sewing

I put on headphones and Beethoven piano concertos and spent about three hours Sunday machine quilting this (small!) throw:

I’m proud of how the diagonal lines are exactly lined up with the corners of the blocks on the front, even though I was pressing each block with steam and I only read later that that can distort the grain.

In the week or two it took to piece the top, the bottom sheet from a Target set ripped out at the corners when I was making the bed–so I made it the backing for this. It still feels weird to cut up brand-new fabric to sew into a quilt, but at least I could recycle a little.

Toby has already claimed this so if I can get it back from him, I just have to do the binding (by machine, I think, but we’ll see).

After playing with every possible arrangement for my rainbow log cabin blocks, I had a brainstorm to put a block of print in each corner and that was the winner:

Using all pieced blocks is probably more traditional but I’m just making this up as I go along, and I like how the rust helps the colors flow.

After all that thinking and rearranging, it only took about 30 minutes to sew the blocks together into a quilt top:

If I think too much about it, piecing a quilt still just seems odd (to this garment sewer, at least): you take small pieces of fabric and just sew them into ever-larger pieces? But it’s fun. At least, it’s fun until I try to wrestle 54″ of fabric under my machine to quilt it (the next step).

I finished all sixteen of my scrappy blocks over the weekend, still burning with Quilt Fever. Like I said last week, I gradually figured out “value” while making these–it’s not enough to contrast colors, like I was doing at first; you need to consider how dark or how light each color reads and contrast that.

But the thing about traditional quilt blocks is they’re traditional for a reason. Even with my less-than-ideally contrasting blocks, you can use the dark and light halves to make larger patterns and end up with a fairly cohesive quilt.

For example, did you want to make a giant sawtooth star out of your blocks? It kind of works!

Or you could try the traditional log cabin “sunshine and shadows” arrangement, where the lights and darks  make diamonds that blend into each other.

There are many, many more options for log cabin block layouts here. Will I try all of them before I decide? Probably. If you need me, I’ll be squinting at a wall covered in flannel in the sewing room.

I started buying fat quarters as fabric souvenirs over the last few years. In the last couple months, I found some cool quilters to follow on Instagram and started studying historical quilts. A couple weeks ago I got some Kaffe Fasset quilt books from the library. And now it’s full-on Quilt Fever over here.

I have flannel pinned to the wall for a “design board” and piles of my scraps everywhere and am just having a good time learning as I go. (You can see how I’ve gradually figured out I need more contrast between the light and dark “logs” in each block, for example.)

I don’t really have a plan; I’m just making blocks. I think I’ll get to 16 and see what I want to do–a throw? A wall hanging? I have enough scraps that I’m already thinking about using them in another quilt with slightly more complicated piecing (I’m fascinated by the name of the “Goose In The Pond” block)… or a sampler… or another quilt coat.

Who knows where Quilt Fever will take me! Wherever I end up, at least it will be warm.

I made a one-piece swimsuit for our day trip to Bear Lake–a couple months after I thought about it and in a different fabric (also from my stash). This was mostly to test the pattern (the Seabright Swimmer) in advance of making the long sleeve version for any winter hot tubs, but I was pleased with it overall.

The front feels very vintage!

And the back keeps the sun off!

My one regret? I used the inferior cotton swim elastic instead of the good rubber elastic…and when the cotton gets wet, it relaxes…and that plunging front needs a snug elastic to keep things decent. (I brought a bikini to the lake just in case and I ended up changing into it.)  That cotton swim elastic can shrink pretty dramatically, so I threw the suit in the dryer after this trip to try to fix it. But this might end up being a “poolside only” suit.

I also had to add two inches overall to the length of the pattern. My usual long torso adjustment is just one inch, but I gave myself wiggle room and used it all. (A short torso as drafted seems to be a common complaint with this pattern.)  Other than that it was an easy sew. I changed some construction to get finished seams in the top and that was simple too.

Will I make it again? Yes! But I’ll use the rubber elastic and put some sleeves on it.

There’s nothing like seeing your man in a hospital gown for four days to make you realize he’s due for some fresh underwear. I mean, I do the laundry, so I was aware the pairs I’d made him with Joann knit had lost most of their color and that the elastic was going, but it becomes a little more urgent when the entire world can see it, too.

Fortunately, I’d already been buying some better knits to make him more undies for Christmas, so I just bumped up the schedule.

These are both sold out now but the raccoons (Raccacoonie!) were from Nature’s Fabrics and the cats were from Jumping June Textiles. The pattern is the Greenstyle Walbrook Boxer Briefs and I sewed both of these up Sunday in about 90 minutes.

At some point in the last few years I’ve become a knit snob and the Euro stuff (especially from Jumping June) is indeed worth the price tag. It doesn’t fade, it doesn’t bag out, and it’s just such a nice quality–smooth and thick. I sincerely hope we never see the inside of a hospital again, but it’s good to have deluxe new undies anyway.

Last week I mentioned a string of projects in a row not working out for me. They included two pairs of undies (one a new style I hated, one in a pattern I forgot I altered to be too low rise); a hat; and a too-small pair of pants that ALSO had incredibly disturbing pattern matching across the butt:

The tigers were an expensive Euro knit and I thought that since I’d made a successful version of these pants previously, I’d be fine using it. Except I didn’t think to check the stretch percentage on this knit and they’re just barely too small (and being stretched to the fabric’s limit really doesn’t help that six-legged tiger be any less disturbing).

As for the hat, it’s just meh. I can’t get the wave out of the brim, even though I used the recommended stabilizer, and I don’t like the shape of the crown. I keep wanting to be a hat person but then I never like myself in any hat, so maybe I just need to accept that.  At least this was a free pattern and I used fabric scraps for it (recognize the patio chair cushions?).

I don’t post the duds much but they do exist–especially in this Summer of Struggle. Between Toby and my job, I have limited mental capacity for anything extra (even the gym lately) so it’s extra frustrating when the sewing I do manage to get in doesn’t work out.

But maybe the Summer of Struggle will be followed by the Autumn of Ease & Abundance and I’ll be back to complicated, beautiful projects?  Here’s hoping.

There was record heat on Sunday, our door was boarded up, and I was already dreading Monday back at work, so I holed up in the sewing room for a few hours and made cat pants to calm down.

One pair was for a friend:

And one pair was for me, using my fabric payment from said friend:

They are both the Greenstyle Cavallo Leggings and the fabric is from Spandex World. I’m waiting to deliver my friend’s pair so it’s unknown whether the fit will work for her, but I wore my pair to the gym this morning. I’ve had about 4 projects in a row not work out, so it was nice to have two quick wins to get my sewjo back.