Two of Sixty Strips

I am back to working on the Bohemian Wife, all of the blocks are completed and they've been hanging out on my design wall since March. So now, it's time to do the cutting of the background strips. I've been putting it off, because this is the most complicated step and a big part of the reason I love the look of this quilt design so much. The commercial pattern is woefully inadequate to the complicated assembly scenario, but luckily there have been many sew-a-longs that have caused helpful people to make very useful spreadsheets. There really ought to be a chart like this in the printed pattern, that lists the section of the quilt, the lengths of strip required for all Sixty Strips. I think it's one of the main reasons this pattern has such a reputation for being difficult.

As I cut the segments of each strip I'm labeling them and then pinning them together. There are 10 sections total to be assembled into the quilt top...

So far I've only gotten two of the sixty strips cut out and placed with the blocks, those two on the left. It's either going to end up being a colorful riot or a riot of color, which is sort of the point.
 

Already Up To 91

 

Well, I'm finally into the 90's with the 100 Day Project, today was day 91.

I'l admit it, I'm starting to get a bit tired of doing this now. But I'm too close to the end to quit on this project.

Talking myself into keeping on keeping on. Works (almost) every time.

That skinny strip of medium gray almost looks like a shadow on the right hand side here.

I really like the teeny piecing I did in the green section on this one.

 Shades of purple vs. shades of orange, hot hot hot.

I had to slip another face in before I reached the end.

I like this blue green peaceful kind of feeling on this last one here. That grey hand-dye really blends in with the wool pressing mat.

Miyako Bag

I bought this cool red leather handle from Miyako Design at Golden State Quilting last year and it's been hanging around. I'll admit that I was a little confused by the spare directions that it came with it. I happened to find this more expansive and better illustrated "sewing booklet" at Santa Cruz Vac n' Sew. Hooray for LQS's having interesting products!

Furoshiki handles with a French touch is how they're described. Furoshiki is the traditional Japanese art of folding fabric for gift wrap or transport of goods.

The handle I bought is the 31.5" one, it seems like it would be long enough to go over my shoulder.

I decided to try out a non-lined version first and chose this printed linen/cotton blend that was in my stash. It's Anna Graham for Robert Kaufman, Forage in the color Charcoal.  I folded over the raw edge twice and basted it down, I also folded in the sides and basted them down to make a square instead of a rectangle (instead of cutting it to size).  In theory this is meant to be a no-sew thing, just ironing over the double fold of the raw edge. This is a temporary/transitory sort of purse situation where I'll likely take it apart and use the piece of fabric for something else.

I really really like this fabric design and I think it looks great with the vivid red handle.

I also found the Miyako YouTube explanation which helped when I tied my first two knots.

The hardest part was figuring out how to put the fabric through the slots on the end of the leather strap.

Nope! The knots are going the wrong way. I watched the video one more time.

That's much better!

Using the new light-filtering curtain as a backdrop, here's a picture of the "finished" bag. It's not secure, so it won't work for carrying my wallet, etc. but it will be an easy bag to carry projects or larger things around.

 

It's Curtains

This picture of my hand-dyed scraps is lit by the strong afternoon/early evening sun at 5:30 pm. This is nice to have the light when it's not super hot, but it's a lot of direct sun. It honestly feels like too much direct sun in a room filled with fabric and thread. 

Last summer we had to go as far as to mount on the outside of the house a shade curtain. It worked very well, but it was quite ugly from both outside and inside. So there's a curtain project afoot to see if I can avoid having that shade put up again this year. 

The window in my workroom is an unusual size, it's quite wide at 8' and it's 4' high. So that means that buying grab and go curtains from Target isn't in the ballpark really. Unless one has a sewing machine....mwahaha. 

All I can hear in my mind's eye memory is the Bugs Bunny version of "It's Curtains for You":

So I bought some "light-filtering" curtains from Target that need to be modified down to size as they are much too long at 84"

These curtains are very simply made, and I discovered that both the top and the bottom have a similar big hem that's open on the ends so that they're can both be functioning rod pockets. 

Here's the before picture. The current curtains on the sides are very old and made out of a fairly heavy damask that is also lined. They were made for a normal 6' width window. So they block too much light and also don't cover the whole window. The dumb thingy on the curtain rod in the middle was what I made out of the leftovers from shortening DS's blackout curtains that we got for the same afternoon sun situation. It was made to try and block the bright light that was coming through the top of the exterior shade we put up last year. Unfortunately it didn't work and also looks truly demented.

Tah-dah, much much better. No more demented pouf crouching up on the curtain rod and a very nice filtering of the light as per the package. The two curtains were both shortened to 4' high and then I used the left over fabric to make a third curtain (seen on the left) for when it's really bright.

This is great, I feel so much better, like I now have some control over the amount of light coming into the room. 

Even with the strongest sun of the day coming in, it's still much better. I love the moving shadows.

I'm counting this project as Done✅

 

Wandering Wednesday - Mother's Day

 
It was time to make a custom Mother's Day card for my wonderful mom. She loves green so I picked a green deckle edge blank card and first did some colored pencil.

Then I expanded it with watercolor pencil and crayon (Inktense blocks).

It all flowed out and combined pretty nicely. Here's Mom Mountain.

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DH chose the goodies for the meal, all sourced at Costco. I didn't go in and supervise as I'm not walking around quite that much yet. He splurged on some American Wagyu hamburger and got fancy buns. That and some teriyaki chicken and salad made a really excellent dinner. DS helped a lot which was great because my Mom would actually sit down. 

I had told DH to grab something dessert-y and boy did he deliver! My Mom was So Excited about the chocolate covered strawberries. She said she'd never had one and had only seen them in magazines. So that was very cool to give her that experience. They were really really good. A great strawberry with a good chocolate that tasted like chocolate instead of wax. I took this picture because I liked the imprint of the seedy exterior of the strawberry on the chocolate shell.

The very nice patio where we had our early dinner. My mom's container flowers are exploding with color this year. 

And she really liked her Giants t-shirt too.

The rest of the Mother's Day crew. What a great day it was. My DD was going to join us, but her sinus infection got a lot worse and she was worried about passing it onto the grandparents. A nice long phonecall with her was a great gift.

Friday Night Lights

 

Friday Night Lights-Aurora version! No editing (except for the built-in cell phone camera editing). My phone has an automatic night camera setting, which is a 3 second exposure. We could see the color slightly with our own eyes, it was really different than the usual look of the sky on a clear night. When I saw this color in this first picture,  I almost burst into tears. I've never ever thought I'd get to see the Northern Lights. And just getting this little bit of it here at home, was overwhelming and so cool.

Over the next couple hours I kept going back out on the deck to take more pictures and was so excited to see how much the color changed. 

I like this one with the yellow-ish light on the trim of the roofline.

It really went through a cycle of different purples and magenta almost fuchsia. (I can never ever spell fuchsia right the first time!)

Deep magenta! And it was finally time for me to go to sleep at 1am. So I missed whatever came next. Unfortunately the next two nights we got nothing down here, so I'm super pleased that it was so clear out on Friday night. 

Now I really want to go to Norway even more to see the Northern Lights without the aid of a camera.

A Place For Hexies

 I had this toppling over stack of hexies ready to go and I was worried they were going to get mixed in with the mess of scraps from working on the Scrap Tape. So they needed a place to hang out together and I had saved a magnetic closure box that was close to the right shape and size. Formerly housed a FitBit. Of course I needed a rainbow, so I used some Inktense blocks on some heavy sketchbook paper.

After brushing on some water and letting the rainbow dry, I trimmed it down to close to the exact size and glued it into the base of the box.

I had to cover up the FitBit logo and UPC codes with some nearly matching washi tape.

It's a really nice box, heavy and a solid closure that sticks with no fiddling around. 

It fits all the hexies I have so far with lots of room for more. I could even have a little sewing kit in here.

A rainbow of Hexies in a rainbow box. Now to sew some together....

To The 99th

 

Well it's down to choosing fabrics for the last three Pantone Project postcards that I've received. A total of 99 postcards have gotten to me from friend Jaye, some were delayed, nearly destroyed, many were ink stamped, etc. One is in transit some where. Maybe it'll show up at some point. Hopefully before we're ready to put together the quilt tops.

Tah-dah, The last three blocks for this project, down to the 99th.

A closeup of the blocks and the fabric choices I ended up going with.

And now over to a really great group of blocks that friend Jaye handed over at the retreat. A huge bunch, wow! That whole column of Ribbon blocks is so great looking, could maybe make an interesting border? I like the white diamond created by the two Peaky & Spike blocks next to each other.

And more from Jaye, I like the colors in this grouping a whole lot. In the top row, the Sliver block plus the Ribbon block is a super interesting shape.