If I didn’t have bad luck

I’d have no luck at all….

I forget what song that line came from. We have hit a speed bump with our house sale. The septic failed. Our house was built in 1983 and the regulations were different then than they are now. The laterals for the system are in the water table. So the question now is how many thousands of dollars will it cost us to have it fixed? $30,000, $40,000? What a kick in the butt….That will delay the closing as well. You have to hire an engineer, get permits, get the work done and approved. The county heath department gets involved as well. Yikes….what fun….

I pretty much finished the bag except for the snaps. Dritz is sending me 2 new rubber rings for my snap pliers. So as soon as I get those I can finish this project up. It was nice of them to answer my email and offer to send me replacements for free.

I did end up redoing the straps to make them thinner by about 1/2 inch. I also added black fabric strips to the zipper pulls which the pattern did not call for.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I bound the raw edges inside the bag with black fabric as well so now it looks nice and neat inside.

 

 

 

 

 

Maybe we should just offer to put an outhouse in the backyard for the people buying our house! Just trying to find some humor in the situation…

Thanks for reading.

Chris

Bag nearly done….

Wow this bag has been an experience in making something with really crappy directions. Things were the wrong size. The directions for the handles were really unclear and I don’t think I did them correctly since I think they ended up being about 1/2 inch too wide. But I am not going to go back and change that now. But you never know it might bug me so much that I will go back and make them again. I still have some fabric.

 

I still have to put binding over the raw edges on the inside so it looks a little nicer. She has no instructions on how to do that….what a surprise. I’m not even sure the width she has you cut them is correct.  

And of course I have to insert the snaps. The snaps are silver so that should look nice.

This could have gone a lot smoother with good instructions. Instructions should be written so that even someone that does not make bags should be able to easily follow the directions.

 

Thanks for reading. Linking to Off the Wall Friday a day early. With the whiskey tasting tonight and going to visit my dad tomorrow I will not be at my home computer.

Chris

Bag progress

The directions are not that good on this bag pattern so it is slow going. At this point I have the front and back of the bag done. The front pockets were really a pain the the butt. Following her directions they ended up too close to the top of the bag. So I had to take off the flaps, cut them down a bit, and then install them closer to the pockets.

I think the pockets are pretty much decorative because they sure won’t hold a lot of anything. I got out my Dritz Snap fastener/pliers and one of the rubber rings is missing. Now I have to come up with an alternate way of installing the snaps on the pockets.

Today I am onto installing the zipper and making the sides of the bag. Maybe I will get to the handles. I don’t know why she did not put any interfacing in the handles. Seems like you would need it. She has you put it in the pockets and flaps. I will put interfacing in the handles.

 

I do love the fabric. It is a heavy cotton fabric so will make a good bag in the end.

We have a busy week this week. Most of the stuff is not fun stuff. The crossed out ones are done.

• Prius service
• Mold in the attic (they are here finishing this job)
• House inspection tomorrow (keep your fingers crossed that they don’t find anything wrong with our septic.)
• Water test on Wednesday since we have well water. Hope our water is OK
• Whiskey tasting on Thursday (finally a fun thing to do)
• Pre-construction meeting on the new house on Friday
• Drive to Pittsburgh to visit my dad and do his taxes.

Thanks for reading. I think I better straighten things up around the house a bit.

Chris

New project

Even though I did not finish the repro quilt I decided to work on a new project. It is going to be an overnight bag. I have been wanting a cool overnight bag instead of the boring Nike duffle bag that I have. Here I have the pieces cut out and marked. The “circle” fabric is on the outside and the diamonds is the lining fabric. The gray is an accent piece for the outside of the bag.

 

 

Since this has to be quilted I decided to make a sample piece to see what kind of shrinkage there would be and how much larger to make the pieces to allow for that shrinkage.

I am only going to quilt across the piece in parallel lines to make sure that I get very little distortion in the pieces. Heavy quilting would certainly cause distortion. Of course the next problem is how to mark the lines without having markings to wash out. The answer? Blue painters tape.

I decided to quilt the lines 3/4 inch apart because I thought 1/2 was too close and 1 inch was too big of a spacing. Sometimes when I can’t decide about the spacing I pick the value in the middle.

In this photo I have the ruler on the previous stitching line and then I butt the blue tape against the ruler to mark the next stitching line which gives 3/4 inch spacing.

 

 

Here is the piece with the ruler removed and the blue tape in place and ready to stitch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is my practice piece all stitched out. It did shrink a little from the original dimensions. Why is it that the lines are perfectly straight in the areas that blend more with the thread and not perfectly straight when the thread contrasts with the fabric?

 

 

 

Do you make bags at all?

I find that the directions for things like bags written by quilters are not the best directions. I come from a sewing background and use to sew lot of clothing, curtains, and Halloween costumes so I am used to the directions from companies like McCall's and Simplicity. They are much clearer directions. I had to read the directions for this bag about 6 times before I understood what I was supposed to do. The directions even had photos and still was vague in several places. They are not the directions that I would have written. I have written lab manuals for several of the classes that I used to teach so I know how to write directions.

Speaking of teaching I heard from a student yesterday that I had written a letter of recommendation for back in January. This is what she said:

Professor,
I am writing to let you know I finally got my letter from CU Boulder and I was accepted. Thanks for writing my recommendation letter and being a great and engaging teacher of astronomy. I signed up for the course because I thought it would be very interesting and cool and you definitely made it so.

So you see why sometimes I miss teaching. Well back to bag making. Linking to Off the Wall Friday.

Thanks for reading.

Chris

More progress

The top is pieced and the appliqué in the center is fused and stitched. I still have to fuse down the appliqué in the border and stitch it.

Boy I hate patterns that do not get things right. I realized after I marked where the vines and leaves go in the border the person that wrote the pattern did not have things centered. So I had to shift things a little when I positioned the pieces. Love how the pieces stick in place with Steam a seam so you can put it on a design wall to see how things look and the pieces do not fall off.

 

 

Do you see anything that looks weird in the border? Just thought I’d ask before I fuse things down.I noticed that she did not create borders that are perfectly symmetrical.  I am not going to change that.

While working on this I decided that I am going to machine quilt this. Too many seams to deal with for hand quilting. I have an Hawaiian quilt that I can work on while living with my MIL. I hate to admit how long ago I started it! I am only 1/4 of the way done with the appliqué so that should keep me busy for a while. I will have to remember how to do needle turn appliqué.

Thought I would post some pictures of my sewing room. The photos are going counterclockwise around the room. I think I will miss this room a bit when we move. However, I think my new room is a little bigger.

  

Thanks for reading.

Chris

Moving along

I have accomplished a lot on the repro quilt that I started last week.

• I have all the HST sewn.
• I have the 28 pinwheel blocks sewn. How you see them in the photo is not how they will be arranged in the quilt. Basically they form a border.
• I have all the leaves and other appliqué pieces fused, cut out and ready to add to the center and the borders.
• I have the vines and leaves added to the center block.

That little pink block is a mini block that I have had hanging around for a few years and has nothing to do with the current project. I even forget why I made it.

I have been using Steam a seam II Lite for the fusing of the appliqué pieces. I got a roll of it for Christmas. It was off of the market for a while, but it is now back. It seems to be working really well. What I like about it compared to something like Misty fuse is that you can put the pieces on and they stick. They can be moved if you need to move them. Once you iron them, however, they become permanent. I like the new version of this because one of the papers has a grid pattern on it. That makes it easy to cut a straight line. Plus that is the side that has the fusible glue on it so it is easy to tell which side has the glue. That was not always easy to tell with the old version.

So now to stitch down the leaves and vines in the center block.

What are you up to today?

Thanks for reading.

Chris

Back to my roots (at least for a while)

I started out as a traditional quilter and had a period of about 6 years where I did l a lot of mini quilts.

There were many from that period that I gave away as gifts, but also many that I still have. Unfortunately a lot were made before digital cameras and I don’t have pictures of many of them.

 

 The Last Rose of Summer

Unfortunately I gave this to a person that got angry with me because I stopped having her cut my hair. I wonder if she destroyed the quilt! She would be just the type of person to get out her scissors and cut it into bits.

 

 

 

 

 

Made with repro fabrics and was the first quilt I made on my Janome about 10 years ago. No title.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelsey’s Quilt Shop

Made this from a quilt I saw in miniature quilt magazine. Made it for my daughter. The log cabin quilt has 1/2 inch blocks and 9 pieces. Most of this was paper pieced. I made it because she saw it in the magazine and loved it.

 

 

 

 

 

The log cabin quilt up close.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Scotland the Brave

Made for my husband who is a bagpiper. That is him in the center of the quilt and the words are to his favorite bagpiping song. This one was hand quilted mostly because I was afraid to free motion quilt it! It was the first time I hand quilted in a long time and it was enjoyable.

 

 

 

 

So in preparation for moving in with my MIL in May I decided to make something that I can hand quilt while there. I am working on a repro quilt again from fabrics that I have had around for a while. The HST blocks are only 1 1/2 inches. This definitely calls for great accuracy.

 

Here is a picture of the pattern. My fabrics are a little different than those shown. My husband will love this quilt because he loves blues. It will be 39 in by 39 in.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what I have done so far which is about 80 HST. I plan on fusing the appliqué since I am not really a hand appliqué girl. My husband’s bagpiping quilt was fused and it worked out fine. I guess the quilt police would not be happy with that. Oh well.

I still love the repro fabrics. I like the grayed subdued look of them. I think I will enjoy hand quilting this while living with my MIL. It will certainly help the stress.

 

The stress of selling out house has increased since last weekend when we got an offer. Their lawyer is all ready being a pain.

Do you still have repro fabrics around? Do you love or hate them? Do you still do hand quilting?

Hope on over to Nina-Marie to see what she is doing.  I am linking a day early because I will be busy tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

Almost forgot about the hawk that we had near our bird feeders last weekend. Not another bird in sight!

Chris

You were expecting weather Monday?

Sorry to disappoint you, but I am going to be too busy to continue doing that each Monday. Each one took a really long time to write.

We sold our house over the weekend and now the real craziness starts! The contract is now in attorney review. Then comes the inspections to figure out what is wrong with the house and then getting rid of stuff and moving. We are moving in with my MIL in mid May until our house is done being built. That should happen in August. Not thrilled about having to move twice, but nothing can be done about that.

I did manage to get the lap quilt quilted and binding sewn on. Today I have to stitch the binding to the back and then wash the quilt.

Went to the Mancuso Jersey Fest quilt show yesterday. It was good to get out of the house and get inspired. I did buy some fabrics at the show.

The black and white pieces are done with thickened dyes. This is a technique I have not tried yet although I do have the materials. The one even looks like a winter scene with distant trees and a lone person walking in the foreground.

 

The FQ bundle is shot fabrics made by Oakshot in England. These are amazing.

 

 

Here is a side view of the stack. One of the threads is black to create these great colors. Not sure what I will do with them, but they called my name.

 

 

 

 

 

The quilts for the most part were pretty fantastic. Although I must say that quilters that do a lot of machine quilting should block their quilts. I hate wall quilts that have all kinds of massive ripples in them. It is hard to appreciate a quilt when Mt Everest is staring at you in the center of the quilt.

Here are some of the quilts that caught my eye. This wall quilt won for best wall quilt. It was fantastic. How do you come up with ideas like this?

 

They had the 50 shades of gray quilts and this one caught my eye. I like the illusion that makes it look 3D.

 

I liked this one of a girl.

 

This next one was digitally manipulated from several images and then digitally printed and quilted.

I thought this Mariner’s compass was interesting.

I love Japanese indigo fabrics and this one caught my eye.

Well at least I won’t have any appointments today to show the house. So I won’t have to dust the floors today!

Thanks for reading. What are you up to this Monday?

Chris

Circling the wagons…..

I can’t seem to settle on working on anything. Not matter what I think will be something that I can sink my teeth into it turns out it is not.

I feel like I lost my sewing mojo or that I am going in circles. It is like reading the same page over and over again in a book and not getting anywhere. Maybe the book is not that interesting….

 

 

 

 

Is it this winter that is killing all my motivation? I suppose it could be. We just had more snow yesterday. After shoveling for 2 hours I am just too tired to do anything creative. I am really tired of the snow and cold.

 

 

 

 

 

Or maybe it is the stress of selling our house. I can’t ever really make a mess in my sewing room since someone might want to come by to look at the house. And we all know what our sewing rooms can look like when we are creating. I was going to dye some fabric, but that is too messy as well.

Or is it that I am trying to adjust to being retired? Yes…. retired, selling our house and building another house. Maybe too much stress all at the same time?

Or am I just burned out after several years of creating non stop?

Whatever it is it has me bummed out. I want to get back into something….anything…but everything I try does not interest me. That’s why I feel like I am circling.

I did decide to pin and quilt the lap quilt that I made back in January. My heart is not in doing this either, but I am plugging away at it. I hate trying to quilt something that large on my machine, but I did not feel like sending it out.

I did not even feel like writing my weather blog last Monday.

Well back to the machine quilting.

 

I think I will go to a quilt show on Sunday and hope that it revives my creative spirit.

Do you have creative slumps? How do you get out of them?

Thanks for reading and your suggestions.

Chris