Busy, busy!

I'm so stoked about my latest venture. Sooooo Stoked!
I really get in the zone when I'm designing fabric. It's about as close to a runner's high as I'll ever get. I'm not a great runner (to be honest, I'm more of a walker/trotter), but when I'm at my computer with the colors and the shapes, the patterns and the possibilities.... man! That is a high.
I spent part of last night gathering my thoughts about how I'm going to present this to my husband. He's probably going to need a fair amount of convincing, but I figure, if I really have my poop in a group, he might take it seriously. That's the hope, anyway.
I've made my lists of how I want to proceed, and I checked in with mom this morning so I'm not losing momentum. I've added more color options to the collection and I've scrapped the ones that stink. I adjusted a few to be more on trend with the colors I found on the projected trends for the next couple of years and changed the scale on a few of them to have more options. I was inspired by a blouse I saw Kyra Sedgwick wearing on a magazine cover, to really bring the scale down to a tiny size. Wouldn't it be killer if she wore MY designs on the cover of a magazine?
I'm going to go work on the garment designs now. Wheee!

PS - I got the swatches back for the Harriet Collection and the pink did NOT turn out. I'm going back to recolor them, however, some of the designs were fine and they are now available for purchase on http://www.spoonflower.com/collections/17669

A couple more things...

I took a picture of the variegated ribbon yarns I used for the batik tie quilt. They don't show up in the photo of the quilt enough for you to see what they look like. The colors really blend in, which is cool, and what I wanted, but I thought you might enjoy seeing how they actually look.

I also completed the "1/2" flower (#9) from the other day and finished the 10th!

Gee, it looks like it either has a teensy little stem or a tampon. I should really think of those things when I take pix for this blog. Oh, well.

I'm back home after spending a few days with my mom and tomorrow morning I hit the ground running, so I wanted to make sure I posted these before I forgot. I have an action-packed day ahead. First, a morning appointment with my waxing artiste (my friend, Angela the Aesthetician, is going to rip all the unwanted hair off my face), then a 2 o'clock photo shoot with Nathan Yungerberg, photog to the stars, and in the evening, I'm auditioning for a production of Cabaret. I've already played Sally Bowles - almost 10 years ago! - so I think Fraulein Kost will be a nice, small, low-impact role. Unless, of course, the director would like to do some non-traditional casting and put me in as the Emcee. Ha! (What? I could do it.)

Oh, yeah! This Tuesday I'll (finally) meet little Lillian and give her the baby blanket. Pictures for sure! I'm soopy citers! Yay!

Grandma's Flower Garden

I now have 8 1/2 hexagon flowers. I'm not working consistently on them, but in the evenings after the boys are in bed, sometimes during the day while a movie is on. Now that I know better what I'm doing, it's going pretty quickly. I took some pictures this morning of what I have so far.

Here are the first blooms of the "garden". I had to use the platter under the brown ones so you could see them. 

The basting threads will remain until the whole top is put together. I also haven't taken the time to press them yet, since they're traveling with me in a ziploc bag. For the most part, they're maintaining their shape via the freezer paper I'm using for stabilizer.

It's odd how the colors are different from pic to pic. I didn't really notice it until I looked at the table in the background. The photo on top (the blue flower) is most true. These were taken on my phone. I'm rarely happy with those pix. But, hey, it's serviceable and it's what I've got. It's also the easiest way to get the pix online.

Now that I'm looking at the two directly above, I'm thinking I should have put more thought into how I was laying out the pieces. I've been literally picking them up and stitching them together. I've put them in sets of petals and centers and safety pinned them in their little flower groups, but that's as far as the "planning" has gone. Anyway, in the bottom photo, there are three petals where the stripes are going the same way and the other three are haphazard.  If I'm feeling extra ambitious when all the flowers are completed, I'll go back and fix this (and any others there will most likely be as I'm looking at these, and knowing how I am about such things).

Again, the ones with the blue petals seem to come out with the truest color.

The green one above is "in progress".

Here's the backside of one. I chose freezer paper, since it's a really inexpensive alternative to specially made fabric stabilizers and is available in most grocery stores. It's also temporary. If you're unfamiliar with it, it has one waxy side, which can be ironed on to the wrong side of your fabric, stabilizing it for sewing. Once your seam allowances are basted, it'll stay in place, even when the wax is no longer holding. The wax is minimal enough that it doesn't leave a residue, and if you get it in the wrong position, it is easily removed and relocated. Once the quilt top is complete, I'll remove all the basting stitches and the papers.

To make the paper hexes, I read how one quilter had her husband make a CAD drawing of hexagons put together like a honeycomb. Then she'd tape her freezer paper to a regular sheet of printer paper and send it through the printer and cut out the pieces. Since my husband is not a CAD draftsman, I tried making a jpeg from some hexagon images I found online, but in order to get the right size, I had to futz around with the scale and I ended up using a lot of ink. The dimensions on the screen just didn't match what came out on the paper. I did get a few to work, but, frankly, it was a huge pain in the @$$, between the cutting and the taping and the this and the that, and the schmachta... so I scrapped that idea. Instead, I used one of my nested hexagon templates which was about 1/4 inch smaller than the size of the fabric pieces and good ol' Sharpie pen to draw on a nice, large sheet of the freezer paper. Cutting them out was a breeze, and, dare I say it, kind of fun! 

I used the pages I had printed with the wrong size hexes (just on regular paper, I didn't want to waste the freezer paper while I was messing with the sizes) for trying out color combinations. Yes, I have a huge crayon selection. Don't judge.

It's a bit blurry, but here's a close up of the one I'm currently working on. The white threads are the basting stitches and the pink lines are the connecting stitches. I'm stitching them in the same way I learned from the quilter with the drafting husband. The stitches are pretty wee, but I want this sucker to last forever, so it can be passed down for generations. This is also why I may not actually take the time to undo the one that has the brown stripes. Those teensy stitches won't be fun to take out.

I'm starting to run out of the original set of fabric hexes I purchased in a kit. I thought about getting another kit, since I really hated the idea of cutting out all those fabric hexes, but then I thought, no, I don't want this to just be made from some kit. I'll suck it up and cut out more hexes. I got some fat quarters that went pretty well with the fabric in the kit, used one of the kit pieces to make a template, since they are a different size from any in my set of nested hexagon templates. In fact, I used one of the cardboard pieces from a fat quarter packet to make the template. I now have enough for the quilt without it looking like it came from a kit. It'll have my personal stamp on it now. Frankly, I only chose the kit I got because I wanted to try to put together hexes by hand. I had a trip to go on and wanted something creative to take along, but I didn't have enough time to cut out a ton of pieces before we left. It's just a lucky break that my niece is having a baby girl and I can actually pass it along. Knowing that makes this process so much more fun, and has given me the impetus to be even more creative with it and git 'er done. 

Sew close!

I found some ribbon yarn that was left over from a scarf my mom made for me a while back. There are two variegated color ways, bright primaries and bright secondaries, so I'm using them to make the tie quilting on the batik. I'm about 2/3 of the way done. I broke my needle. 

Okay, I wasn't using quite the right needle, but it was working just fine until it broke. I've been through 4 more needles since it died and I haven't even been through a whole row of ties.  Now, these needles didn't break, they were just not the right size. One was too fat, one's eye was two small and started to tear at the yarn, and the other two just didn't feel right. Somewhere in my "collection" (some might call it a "heap") is an old Sucret's lozenge metal box filled with really sturdy needles left over from my grandma and grandpa (he was a carpet layer) which would be really sweet to find right about now. I've been using a needle nose pliers to get them through the quilt. That is what ultimately broke the first one. I had a little too much torque on it.

One the other hand, my sitter came over yesterday and was chatting me up about the quilt (she wants me to teach her how to sew) and I asked her if she'd like to have it for her birthday next week. She was super excited about that. She just graduated high school and is getting her own apartment (she's really got it together), so she wants to have it for curling up and watching tv in her new place. Yay! It has a home! Also, I had it on my lap as I was sewing up the opening the other evening and it was so toasty! The air conditioner was blowing right on me and I didn't even mind. 

Today my boys and I are leaving to go stay with my mom for a couple of days and help her with a couple of household projects she really shouldn't do by herself. I plan on taking the batik along to finish and I'll take the hex project along as well. I almost have another flower done. I had no idea how painstakingly slow that would be. It seems quick as I'm doing the hand sewing, but that's alllll an illuuuusion.  

Here's another fun wrench to throw into my routine: I have been diagnosed with Adult ADHD. Not that this is a surprize. It's more of a confirmation of what we already knew. This is serving to make me even more determined to finish projects and not just let them sit around and languish in the dungeon, and to keep this blog going. Seriously, this is the most I've ever blogged. I must've found something I actually want to write about. Huh. Go figger. I'm going to start my medication later today and we'll see how that goes. I face it with hope and trepidation.  

Also, don't forget about my Autism fundraising! Go to http://www.cafepress.com/harriet07 and purchase and Harriet t-shirt in the month of June and the profits will go to Autism research! (See post from June 1st for more information)

Scrappy McScrapperton aka More, more, more...

How do you like it? How do you like it?

I like it when I'm busy. I also, apparently, like it when my quilts are busy. Like this top I just finished, which I shall call Scrappy McScrapperton.

It was inspired by a few things. First of all, the scrap quilts that my grandma made. Second, a similar quilt top I found in a magazine. Which I promptly lost, so I can't add a pic of that one. Third, recent research suggests that all those pastel baby things we get for newborns, can't actually be seen very well by babies. They develop a sense of contrast first, black and white is best, then the spectrum of colors begins to be processed. Geometric shapes are easier to see than fuzzy blobs, but they eventually register by the time baby is about a year old. 

My Grandma Louise made scrap quilts. She typically used a 9-patch, but I saw a quilt in a magazine (seriously, where did that thing go?!) that made squares within squares. It also had sashing, but I opted to just put the blocks together without it. When my sister's kids were little we'd put my quilt from Grandma Louise on the floor for them to play on. My nephew in particular, enjoyed discovering matching squares throughout the quilt; a bit like the game of Memory, but without the cards being flipped over. Hey, when you're 1 1/2 that's about all you can manage.

So, I put together a bunch of fat quarters with different colors, shapes, and varying degrees of contrast, cut them into strips 2 1/2 inches and 4 inches wide. I didn't worry about the length because I didn't have any idea which ones I was going to use where, though I did have some which were shorter and longer and I made squares of each size. I also used a couple of scraps left over from another quilt. They weren't the right size, but I just worked with them as they were. 

As far as putting the blocks together, it was an exercise in improvisation. I'd pick a center piece, (some were squares, others were rectangles. I like variety.) and then I'd put together the pieces going around the center piece in much the same fashion as you would for a log cabin block, only without the triangular color separation. I trimmed the length of the strips as I went around to square them off. I also didn't want the blocks to be perfectly square. They're 11" x 12". Sometimes, because of the trimming, in order to get the right size, I'd have to add an extra strip to one end. I just played around and had fun.

Once I had 20 blocks, I laid them out and played around with placement, following my instincts with regard to the way the colors made my eyes bounce from one part of it to the next. I also decided I wanted 5 more blocks. It's meant to go on the floor to let your kids play around on it, rather than cover a specific size of bed, but I wanted it to be just a skosch bigger than it was at 20 blocks.

I still have a ton of scraps left over, so I can make similar ones, or pillows. Or something completely different. 

Some of those fabrics were used in Lillian's baby quilt. I took what was left, added some solid batiks and had enough for a twin sized bed runner. Or, as I like to call them, Tootsie Toasters. 

It was pretty windy when I took this one, so I put some rocks on the corners to hold it down. Also, there's some schmutz on the camera lens. I'm just going to pretend it's a fancy schmancy artistic filter, 'kay? I may even have enough of the hot pink flannel I used for the back of Lillian's quilt to back this. I haven't checked yet. What? I've been busy.

Also, today is my little guy's 6th birthday. He's busy playing with his presents, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to add these photos and blog.

Happy birthday, Li'l Pootie Boo!