july crafting update

So I checked out Heather Ross's book from the library and totally blew my interlibrary loan privileges by keeping it waaaaaay past the due date (that's right people- they are a privilege- not a right. librarian rant over). I kept thinking I would just try out -one more little project- but first I had to yadda yadda whatever and all of a sudden I am a terrible person who keeps a library book even though I know it's on hold for someone else.

So I have a few things I'd like to make from that book, and a few other projects I've bookmarked, but mostly I've been putting my crafting time in on two quilts I really love.


First up is Jane's log cabin quilt. I finished putting the binding on (messily) yesterday, and now all that's left is a few more squares of quilting and I get to wash it and pull a big, fluffy warm quilt out of the dryer. Then I get to deposit it on a bed that is more often than not coated in gritty sand and dog hair, but I am fine with that. The more often it's washed, the softer it will be. And in the Velveteen Rabbit school of mythology, if Jane loves it enough, maybe it will turn into a real live Quilt, and when she recovers from Scarlet Fever, the quilt will hop from the burning rubbish pile and roll (waddle? gallop?) into the forest, to live with all the other once beloved relics of lost childhood.


Is it coming through how much I hate that book? I'm sorry to anyone who has given me a copy of it since I had kids. I will -never- read that to my children. I am still battling guilt that my stuffed animals remained stuffed, and did not transform. My love was not sufficient to save them from a slavish stuffed existence.


So here's Jane's quilt. Which she can love exactly as much as she wants to. I hope she does like it though, since it's sized to Wren's bed, which is what Jane will be moving into once she's old enough to assure us that she won't just hop up in the morning and turn on all the gas burners.

Next up is a quilt for my bed, that I've been wanting to make for a while. It's a whole cloth quilt with white work. In the pictures the stitching looks pink but it's actually just a pink quilting pencil I used to sketch out the designs. I really hope that washes out of the thread eventually.


For the whole cloth I used top sheets we already had- both sheets we received as wedding presents 7 years ago this summer. We almost never actually use top sheets, I don't know why, but Chase can't stand them. He's weird. Anyway, since most people buy sheets in sets, I have a stack of top sheets sitting unused in my closet, and there is not room for anything in this tiny house to sit unused. So now they are in the process of becoming a quilt, with my beloved 80/20 as batting.


I am using mostly traditional quilting motifs, like the pumpkin seed in the corners, and the cabled borders, but I'm drawing on the quilt without the use of stencils, or even really rulers, so everything looks a bit wonky and off balance. I long ago embraced that as my "style," if half-assedness can be classified as a style. Really, I just used whatever edges and curves I had at hand (in this case, plates and books) to make templates. The center medallion is traditional Amish feathering, which is a total bitch to do. I was originally considering a feathered border, but once I finished the circle I was done with feathers.

So that's what I'm working on now. As soon as it gets cold, I'll pick up my knitting again. And when Chase is back in town, I might be able to sit down at the sewing machine again. But for now it's hand quilting, since I can drag it from room to room, and drop it anytime I need to enforce time outs or open string cheese wrappers.