Monday is Fun Day -Tissue Paper Flowers

I spent a few hours yesterday making tissue paper flowers.  I was going to use some nice sheets of crepe paper I bought a few years ago, but I couldn't find them, so I made a quick trip to a dollar store. 

I bought four packages in a range of colors, most of which I haven't used yet.  Each flower has three different colors of paper.  Sometimes the results are more subtle, like the different shades of pink.

Feeling tentative, I made the monochromatic pink ones first.  The reason why I had to buy four packages of tissue paper: some packages had brights; some had pastels.

I cut the edges differently on each one.  
 

Next I used an analogous color scheme, a spicy combination of red, orange, and yellow. 

A shortcut to getting these different results is to make just one accordion fold with the stack of three papers, then cut the folded stack into three pieces.  Tie off each piece with your method of choice (I used pipe cleaners).  In this example, for some of them I pulled the yellow first, to make a yellow center.  For the top one, I flipped it over and pulled the red first so I would have a yellow layer of outer petals.

Sometimes I trimmed the center color after fluffing.

One of the packages of tissue paper had writing on it - you can see it in the middle layer.  It gives a nice texture to the flower.

This is my last set, and I think I gravitated toward it because it resembles the colors in my new ottoman.  Just like with the other six flowers, some of these were fluffed from opposite directions, giving a nice variety without a lot of work.

Another example of paper with writing on it, this time green.  This is my favorite of the color combinations.  They should make real flowers like this, in my opinion.

Just nine pieces of tissue paper made all this.

While I was at the dollar store, I picked up a clear vase along with the tissue paper.  Now you can see all the petal trimmings.

I made this bouquet to take to our quilt guild meeting as a decoration.  Good luck getting it there and home again - the pipe cleaners are rather floppy, and this is just one of many things I'll be carrying.  But I chose pipe cleaners instead of bamboo skewers for stems, because pipe cleaners make it easier to arrange the layers at different heights.

Oh yeah - when putting the tissue paper away, I found the missing crepe paper.  Now I have lots of paper.

I'm Going to Read More

I know enough about goal setting to say "I'm going to read more", instead of "I want to read more".  But logic, well that's another story.  I took a logic class once but found it very complicated and I didn't do very well.  So I bet my latest effort at logic is another failure.  It goes like this:

I'm going to read more.
I'll read more if I have a pretty chair to sit in.
Therefore I  need to make my chair pretty.

I bought a pretty ottoman (pictured in the bottom of this photograph) in early June, and made it the focal point of a redecorated room.  The only thing left to do, and which I planned to do right away, was make some cushion covers for my rocker/glider.

I laid some potential fabrics out on the chair, as you can see, and they've been sitting there for almost three months.  As you can imagine, not a lot of reading has been going on in that spot.  I think I was putting it off because I didn't have any cream-colored muslin that was of good quality, just some very coarsely woven yardage.  But the other day I remembered I have over a yard of perfect muslin left over from my Positivity Crayons quilt, so this chair project has now jumped to the head of the line.

My Tablet Fits

Last Saturday I failed at making a zippered bag to hold my tablet.  This past Monday, I was successful.

This time I went slow and closely followed the tutorial from 'N Stitches Designs.   I cut new fabric, oriented in portrait mode, so I could use my short green zipper.  Using that zipper with a bag in landscape mode was what caused my previous failure.

Now my tablet fits into the zippered bag with room to spare, and the zippered bag fits into my new tote bag.

 

The outside fabric is on both sides, like it's supposed to be.  This time I quilted both sides the same - vertical bands of stitching in green and pink thread, overlaid with intersecting large curves - one green, one pink.

The inside stayed on the inside, just like it should.

The topstitching and completely finished interior (no raw edges) makes for a pretty bag.  Now that I know what I'm doing, I'm going to make a more advanced one.  I've seen tutorials that do cool things with the zipper closure and tab.  The only trouble is I can't remember where I've seen them.

The other thing I'd like to try to improve on is the sides of the zipper where the seam lines are.  When you turn the bag inside out, those top corners are rounded.  I wonder if there's a way to make them more square.  Maybe if it wasn't full of batting and quilting, it wouldn't be so round.  Something to strive for, some day.

Monday is Fun Day - Vintage Yardsticks

One of the reasons I like rearranging my sewing room so much is because I can make new combinations of things.

I hung my Chinese Lantern quilt, added a fern, and stuck my vintage yardsticks in a pitcher that came from another room I rearranged. 

How NOT to Make a Lined Zippered Bag

I want to make a padded carrying case for my very small tablet.  I never made a zippered bag before, so as I lay awake last night, I kept going back and forth in my mind over the various ways I might accomplish it.  I was worried because I want it lined - I don't like those raw edges on the inside of unlined things.  I even considered making something without a zipper, with just a Velcro or button closure.  But that didn't seem like it would keep little scratchy things from getting inside the bag.

So when I got up this morning, I looked for online tutorials, found tons of them (what was I worried about?) and settled on a good one.  These are the raw materials I picked to coordinate with my new grey leather tote bag.

Because I wanted the bag padded, I added batting.  This is the outside with one kind of quilting - diagonal lines in grey thread.

 This is the other side with horizontal lines of pink and green thread.

All the tutorials I read said to use a zipper much larger than your bag.  But I really liked this green zipper and it was just barely long enough.  I could have put the zipper on the short side of the rectangle, but the print is directional and I cut it out so the orientation was horizontal.  If I put the zipper on the short end. I'd have my birds turned 90 degrees. 

Why didn't I think about that before all the quilting?  Who knows.  But at this point in the process, I convinced myself that if I was very careful, I could squeak by.  From the photograph, it looks feasible, don't you think?

And right here I should have remembered my number one rule: shortcuts wind up taking you longer.  Like when you try to move a piece of furniture that has stuff on it, and you tell yourself if you're really careful nothing will fall off.  So you're really careful, and things fall off and break anyway. Lesson being, I should have cut out new fabric, put the zipper on the narrow end of the rectangle, and put the tablet in vertically.

But I didn't.  I wasn't being obdurate.  I was being naive and confident and forgetful of the shortcut rule.  Remember the part about me being awake during the night?

And I also didn't refer to the directions after I read them online, even after I spent a lot of time formatting them so they would fit on fewer pages.  I figured I spent so much time reading them that I had them memorized.  I printed them out, and kept moving them out of the way on my sewing table.

I was proud of myself for remembering this tip I read about the zipper tab:  If you don't want a wiggle in your seam when you sew around it, here's what you do:  Unzip it to about halfway down your edge.  Sew up to it and stop.

Take your project out of your machine, zip the zipper up so the tab is out of the say, and continue with the seam.  I made a beautiful straight seam and was very proud.

After I sewed the second side, this is what I had.  OOPS.  I'm supposed to have my outer fabric on the left AND the right sides of the zipper.  I have my lining fabric on the right.  I quickly shifted my evaluation to "I kind of like it like that."  And I kind of did, even if one side of the outside wasn't going to have quilting on it.

The good news is, I was able to make the zipper fit.  The bad news was I couldn't do my topstitching next to the zipper because that tab was in the way.  If I had a nice long zipper like I was supposed to, it wouldn't have been in the way.

I finished the rest of the sewing and turned it inside out.  But doggone it - that opening is supposed to be on the lining, not on the outside of the bag.  And you can see from the zipper that this is the only way the zipper will work, so this is definitely my outside.  

So this is what you get when you screw up and accidentally put the lining on the outside of one side of the bag.  And no amount of "I kind of like it like this." will fix it.  

I could have just slip-stitched it shut, and I would have except for one HUGE problem.  My tablet doesn't fit.  You know that episode of Friends where Ross, Chandler, and Rachel are trying to get his new sofa up the stairs and he keeps shouting "PIVOT!"?  Well, no amount of pivoting could get the tablet into the bag.

So another day (not today - blech) I need to start all over, and try it with the zipper on the skinny end.   I'll cut out new fabric so the birds are oriented correctly.  I'll go slow, follow directions very closely, and not to try to talk myself into something if a little voice thinks there might be a problem.

Quilt Finish - Positivity Crayons

Positivity Crayons is a quilt I made for a challenge contest.  The challenge was to make a wall hanging using a bale of fat quarters, adding no more than three yards of other fabric.  It was due last Saturday and I finished it one hour before the store closed.  That means that as soon as I finished it, I had to turn it over.  I miss it, but it will be back home in a few weeks.

It measures approximately 40" wide by 55" tall, and it's my own design.

 I had two inspirations:

1. The bale reminded me of crayons.
2. Last year I read Barbara Fredrickson's "Positivity" and had been waiting for the right opportunity to incorporate her ten components of positivity into a quilt.

Hence the name, Positivity Crayons.  I paper pieced the letters using Sam Hunter's book, Quilt Talk.  It was a lot of fun!  I'm definitely going to make more quilts with words.

As I said earlier, Frederickson's research centered on ten components of positivity.  I had sixteen colors in my bale, which would have made the quilt too large, so I winnowed down to twelve fabrics, and added two positivity components of my own (kindness and resilience).

The labels were a dickens.  The cream muslin fabric was too light; the black was too dark.  I settled on this muted grey brown and proceeded to hand embroider the words.  I don't know if you remember, but I started the quilt on a Tuesday which only gave me five days to finish it.  Lucky for me, after embroidering six or seven of the words, I decided they looked lame.  I had to use six strands of embroidery floss to make the words stand out, and they didn't all pull through the fabric evenly.  Plus it was so hard to get the needle threaded with six strands - yuk.  I would not have finished on time if I had embroidered all the labels.

I switched over to writing out the words with an indelible marker.  That all sort of blended in too much, so I surrounded each label with baby rick rack, purchased on an emergency trip to Jo-Ann.  It never occurred to me I might need two packages, and I was sweating it as I started in on these last six crayons.  I wound up with four inches of rick rack leftover.

 

I had a lot of white space in the upper-right and lower-left corners, and I certainly didn't need any more words.  So I appliqued an arrow...

.. and a plus sign.

Most of the quilting was done as a variation on "quilt as you go", referring to the book Quilt As You Go Made Modern.   The difference was that I pieced three big horizontal hunks (upper crayons and arrow; the paper-pieced words; plus sign and lower crayons), then quilted each of them onto batting.  In the original "quilt as you go" technique, you piece the blocks onto batting.  Because of the applique, my design didn't lend itself to that.

But the variation I used still saved me a lot of time and here's why I loved it and will definitely do it again:

1. There was much less bulk to push through my sewing machine armhole or whatever you call it. 
2. Quilting was faster and the stitches were more even.
3. For the times I needed to do a lockstitch, I didn't get a knobby knot like I do when my sandwich includes the backing.
4. It's a great way to use up those odd sizes of batting scraps.
5. The quilt top stayed square after quilting - a first for me! 
6. It was actually fun to quilt, which has always been my least favorite part in the past.

In designing the quilt, I made sure that the width didn't exceed 40" because that worked just right for 42-44" wide backing fabric.

You have to still do some quilting to hold all the layers together, but you don't have to do as much.  Plus, I was in such a good mood from the quilt-as-you-go quilting that I didn't even get cranky on this part.

You can see some of the quilting I did in this close-up view of the backing fabric. Basically, I stitched in the ditch between each crayon; echo quilted around the labels, arrow, and plus sign; and did long horizontal lines above and below the paper-pieced words.

For the label, I made stylized crayons.

After all that quilting last week, this week I need to catch up on the rest of my life.  That at-home quilt retreat sure was fun, though.  I need to do more of them.