Garden flowers

 Hello, everyone.  

I have been working on the little pumpkin coasters a lot, and so what I have to share today is flowers. Not that it's ever unwelcome to see flowers!

 The eggplants that I rescued from the garden, where the clay soil was just too heavy for them, are rewarding me with blossoms. 

This is a native plant that butterflies,  especially the monarch clan, just love. It needs water but it's just so pretty. Ankle high and no thorns, too.

When we moved into our new house, leaving behind the beautiful roses, DGD gave me a mini rose for Mother's Day. It's still going strong.

Last of the list, a rain lily. 

We have put compost and topsoil into the rectangular raised bed. I plan to put greens, radishes, and maybe some herbs into it. There are some basil seedlings that are now in gallon sized pots and would look pretty across the end.

That's our progress on the garden bed so far!

The little corner of time between Thanksgiving and Advent

Hello, everyone.

I hope all of my US readers had a happy Thanksgiving.

That "little corner" of the title is a week long this year...plus a couple of days. (For my international readers, Thanksgiving Day is always on a Thursday. And, of course, Advent begins on a Sunday.)

We had most of the gang in house for the feast--moved the grandparents' table into the largest room and put in *all* the leaves--even had an extra guest. It was great. And as this was the first time the new graduate and the newly completed graduation quilt were in the same place, she received her quilt.

I used a new (to me) way of binding on this one. I made the double folded straight grain strip and pieced the sections with a bias seam, and then sewed it onto the back of the quilt. Then pulled the folded edge onto the front, pinned it down, and machine sewed it in place on the front. It went fairly well and was a lot quicker than the old way. Plus the corners are all mitered.

As the fabric was almost all from stash, that means much of it was from Fabric.com and some was from Hobby Lobby. The binding is plain black Kona cotton.

Progress on the Tech quilt: quilting in progress

Hello everyone.
The Tech quilt is slowly approaching completion.  I'm hoping to finish in time to present it at Christmas.

The center has been quilted. There are a couple of spots that will need to be "unsewn" but it's a good start.

I added some interior quilting to the elephant's blanket and ear.

Now that the center is quilted there needs to be some planning and marking before the sides and top and bottom get quilted.  There are just too large of spaces without natural landmarks to wing it there.

Progress on the Tech quilt

Hello, everyone.

The Tech quilt, as first considered for pin-basting, turned out to have too small of a backing. I added a row of 6 inch blocks with some blue sashing between them, and a blue 2 inch strip along the bottom. This made it big enough that the top can be laid out on the batting and backing without a lot of warping problems popping up.

The area of layout was moved to the tile-floored hallway instead of the carpeted room it had been in. This necessitated creating ways to prevent critters from waltzing through the basting area and tracking dirt on the quilt. There is a door controlling access on one side, but the hallway is open in the other direction. A piece of dog-crate was deployed.

The crate/gate is supported by a chair and the doorway. Note the piece of selvage
wrapped around the blue metal. Wish we'd thought of that when there was a litter of puppies being confined by this method! There were some unfortunate blue marks on doorways after that experience.

 The quilt layers *just* fit into the space by the front door. If I hold onto the stair banister while going around the fabric!

The quilt layers. The backing is being held steady by pieces of
blue painter's tape.

The approximate density of pinning needed to hold all the layers stable while
machine quilting the layers together. 

The quilting has begun but there are no pictures really of the progress. I have learned that using the sewing machine's blanket stitch on the elephant is a complete failure. (Too smart by half.) Had to rip all of those stitches out! Like they say, Keep It Simple Stupid.

Progress on the Tech quilt

Hello, everyone.

This is just a small update on the Tech quilt progress. The top is finished, and the next step is to lay the backing (not chosen or made yet) and the batting and then the top down somewhere flat and pin-baste the whole thing together for quilting.

This photo is cropped a bit, but y'all can get the idea. It has been a good stash-busting project, even though there were a few new fabrics bought to  balance out the ones in-house already.

A small break from routine

Hello, everyone.

The blog has been somewhat inactive because we had someplace special to be for a couple of days.
 This might have been obvious from the color scheme (red and black) of the elephant block,

They had commencement (this was one of four ceremonies!) in their basketball arena. As y'all can see. this allowed them to use the "Jumbotron" to give everyone in the place a really good look at their family members crossing in the front. It also meant that there was plenty of seating. This may have been the best organized commencement ever, and because it was in the basketball arena there were concessions selling coffee.

The visit to Lubbock, for us, requires 2 days driving each way. (For my European readers, this is because Texas is huge.) We just like to have a more pleasant experience, so we split the 12 hour drive in two. This also allows us to stop over in either San Antonio or Kerrville en route. (Second link is for the geographic area called the Texas Hill Country.)

The elephant quilt is progressing...meaning that a design is in progress for the rest of the quilt. (The elephant is the center of a three foot by three foot block right now.) Expected final size is 5 feet by 6 feet. (approx. 1.5 m by 2 m) It is not expected to be finished until after we complete our pilgrimage.

Progress of the elephant

Hello, everyone.

There is, for the first time in days, progress on the elephant.

The colors here are planned to be the theme throughout the piece.

Block Play Ideas

Hello, everyone.

In connection with a new quilt that has been requested, there has been some pencil block work done lately. The requestor is a Texas Tech student.

A quick stroll through Pinterest didn't come up with a whole lot of candidates...there was the square named Ararat for an elephant square from the Kansas City star, and a whole lot of applique elephants, and a couple of other pieced designs that just didn't appeal a lot.

A Tech elephant

Yes, yes, I know that Tech are the Red Raiders. And one of their big slogans is "Guns up!" But the masked rider is way, way beyond my artistic level. As is the hand in "guns up!" position. (Any hands, actually, are beyond my artistic level.)
The doggie with a blanket shown earlier was a possibility, and it might even make an appearance, substituting Tech fabric for the Aggie fabric that was used for the first dog blanket.
Here is an elephant, suggested colors being two shades of gray (the ear different from the rest) and the blanket being Tech-design fabric. The corners could be black, here, and the "floor" could be green, with the remainder of the background either a nondescript "solid" of any color or maybe a sky type design. There is just enough extra room at the top to add a little more shape to the ear if wanted. But do we want an elephant ear that looks like a straight-up lozenge?

The Double T in 6x6 square

This one to have the Double T in black and the main background red. Possibly a contrast shade of white or pearl gray in the side bar. (Side bar is there because I am really uninterested in blocks with odd-numbered dimensions--it was 6 tall and 5 wide until that was added.) If the square was made in 12x12 format, the double coloration of red and black in the square could be done. Also the serifs on the smaller T could be done with no problem, and the larger tee could have square serifs too. In that case, I would sub pale gray or white for the background and either a strip of Tech pattern fabric for the side bar or just have the side bar as part of the regular background. (Switching the sides of the bar could give a nice zigzag effect in a vertical stack of the T squares, too.)

And an attempt at a bridge

For this one, colors might be gray and/or black for the bridge structure and either a plain background for the rest or possibly something that suggests a body of water near the bottom and sky above.

The previously shown hammer and wrench blocks might even make an appearance, too, in the thematic colors of red and black.

We step away from the quilting project momentarily...

Hello, everyone.

I was going great guns on the quilt--got the coordinate tags pinned onto every square--when DD2 came to me and requested a bag to take with her back to school.

This bag should: be able to carry food. Fit under the seat in the airplane. Be easy to carry.

Then she sent me a pin from Pinterest--which pin led to long-gone reusable shopping bags--and so I chased down something like it on Sew4Home. This is a shoulder-bag tote.

Hmm. Doesn't look difficult. And--for all the marbles!--I can do something with purely the stash on hand. No shopping trip required.

The outer fabric, using a 3/4 yard cut of Texas Tech spirit fabric I had picked up on spec and some black broadcloth to make up the length at the bottom and also to make a gusset at the sides, and the lining fabric from the "grays" cubby of my quilting cabinet:

Off-cuts of the fabrics for the bag. I also used some scrap batting that was lying around.

The layers set up and cut to the desired top-edge shape. She isn't asking me to make something that folds over, so the batting will extend into the curve and I'll even add a bit of tulle for extra shaping oomph.

(I did remember to get the little Raiders right-side-up when I sewed the red panels to the black bottom fabric. Yay!)







The inner pockets being constructed from more of the black and some bits of red that was lying around. I zigzagged the seam allowances so they'd not fray all over when she uses the pockets.

It looks like there's going to be a snap added at the end, so the top will kinda-sorta close. She says that the closure is just to keep things from jumping out, not to be actually secure, so a snap is probably just about right.

And having studied the construction method in the Sew4Home project more carefully, I'm departing from it. Adding side gussets instead of making a flat bag and boxing the bottom corners means that I'm going to have to construct the lining as a bag, and the outside as a bag--I think I'll attach the batting layer to the outside layer--and then sew the completed parts together and turn through an opening. Rather like making a lined vest, really, without the problem of armholes to get into the way.
Just a strap instead...and the strap goes on at the end anyway.

I ended up with a bonus pocket, too, when I cut things out. (That's what happens when you cut the 8x8 inside-pocket piece as a 12"x8" rectangle and then cut off the end 4". And cut that 8"x4" piece in half. I did add red strips on the sides of the 4" squares, as you can see in the picture above, to get the 5" width of rectangle. I left the depth at 4" though, so the finished pocket is somewhere around 3 1/4" deep. But it's for shopping lists and suchlike anyway!

More in tomorrow's post, this has gone on plenty long already for one day.

Beads, and starting over again

Hello, everyone.

As you will likely remember, I have some small beading projects lined up to try, along with my idea to make a big picture of the Bramontini Risen Christ. (I think this picture may be 300 or more beads tall, but who knows? I don't think the free pattern makers that cap the width at 100 beads do it justice, and with 100 beads width there are a lot of rows. Not quite 300, but a lot. And the only way I can make a 100 beads wide picture come out decent it to essentially make it a head and shoulders only cropped picture instead of aiming at the whole painting. I'm not convinced the narrative element comes across with only the head and shoulders.)

So I started out with some beads and the pattern of the Cross of Santiago. Goal: pendant for a necklace. Materials: red Preciosa #11 seed beads and bone colored Delica #11 beads.

Starting out on the first attempt on the Cross of Santiago, lower right on the pattern sheet.

The blue bead in the white-beads dish is a stop bead, which I use to keep the beads from escaping out the back end of the thread before they're corralled by the stitches. The squareish bump on the top of the cross is the bail so the cross can hang from a strand of beads or a chain. I will curl it around and sew it into the back of the work at the end, like I did with the scallop shell purse ornament.

I have now learned that you cannot mix the Preciosa seed beads with the Delica seed beads in a peyote stitch project. They aren't the same shape! The Preciosa beeds are, when strung onto the thread, tall and skinny things that don't take up a lot of space. The Delicas are, on the same thread, little rectangles that lock into place in peyote or similar stitch work. When I tried using the Preciosas in the middle of a blob of Delicas, the skinny Preciosas just didn't sit well between the Delicas on either side. After getting about 10 rows up the stem of the cross, I concluded the only way out is to dismantle it--using the line cutters--and redo from the ground up. Using a different set of beads.

Now the tentative plan is to make: 1 cross with all Delicas, the bone colored ones for the background, the cross mostly in a sparkly charcoal gray, and a few accents in dark rose and gold inside the body of the cross and as a couple of little rosettes in the middle of the ground to either side. Then, 1 cross using Preciosas, using black for the background and red for the cross. Maybe a third color as little accents to make the pendant less stark in color. Or maybe just as-is. (A cross pendant in Texas Tech colors?) And finally there is a plan to use Japanese seed beads in transparent red and silver to make a third cross, more sparkly in effect than either of the others I think. Almost Christmas-y!

But that's where this project stands, being redone and turned into three of them.

The Bramontini project, now, that requires me to find or figure out a better pattern that will be big enough, and also I have started putting Delicas on my wish list at Fire Mountain, in colors that the painting will require and I don't have.

The days are growing short

Final preparations have begun: packing the packs (one more time); counting socks and underwear; labelling the clothes.

I shortened my sweetie’s new pants—that was tricky. The pants had zippers at the hem, and they’re zip-offs. I cut the excess fabric out of the lower-leg pieces and adjusted the taper at seams, sewed the pieces together, and replaced topstitching that had been disturbed. It might have gone a little better if I had done it in two cuts, one above and one below the knee, but it will do. I did resist the urge to add extra (new) pockets made out of the removed fabric! Those bits of nylon poplin will have a use, I am sure. Maybe pouches for storage? We’ll see.

We are learning to use our new cameras (the old ones were pretty old, and besides the new cameras have much better optical zooming!) and have discovered that we need to add a small carry-on bag to the list—something that is soft, lightweight, and able to hold the cameras, cell phones, Kindle, boarding passes…the usual little things that can’t be checked. Plus some snacks!

It looks like the new bag will be a soft sided fabric affair, with strap handles. I’m going to use up some of my Texas A&M quilting fabric for this one. (Sorry, Tech, but I don’t have any Red Raider fabrics in the house! Maybe you should license some.) One of my children bleeds Maroon, anyway. ;-)

For now, since there are no bag pictures to show yet, I will put up one of the pictures from my new camera.

Oh, and for any readers from Mexico who are Mothers: ¡Feliz Día de Madres!

from my sweetie's new camera, a neighborhood flower (gaillardia, zoomed)

from my new camera, the little puppy--hanging out in the kitchen of course!