Pouf !

A pouf can be a number of things.  It basically refers to something with an inflated appearance.  Marie Antoinette's hairdo is called a pouf; so are beehive hairdos.  It can be a fluffy part of a garment, for example, a sleeve.  But lately, pouf has become a well-known synonym for a legless, well-padded ottoman.

I took the Gum Drop Pillow Class at The Sewcial Lounge over the weekend.  It was the most fun class I ever had and I came home with a completed pouf.  We used this pattern by Amy Butler.

 I used one yard of Amy Butler's Arabesque...

and one yard of Ty Pennington's Angel Wings.  I bought both of these fabrics from The Sewcial Lounge.

I must really like those colors, because they go perfectly with this plant I bought a few weeks ago.

The pouf is twelve inches tall and eighteen inches across.  I made the whole thing in just a few hours.

If you like it, I encourage you to take the class.  Sara had lots of great hints that weren't in the pattern.  I'm looking forward to making more of these!!!

Not Just Another Pretty Face

PIGIPEDIA
A "drove" is a group or herd of pigs that is on the move.  Farrow is a group of piglets.  Sounder is a group of wild pigs.

Teensy Bonsai

In Framed, I showed you a couple of interesting frames I bought from a thrift store a few weeks ago.

Here's a crop of that photograph.  I thought this frame deserved a tree.

I embroidered this teensy bonsai tree last week.  It's about 3 inches across and 2.5 inches tall.  

Meant to be together.

Happy Arbor Day!

Vocabulary

In my last post I talked about losing our produce vocabulary.   I've learned a few new words in the last month or so and they were fun, so I thought I'd share them with you.

One of them is "broderie anglaise", a French term meaning "English embroidery".  It is a single-colored fabric, often white, with small holes edged with satin stitching.  It can be an all-over pattern or just on the border.  

I realized I had some of that fabric and here it is.  Many of us call it "eyelet".   The holes are grouped in various ways, then connected with additional stitching to form a secondary pattern.  

It's hard to see in my photograph, but the pink has a floral pattern, the green is diamonds, and the turquoise is like woven ribbons.

 

I bought this fabric at the same time.  I have a vocabulary gap here - does anyone know if there is a name for this?  Rick rack and two kinds of ribbon are stitched in a diagonal pattern on white cotton.  It seems like it would be interesting for something, but I haven't come up with a good idea yet.  I might work it into a quilt with half-square triangles and use this for big blocks.

"Croquis" is the next new word for me.  In its strictest sense, it means a quick sketch of a model.  But it's commonly used in fashion sketches.  Here's a one-minute video showing you one.

 

I learned the word "enfilade" from a decorating magazine.  It means that interior rooms and doorways are aligned so you can look in one direction and see multiple rooms, one after the other.  Sorry I don't remember the magazine!  I'll find it again when I don't need it - you know how that goes.  Their point was that the decorating between rooms needed to have some continuity.

Museums and palaces, as well as railroad flats, all have this architectural feature in common.

 I'm leaving you with my favorite new "vocabulary" discovery.

Are you familiar with the Lyrebird from Australia?  Watch this video to see its incredible range of mimicry.   Be sure and watch it until the end - that's where the most surprising sounds are.

Tea for Tuesday - Apples

This is a sugar and creamer set made by Otagiri in the 1950s.   I picked it up earlier this year at a thrift store.  I don't have a teapot to go with them, although I do have some apple facts...

  Apples don't come true from seed.  If you like apples made by a particular tree, and you want more of them, you have to clone the tree by grafting a cutting of it onto another rootstock.

Every McIntosh apple is a graft of the original tree (or a graft of its offspring) that John McIntosh found on his Ontario farm in 1911.

Likewise, every Granny Smith apple is a graft of the tree (or again, a graft of its offspring) that Maria Ann Smith found in the mid-1800s in her Australian compost pile.

In the mid-1800s there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States.  Industrial agriculture reduced that to a handful of varieties that got promoted worldwide.   The top five sellers in the U.S. are Red Delicious, Gala, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, and Fuji.

New varieties are being developed, but they are strictly controlled.  Growers sign a contract that stipulates how the trees will be grown and where they'll be sold.  In addition, the growers need to pay annual royalties on every apple.

 

Luckily, even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than 200 years.  

This means that many of the old varieties may be commercially, but not quite yet biologically, extinct. 

I bought this assortment of apples this weekend.  I picked apples I never heard of before.  

Maybe you'd like to branch out and try a new one, too.  It's a good way to keep us from losing our produce vocabulary.  I kind of wonder about that every time a young cashier asks me whether she's weighing lettuce or cabbage.  I suppose I should be glad that she knows the names, even if she can't tell them apart.

 

Zig Zag Pillows

Last Friday I told you I was in the mood for zig zags and that I'd have something to show you this week.  The end of that post had clip art that showed zig zags, a pillow, and a sheep.  I don't blame you if you didn't figure out what I was making.

This was my starting point for fabric.  After I took this photograph earlier this week, it bugged me that the sheep had whiskers.  I don't remember them having whiskers!  An internet search failed to turn up any photos of sheep with whiskers, green or otherwise.  The whiskers are now gone.

I bought a sheep panel at the Sun Prairie Quilt Show a few weeks ago.  It was so cute and went perfectly with the colors of my Urban Cabin quilt you see in the background.  A third panel is yellow, but I haven't used it yet, and don't have any plans to at this point.

 These are the zig zaggy sides.  Although I used the same fabric, I used different designs.

For the first pillow, I cross cut wedges out of straight strips, then sewed them alternately with white wedges.  This made curvy strips, like getting a perm.  I cut a straight strip down the middle.

 This is the other side of the blue sheep pillow.

I didn't have a pattern nor did I have a standard pillow form.  So I eyeballed and estimated and it came out looking different than I planned...

The white strip on the side is matched by a white strip on the left side of the blue sheep.  (See earlier photo of the sheep sides of the pillows.)   In my head, the white strips were going to be on the left and right edges, barely visible as they wrapped around and connected the zig zag piece to the sheep.  It was my squish factor.  But when I folded the pieced fabric (white strip, then zig zags, then another white strip, then sheep) in half and sewed two side seams, the whole strip was visible.  Oh well, I thought.  I decided kind of liked it - this attititude saved me the trouble of trying to fix it.

I need to learn to use zippers.  I sewed the pillow covering over the pillow, so I can't get it off unless I rip out stitches.  I did that with a previous covering that's underneath - sewed it on and didn't feel like ripping out the stitches, so there are now archaeological layers accruing.

I was going to use a blind stitch with white thread to close the opening, but I was looking through an Amy Butler book and saw a quilt that had a great big black blanket stitch on the edge.  OOH!  So I used black perl cotton and did a running stitch to close the open edge.  I loved it, so I wound up doing it on all four sides.  This helped take up the slack and make the cover fit a little tighter on the pillow form, so that was an added bonus.

This is the other side of the green sheep.  I used half-square triangles and was careful to arrange them so the colored fabric would make a nice crisp zig zag.  It's easy to get things mixed up, so I was super careful.  

I thought there was only one way to arrange them to get the zig zag, but if you look closely, you'll see that there are two.  At the top, the white fabric mirrors the zig zag, but at the bottom, the white fabric makes diamonds.  I noticed it as I was laying out the sewn strips, and since I couldn't decide which I liked better, I used both.

Thursday is Purse Day - Zebra Purse

I made Zebra Purse in August 2008, the same month I finished Spring Kimono quilt.  I'm showing this purse today because it's sort of zig-zaggy and that's turned into a theme for this week.

The black-and-white body of the purse is 2.5 x 1.5 inches.  It opens at the top.  It's fabric trim, folded in half, machine stitched on both edges.  Then I added a beaded handle and dangly embellishments.  The large red bead in the center is stitched to the front, not part of the dangles.

The back.   Looks zebra-like, to me.

Did someone call for some zebras?

Sidling up to it.  I'm not sure what they have in mind...

Well, I hadn't thought of it, but yes, I guess it could be a zebra saddlebag.  I just hope she puts it back when she's done with it.