Not Just Another Pretty Face

Each Sunday, I'll take a break from the material aspects of this blog and spend a little time looking at the finer points of pigdom.  Most people probably appreciate the ham and bacon side of pigs; little do they know they have a deeper side as well.  We'll start the week with a peek into the favorite quotes of thoughtful pigs and also learn a pig factoid (pigoid?) in a feature called Pigipedia.

PIGIPEDIA
A pig can squeal as loud as 115 decibels - your average rock concert rarely gets above 110.  A piglet is the noisiest of all babies, audible half-a-mile away.  They almost always squeal unless they are nursing or asleep.

 

Wooden waterfall vase with frog by David and Jeneice Haessig of DHH Designs.  Catch them at the Winter Art Festival in Madison in November.

Thursday Theme - The Sewcial Lounge

Each Thursday I'll feature items that have a similar theme.  They might be quilts, books, or purses I made.  Or, they might be ceramics or other objects (not made by me) related to the theme.  If there are too many, I'll spread them out over multiple, but not always consecutive, posts.

 

This week's theme is The Sewcial Lounge.  They're located on Monroe Street in Madison, WI, across the street from Trader Joe's.  They specialize in modern fabric, offer many classes, and provide a sewing lounge where you can sit and sew with your friends for a very small hourly fee.  Wouldn't it be nice to just bring your project without the hassle of hauling around your sewing machine, iron, and ironing board? 

Their first birthday party is this Saturday, September 29, from 10 am - 5 pm.  The celebration includes guest vendors, good deals throughout the store, refreshments and cupcakes.

Today we'll see some of my projects made with fabric from The Sewcial Lounge. 

This table runner features Alexander Henry's "sew now! sew wow!" fabric.  I love the sewing theme and the mix of old-fashioned (Singer Featherweight machine, strawberry pin cushion) and modern (rotary cutter) motifs.  It celebrates the continued appeal of sewing to many generations.

A close-up view.

 

Nametag made out of the scraps.

This drawstring bag measures 26 inches wide and 24 inches tall.  The chevron fabric is home dec from The Sewcial Lounge and the sort of Sputnik-looking fabric on the pocket is from Mill House Quilts.  I used an old clothesline for the drawstring, for want of anything better.  Anybody knowing of a better thing to use, please leave a comment.

Note the buttons on the pocket and the casing.  I didn't think to sew the buttons on until after the pocket and casing were already attached to the bag.  If you didn't already figure it out, that's the HARD way to do it.  Getting the buttons on the pocket wasn't too bad, although the bottom one was tricky.  Sewing them on the casing, top layer only, was my challenge for that week.  Too bad I didn't plan ahead.

I use the bag to carry quilting projects to guild meetings and Sew Days.  It looked absolutely huge when I was done, but I often find it barely big enough.

I have lots of other material from them I haven't made into projects yet.  I'm looking forward to stopping there on Saturday to pick up some more.  Hope to see you there!  Tell Sara that Piggy Pile sent you!!

Give a Little, Part Two

You saw some of my charity projects on Tuesday in Give a Little, Part One.  Today I'll show the rest of them.  But first - remember how I said you always learn things when quilting with a group?  My three favorite learning moments:

NUMBER ONE
Slotted rulers!!  Boy, does this make cutting strips easy.  No more moving the long ruler over after each slice.  No more squaring up the edge after several "moving over" episodes.  I confess you need to be careful when folding your fabric.  Because the rule has a 12-inch slot, you need to fold 44-inch fabric twice (first fold = 22 inches, second fold = 11 inches).  If you don't smooth it out good, you can wind up with a V-shape after you cut. 

NUMBER TWO
Use your ironing board backwards!!  First of all, pretend you're right handed.  Maybe you don't have to pretend.  Anyway, you probably iron with the wide end of the board on your right and the pointy end on your left.  Your iron sits on the wide end.  No problem when you're ironing fat quarters that are only 22 inches wide.  But if you're ironing anything much wider, it's not really efficient because there is more room for fabric on the wide end than the skinny end.  So as you move the fabric up, you can't move it the full width of the wide part of the ironing board.  I hope you're with me.

Last Saturday at our Sew Day, a right-handed quilter had the iron sitting on the skinny end, and then the fabric had a nice, big, even, wide area to lay on.  When I first saw that, it made my brain itch.  But I tried it and I love the logic of it.  Of course if one wanted to be really efficient, they would have one of those custom totally rectangular ironing surfaces.  But then you need more room.

NUMBER THREE
Thread!!  Thread is expensive!  Cheap thread is bad!  What to do???  Several of the people buy Essential Cotton Thread from Connecting Threads.  Huge spools, gorgeous colors, excellent quality, great price.  As soon as my October allowance comes in (I spent September's allowance at Quilt Expo), I'm buying some. 

OK, on to some photographs.... 
 

I didn't make these blocks, but I pulled them out of the donated block stash along with some uncut fabric and put it together.  The starting point were those four fabulous center blocks.  I made a four-patch, then bordered it with that perfectly-coordinated stripe.  There were some grey and black "Kleenex box" blocks laying around, so I grabbed them and cut squares out of the blue/white stars to make it symmetrical.  The car fabric was the cutest thing in the world, so I cut that up for the border and you see I used that stripe again for the border.

This is why the Community Sew Days are so much fun.  You go diving into the suitcases for blocks and/or fabric and put something together.  It's like shopping for free!!
 

 Just a simple pieced top in nice Spring colors.

 

 

This looks like a table runner, but it's not.  It's a shawl for residents of a memory care unit.  The fabric is from my own stash, and I did this project at home.  The center pinwheel is a four-patch.  When those four pieces are rearranged, you get the big grey/orange star of Kaffe Fassett fabric.  When you use just two of them, you get the sliced-in-half look on the ends.  I only had enough of the Kaffe for three big blocks so I had to add other fabric to get the length I needed.

This is the flip side.  Nice toasty flannel (as is the purple border on the front).  Two pockets for hands and assorted mysteries. I left this back border 1/2 inch longer than the front on all sides, then folded the edge over twice and top-stitched it to the front.

 

  

This is another shawl - similar colors to the other shawl.  I guess I like those colors!!!  The insde is mostly flannel; the outside is fleece that I bought at Joann, with no plans at the time.  The inside fabric was donated by other guild members.  I sewed the front and back together with right sides facing each other, left a slit, and turned it inside out. 

I made two other shawls and for some reason never took pictures of them.  That was dumb.

Tea for Tuesday

Each Tuesday I'll be featuring a vignette of tea-related items.  Most of them will have one of my teapots; they all have at least one thing you could use at a tea party.

I got these at separate antique stores a few years ago, on an outing with a friend.  I saw the Oreo cookie pitcher at our first stop, and thought it was cute, but I passed on it.  When we went to a second store and I saw the Oreo milkshake glass, I knew I had to buy it and go back and get the pitcher. 

I suppose you could brew tea in the Oreo pitcher and pour it into the milkshake cup.  Nothing wrong with that.  Or maybe this is for your tea party guest who has a particularly sweet tooth and wants milk and cookies instead of tea.  (I need an Oreo cookie plate.)  The cookie on the pitcher is 7 inches in diameter, which if translated into real Oreo calories would be approximately .......  um, way too many. 

Give a Little, Part One

I spent this past Saturday with some friends from my quilting guild, making quilts to donate to Project Linus.  We do this almost every month.  It's a team effort to produce a quilt.  There are usually different people involved in the various steps along the way - from donating the fabric, to making blocks, choosing different blocks to put together, piecing them, quilting and binding.  It makes us feel good to spend time together, laugh, learn from each other, and best of all, create quilts that will hopefully be of comfort to others.

Today we're going to look at some of the projects I worked on. 

 

I made this quilt top out of my own stash, with fabric that I bought many years ago.  You know how that goes.  If you don't use it right away when you love it, it's probably going to just take up room for years until you make a conscious effort to use it.  It was so scrappy, that I was having a hard time arranging the blocks in a manner that appealed to me.  Finally I settled on grouping like colors together.   I added a border to bring it to twin-size.

This was a popular block last year in our Project Linus quilts.  We called it the "Kleenex Box" block.  Each block is 6" x 12".

 

This top is a variation on the "Kleenex Box".  Pieced blocks are intermingled with unpieced 6" x 12" blocks.  None of this fabric is mine, nor did I make the blocks.  Other guild members made them out of their scraps, then I pulled the ones that had similar jewel-tones to go with the "confetti" looking fabric.

No border on this one.   I'm not a fan of borders and I got the word that it was OK to make them smaller than twin size.  That made me happy!!!!

 

Somebody donated the blocks in row 1, column 2 and row 3, columns 1 & 4 - french horn fabric.   Also the two blocks with black borders - you can't tell from this photograph but those are musical notes.  I knew those had to go into the same quilt, but needed more fabric!!  No problemo.  I made a quick shopping trip to JoAnn Fabrics where I found the penguins and the grey fabric with notes.  At Hobby Lobby I found the yellow/grey/black circular fabric which I reasoned must be penguin eggs.  The other blocks were pieced from my stash.

I love this quilt top - it has a Happy Feet vibe.  Maybe I should watch that movie.

The "beachy" fabric you see in the center of the blocks was donated.  With all the white space on it, it wasn't a good candidate to cut into small pieces.  There wasn't a lot of it either, so I cut 6-inch squares and used some other donated fabric for the green borders.  The sashing is from my stash.

Again, this is the stage it was in (quilt top only) before I handed it off for quilting and binding. 

 

This was my project last Saturday.  I decided this year to make completed projects - quilting and binding included.  I wanted to make something quick and cute so I decided on a reversible wholecloth quilt.  This is the front.   Cute fabric donated by a friend of mine!  For quilting, I sewed horizontal lines between each row of the alphabet.

This is the back, donated by another guild member, as was the "sky" fabric used for the binding.  You can see the quilting stitching here.   I machine stitched the binding and was pleased how nicely it turned out.  The first time I tried to do that years ago, it looked good on the front, but the back stitching was all over the place - sometimes on the binding and sometimes on the quilt back.  Not pretty.  I don't know why but this time the stitching on front and back was perfectly aligned.  I'm going to use machine binding on all my Project Linus quilts in the future.  It's nice and sturdy and looks good.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

Each Sunday, I'll take a break from the material aspects of this blog and spend a little time looking at the finer points of pigdom.  Most people probably appreciate the ham and bacon side of pigs; little do they know they have a deeper side as well.  We'll start the week with a peek into the favorite quotes of thoughtful pigs and also learn a pig factoid (pigoid?) in a feature called Pigipedia.

PIGIPEDIA
Back in Colonial times, Wall Street was populated by herds of free-roaming pigs that belonged to New York farmers.  Residents of Manhattan wanted to limit their forays, so they erected a long, permanent wall along the northern edge of what is now Lower Manhattan.  A street eventually ran along the inside of this wall and was, of course, named Wall Street.

Thursday Theme - Laurel Burch

Each Thursday I'll feature items that have a similar theme.  They might be quilts, books, or purses I made.  Or, they might be ceramics or other objects (not made by me) related to the theme.  If there are too many, I'll spread them out over multiple, but not always consecutive, posts.

This week's theme is Laurel Burch.

First up is "Catbird", a quilt I made during a class taught by Wendy Butler Berns that was held at Stitcher's Crossing.  It was a two-day class and it loosened me up quite a bit, at least temporarily!  You could bring an inspiration photograph if you wanted.  Obviously this is not based on a photograph.  I was too chicken to bring a photograph because then it would be obvious how far off the mark I was. 

 I learned a lot of new techniques:

The border treatment was a first for me - three strands of yarn that were couched to the edge with a zig-zag stitch.

The tree trunk, the lake at the base of the tree, and the blue nest where the cat is sitting were all made with a variety of threads and yarns sewn in between two layers of water soluble stabilizer.

 You can also see some thread painting on the leaves.
 

 

 
This is the fabric I used, and it was my inspiration.

Close-up of nest with bead "eggs".

 

You can see the tree trunk and lake a little better on the right.  The hardest thing about making this quilt?  Creating that tiny ball of yarn that the cat is playing with.  It kept wanting to come unrolled.

 

The center of this quilt is a Laurel Burch panel from Saving Thyme.  The panel ends in the black strip with the white dots.  I added the two borders - the solids are silk from Gayfeather Fabrics.

You might remember this bowl from my excellent vintage shopping weekend.  It's nice and big (10-inch diameter) for holding food or fabric projects.  You can see that the top of the bowl has another fat quarter of Laurel Burch fabric.  I have plans for two mini quilts out of that.  One of them will incorporate the yarn and blue batik.

The final item in my final Laurel Burch collection is this pair of socks I bought earlier this month at the Wisconsin Quilt Expo.