in. The one I had was only 8x10", so buying this much larger one will make it easier to print something as big as FQ which will be more usable in quilt making. Think of this as the before picture, taken while it's pristine and untouched.

I had most of the paints, and inks on the supply list already, but I didn't have these four. I've never used a paint retarder before so I'm interested in learning how that works.

Also at The Online Fabric Store, I found two kinds of felt. In the class notes, it was suggested to try out the display of smaller works we'll be making on this sort of sturdy dark grey felt, it seemed like it would be a good thing to learn. 

And after looking all over to source it locally, I finally found a grey wool felt that I can use in the Circle Sampler. Wool is really hard to find, especially in the size that I needed. I should have just bought it fro Sue Spargo back when I bought the pattern. I had even tried buying a wool coat at GoodWill and deconstructing it, but the largest rectangle wasn't even close to big enough. Now that I have the background, I can actually start this project.

So, after adding in those 7 yards, it brings my fabric tracker up to a net inflow of 11.8 yards.

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.

Can't Resist the Rainbow

 Suckered in by a rainbow once again. This time it was for a pack of Heather Bailey wool blends.

At some point, I'll do a wool hand work project, maybe like this Sue Spargo one.

PIQF Purchases

PIQF was great this year, so many familiar faces, new and old quilts. Noticed lots of birds and squids (?!) on many quilts. I didn't upload any of my quilt pictures this year, sorry.
And it's always a good excuse to buy some new quilting supplies because there are so many vendors all in one place.

I always have to get something Halloween related since the show is around that time and I'm in the mood, this time it was these great vintage Halloween postcards printed on fabric

A new ruler for shapes I hardly ever use, the Hex n More by Jaybird Quilts, I've been wanting to try block making with them. There are a lot of quilt designs that use this ruler and I'll have to pick one.

 Fun fabrics that I don't have a specific use for, just really liked them, especially this last torn newspaper collage print.

A swivel clip d-ring that I need to make a new bag at some point.

Wool thingies to take with me to China because they're lightweight and fun colors.Big felted balls.

As well as smaller ones. And wool circles, why not?

Wooly Kaleidoscope

Hadn't used Kaleidoscope Kreator program in a while, hadn't installed it on my new laptop (well, new last year), so here's one using a picture of some felted wool balls I recently purchased.