We’re less than a week away from my son’s birthday (12 — yikes!) which is my signal that not only do I need to think about a few gifts and a party for him, but I need to think about the birthdays and holidays that will now follow in quick succession.

And just to drive home the point that it’s time to think about those handmade gifts, this calendar showed up in the mail. It’s the 2011 Sewing Calendar and it’s chock full of sewing projects from all over blogland. There are wonderful, and very accessible projects in here — and I’m not just saying that because November 10 — 13 are dedicated to my Mod Log Table Runners!

What you might also notice is that the calendar shows a table runner I have not yet shared here. I was thinking Christmas red and green reinterpreted, so now seems as good a time as any to share it and maybe spark someone else to create a light, mushroomy, holiday.

Of course, if one is more inspired by say, the Three Kings, then there’s another version conjured up to use those bits and pieces of cloth painted, foiled, rubbed, etc. in the excitement of the newest issue of one’s favorite art quilt magazine(s).

I call this one “Gold Frankincense and Myrrh.”

I have two copies of the Sewing Calendar, and while I’m keeping one for myself, I’d love to share the other with someone ready for some pre-holiday project planning (who am I kidding, we’re not ready to actually start the projects yet, are we?). So, leave a comment and maybe even tell me if you’re planning on making some handmade gifts this year or if you’ve got a plan or list already and I’ll randomly choose a winner to receive the 2011 Sewing Calendar. Make your comment by midnight Hawaii time September 10th (Friday) and I’ll announce the winner as soon as I recover from the birthday party on the 12th.

Cheers

It’s quiet today and I’m having a hard time getting motivated even though I have a million things, both dull and exciting, that I could be working on. The kids are back in school and now, on my second morning with no one else in the house I’m feeling a lot more like curling up with a book or the cat than diving into a project.

I have been slowly working on a few things. Too slowly, but that’s beside the point. One of the “things” is a series of wall quilts dealing with being an Army Spouse. I’ve been trying lots of ideas and techniques. Some are speaking to me, some are not. I think that it is important to try new techniques and media, or test out concept and compositional ideas, but to do it without the expectation that what you produce will be the finished product. Maybe it will, but maybe it won’t — maybe that technique wasn’t the right one for the message after all, or maybe it’s got potential but needs some tweaking or combining with another idea before it’s just right.

For this particular idea, I layered fabrics that had meaning to me and stitched a nice swirly pattern of channels over them.

I slit the channels at different depths with a chenille cutter and also scissors.

And finally, I cut away more to reveal more or less of the different layers. This pile is what I cut away.

The finished product has potential, but this, my first attempt, was too shallow. I’ll undoubtedly apply this chenille technique to another go, but the fabrics themselves will have to have less obtuse meaning for the viewer. It was worth the essay though as an important step along the path.

As more and more craft and quilting bloggers share their process, I think it is important to see that not all projects turn out perfect the first time and not all attempts are worth trying to save. This one will be shoved under the bed for now, having served it’s purpose, and the next one I make will be all the better for that.

Here’s the blue scraps to go with the green scraps of two weeks ago. I had lots of darker blue scraps too, but they are being dispatched in another project. The turquoise scraps still fill my little bin, but at least they have some room to breathe now.

Last spring I taught a sampler quilt class at my local park (Ho’ae’ae Park). In August I will hopefully teach another beginner class. This time I’m thinking that small projects featuring many of the same skills will work as well and give students a better chance at finishing them. To that end, I’ve been making up class samples to show off at the park office.

First will be a small lined tote, perfect for a Hostess gift. It can be made from four fat quarters (that are always so tempting at the fabric store, and often already bundled in nice color combos). Students will learn basic rotary cutting skills and strip piece fabrics to make the patched “piano keys” strip at the top of the bag.

Next we’d move on to an easy way to piece triangles and make this quilted pillow cover. If students have a pile of scraps, just one solid can pull them together — or the pillow would look great in two colors. In addition to making triangles, this is a good size project to practice machine quilting on, and the edge is bound just like a large quilt.

Finally, we’ll make my “signature” project, the Mod Log Table Runner. I love log cabin blocks and think that because of their versatility, every quilter needs to have at least a little experience recognizing and making them. This project needn’t be super accurate until the borders are added, and reinforces those quilting and binding skills.

So, if you or anyone you know is on the Central to Leeward side of Oahu and would like to learn to make these projects, keep your eyes open for the Parks and Recreation schedule in August.

I’ve had the most confounding experience (stitch-wise) the last few days.

I am planning on teaching a beginning quilting class at my local park again in August. This time, instead of a sampler quilt, we’re going to make three smaller projects. I’m making class samples now.

While in Spokane, WA for my MIL’s wedding (congratulations lovebirds!), I bought some really ugly fabric that was on sale and screamed for me to take it home and make it sing. Aqua was all it needed. Then I tried grey and white in an uncharacteristic moment of fashionable-ness. I liked both, so I sewed up two table runner tops. No problem.

But when it came time to quilt the first runner, the thread broke. This surprised me because I was using a “golden retriever” thread (a term coined by Superior Thread Bar Tender Cindy for threads that are very easy to use) and quilting in straight lines. I adjusted all my tension options to no avail. Then I changed to a fresher topstitch needle. Nope. I changed spools of thread, and it broke too (so it wasn’t a bad spool). I changed to a smaller, sharper microtex needle. Nope. Then I put in a brand spanking new topstitch (easy on the thread) needle and still the thread broke. I switched to a different type of thread and it broke too. All the while, I was noticing that the needle seemed to be struggling to get through the ugly fabric. I admitted defeat and picked out all my stitching attempts. I figured that the ugly fabric must have been on sale for more than just it’s aesthetic value and re-sandwiched my table runner top with a different backing (since I had so much ugly fabric, and I thought it was so bad it was cool, I used it front and back). I tried stitching the table runner  in cross-wise straight lines, but even with the new backing, the thread broke. Then, I only stitched on the non-ugly fabric parts — and it worked! I got brave and did a little stitching on the borders (ugly fabric) where I could take it out and it would still look OK. It worked and I didn’t have t remove any stitches! One table runner done.

After sleeping on my fabric problem, I had the brilliant idea to put a new back on table runner two and stitch it from the back, hopefully avoiding, in a way, the problematic ugly fabric. I had hoped to stitch in the ditch of my wonky log cabins, extending the lines out into the border, but that wouldn’t work from the back where there’s no lines to follow. Serpentine stitch is quite popular right now, and would look good with the simple piecing, but I really wanted to do something different. Since I was working from the back and couldn’t follow what was going on on the front, I figured I could take that all the way and do something completely in contrast to the piecing. I decided that since the piecing is tweaked traditional, the quilting should be too — simple feathers in a loose arrangement. I had no problems sewing the feathers, but since I’m not a great machine quilter, and my arcs were pretty large, I just wasn’t happy with them. So, I picked them out.

Again, I admitted defeat, and opted for the serpentine stitch. I wanted to make sure it was oriented relatively straight on the table runner though. I crossed my fingers and hoped that I could stitch one line from the front and then align the rest off that from the back. Guess what? No problem! So I sewed the next line on the front. No problem. So I completed table runner number two without further incident.

In the end, I have no idea what was making my thread break. Perhaps it was that two layers of ugly fabric was too much. I considered that it was the batting, but Runner 1 used scraps from a batting I had used successfully on another quilt, and Runner 2 used a completely different batting (which I don’t like, but not for stitchability issues). Perhaps it was some magical combination of the fabric and the angle at which I was stitching it (straight was bad, serpentine or free-motion met the fabric in an acceptable way). Perhaps it was the alignment of the planets and by day two things were back to normal. I don’t know. I do know that I won’t be using the ugly fabric for my other two class samples which are next on my to-do list.

Ta da! Here’s the companion shirt to the party dress for Nonnie’s wedding. In contrast to Miss Sweetness who loves to pose for the camera, Mr. Impatient here was not into playing male model. He does, however, like his shirt. I can live with that.

My MIL is getting married next month and my kids will most likely be part of the ceremony. It will be a pretty casual affair, and seeing as we live in Hawai’i, I thought it would be fun for the kids to have matching “Ohana Wear” (aloha shirt and mu’u mu’u).

I found what I thought would work well, but by the time I returned to the store several months later, it was gone (darn economy). We checked some other stores, but realized that, duh, I could sew up exactly what we wanted.

Katja rejected a more traditional ruffly-look mu’u mu’u for a party dress silhouette. The pattern (McCall’s M6020) had variations with sheer overlays, and a petticoat underneath, but I simplified it to just the basic dress. I really liked the integrated band and back ties, but Katja insisted that she didn’t want ties in the back. So, I skipped the band and made a separate sash that she can tie wherever she wants, or skip all together.

The sash will make more sense when brother’s shirt is done, because it matches his fabric (he would have nothing to do with the purple fabric).

You may remember that I bought this quilt as a top from Wanda about a month ago. I thought it would be weird  to quilt and finish someone else’s work, but it wasn’t at all. In fact, it was really fun and as soon as I started working on it, I couldn’t stop. Firstly, Wanda’s workmanship is impeccable. All the seams were even and all edges and points aligned. There were no poufs to “quilt out.” Basting was easy-peasy. The quilt is not quite twin sized, so I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it came together despite it’s being large enough to wrap oneself up in.

More significant though, was how the quilt revealed itself to me as I worked on it. Normally, I would already have a relationship with the fabrics from piecing them together. But since I didn’t piece this one, I got to meet each and every fabric and see how it interacted with it’s neighbor as I quilted. I enjoyed seeing how individual stripes modulated in color, and loved being surprised by each pairing that picked up on a hue in it’s partner. It was quite fun.

_______________________________________________________________

I don’t know how many readers are relatively new to quilting and it’s associated gadgets. I may be preaching to the choir, but here are two of my favorites: my walking foot, and the bar thingie that came with it. Walking feet come in several varieties depending on your machine, but they are all variations on this foot-with-box contraption. The purpose of the walking foot is to move the top layer of the quilt sandwich at the same speed as the bottom layer and thus eliminate lots of frustrating puckering. I do all my straight line machine quilting with my walking foot. On this quilt, I kept the quilting simple, because really, with fabric like this, fancy quilting is just unnecessary.

Often, I just use the side of the walking foot as my guide for stitching parallel lines. That’s how I did the first round of quilting 1/4″ from the edge of each zig zag. I wanted to quilt a line down the center of each zig zag too, so I used one of the guide bars that came with the walking foot. It is L shaped and slides through a hole in the back of the walking foot and is locked in place with a screw. You can adjust it so the “leg” sticks out anywhere from right next to the foot, to about three inches away. I also have another guide bar for the other side of the foot, depending on what I want to line up with. (As an aside, my machine came with another two guide bars that fit into the back of many of the regular presser feet too.) Once you get the hang of it, there’s all kinds of uses for these guides. I measured the width of my zig zags (4″) and set my guide bar two inches from the needle. Then, off I went, quilting down the center of each zig zag, making sure the leg of the guide bar followed the seam line. In the photo you can’t see the lovely line of stitching behind the walking foot, but it is perfectly parallel to the edge of the yellow zig. You can see that I am about to pivot the quilt and sew the zag (this is where the needle-down function on many newer machines is also very convenient). I considered more lines in between these, but the quilt didn’t seem to need them. It’s for a kid’s bed, so it didn’t need to be quilt-show-fancy.

It started about four years ago with a drawing by my daughter of her daddy. I thought he looked military (which may or may not have been intentional on her part) and needed to become a patch on a messenger bag.

About a year ago, I found the perfect pattern and went so far as to make custom fabric using my kids’ drawings.

Last November I finally got around to making the bag, but I wasn’t happy with some of the choices I had made — namely stiff Peltex/Timtex instead of fusible batting as called for in the pattern (that will teach me).

So, I took it apart. And so it sat for the last four months, taunting me with it’s un-finishedness, taking up space on the futon in my guest room/sewing studio. It really bugged me to have to keep moving it’s pile around whenever guests came to visit. But I was mad at it for not being perfectly crafted. To the bag’s credit, it came apart easily and was mostly salvageable. But I was still mad at it.

Finally, I jumped in and finished it a few days ago. I used black binding which worked better than the green, and the softer batting in the body of the bag made all the difference in terms of  maneuverability for sewing.

But, once again, I did not heed the warning on the pattern, and I accidentally ironed the strap — making black smudges on the green facing in my lining. And though the black topstitching looks good on the outside of the bag, I don’t like it on the interior, especially as there is under-stitching as well and a couple of hiccups where the thread broke.

It would not be a huge project to take out the interior, replace the green strip and re-sew it all. But, I’m kind of over this project for a while.

Our guests arrived the day before Easter, so I felt like I should do a little something for all the kids. My kids and I dyed a dozen eggs (nothing fancy, just basic dunking in basic colors) so we could have a hunt in the yard.

I made one that match so perfectly the hibiscus leaves that it took the kids four tries to find it.

I also made four baskets, though I didn’t bother to photograph them when they were fresh and full.

The baskets are woven from cardboard boxes (for four baskets: a lego box, a six pack, a cereal box, a box of Borax, and a case of soda). I found instructions/inspiration on Craft Stylish. I filled the baskets with shredded paper, a cute tin of M&Ms, Peeps, a blown egg filled with confetti (THAT was fun!), and some japanese biscuits with cute packaging. Each kid got a bunny monster of my own design as well. The two girls got cute purple ones made from leftover purple stretch velvet, and the boys got slightly zombie-esque ones made from outgrown T-shirts.  The bunnies are soft and squishy and were very well received — which sort of surprised me considering the recipients are tweens!