Quilting Away

Thursday, I went into my local fabric shop (lfs?) in search fabric for the quilt-along. An hour and some change later, I emerged with more questions than answers. I needed to get twelve fat quarters that divided into two categories, be it dark vs. light, print vs. plain, or some other distinctions. Beyond that, I was lost. I left with twelve fabrics, but knew that the issue was yet to be settled. At home, I played around with the fabrics that I had chosen and some fabrics from my stash. It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing a post about what a pain it was to choose fabric that I realized something: I have an inordinate amount of polka dots in my stash. Eureka!

And so we have polka dots and floral/scroll-y fabrics and blocks A and B complete. I’ve just begun block C and it’s definitely giving me a lot of trouble in the squaring up stage. I’m heading out now in search of some freezer paper to try Elizabeth’s trick. Wish me luck!

 

Wednesday Works In Progress

My boyfriend is always chiding me about my ever growing list of things to do. Sometimes he gets brave and tries to stand between me and a new item for the list. It’s cute really, though it rarely works. How thoughtful he is that he doesn’t want my to-do list to become overwhelming, or perhaps he’s just tired of having one finished curtain hanging in our front window, while the other four lie in wait in my box of sewing projects.

Of course, at the moment, I have too many wip’s and not enough fo’s, which doesn’t particularly make great fodder for the blogging cannon (a wip in itself). Nonetheless, I’ve decided that Wednesday will become Works In Progress day in hopes that it will help keep, or revive, my interest in projects lost to the box of doom. Here it goes:

I recently stumbled upon this blog, Judaica Journal, and it had me wondering why I don’t do more Jewish crafts. So I promptly began this hamsa embroidery to be mounted on some wall in our home sometime in the future:

A hamsa is a traditional symbol amongst both Jews and Arabs. It sometimes represents the hand of God and is used as a protecting talisman. Also, because it is something that Jews and Arabs share in common, it has become a symbol for peace in the Middle East. The text is the first lines of an important Jewish prayer, the Shema, in gold cotton. The design will be several shades of blue and mostly free form.

Number deux on the to-do list is to finish painting and recovering the new dining chairs, that we got for free from Craigslist. When my boyfriend first moved into the apartment, we bought the coolest table from Ikea, but skimped on the chairs. For several months we were using a combination of wood folding chairs and cheap balsa-like wood chairs that came with a table (my current desk) from Target (all for $19.99, so you can imagine the quality). So we’re very happy to have new comfy chairs, or will be, at least, once they become fo’s.

They came to us a lovely reddish brown covered with creamy fleur de lis fabric and complementary stains. They are otherwise in wonderful shape. So, we bought some darker brown paint and will be using our older curtains to cover them. All in all, we’ve spent approximately $15 on a set of four dining chairs. The chairs that I was eying to buy were at the very least $50 a pop (and I probably still would have recovered them), so we saved about $185. Pretty darned good, I think. Now, if I would just finish this and the curtains, our living/dining area would look completely different.

Thus concludes Wednesday Works In Progress #1. It’s time to go sit by the pool with some lemonade.

 

Last night I finished construction on my dress. He…

Last night I finished construction on my dress. Here’s a not so great pic:

The fabric is muslin that I dyed myself using good ol’ Rit. It was supposed to be a dark teal, but turned out more greenish as a result of my dyeing ‘tea stained’ muslin instead of the bleached sort. (The bleached muslin from the same dye bath turned out bright bluebird blue.) I’m tempted to re-dye it a darker blue and if I don’t decide on the embroidery soon, I may do that. I love muslin, it’s light and perfect for a summer dress, not to mention extremely cheap and great for dying. However, for the life of me, I cannot iron the thing out! I’ve tried steam and heavy spray starch and everything I can think of, but nothing has helped.

The only real change I made to the pattern was to pleat the skirt instead of gathering it. Gathering just doesn’t work well with my body. I would like to make a petticoat from the white muslin, but I need to stock up on muslin first.

Next is the exciting part of figuring out what and where to embroider.

 

Tisket a’Tasket:

Have I mentioned how much I love the Lady of Jazz, Ella Fitzgerald? For a very long time, Billie Holiday held the number one spot on my top jazzists list, but since I have been listening to The Essential Ella, Ella’s taken first.

It’s really difficult to keep focused on my to-do list with the sun shining and birds singing right outside my window. After brunch yesterday, I took a bike ride down the Sammamish River Trail. Of about 70 photos, only three were acceptable. I particularly love the geese:

Today, my birthday dress is on the machine. After drafting and re-drafting it, I decided to go with Butterick B5028. I normally avoid patterns at all costs, but I want to embroider this dress and only have four days before the Big Two-Six (AGH!). So it’s back to sew I go (that was rather seussical).