Hands to Help Quilt Challenge - Sign Ups Open

I have got hold of so much free/cheap fabric recently, I am keen to make something good with it but I have a real hang up about the things I make being useful. I hate the idea of making endless quilts with no idea of a recipient. Solution? Make one for a charity! There are three charities benefiting from this challenge and I am aiming for one helping chemotherapy patients. To read all about each of them see this post on Confessions of a Fabric Addict. 

She is encouraging international participants and there are two options to deal with costly shipping. 

1. You post her just your front and back and she quilts it for you. 

2. You give to a local charity other than one of the three main ones - so a hospice or other charity close to you could benefit!

Reasons to take part? Apart from the general feeling of good will and the chance to show off your sewing skills, there will be lots of giveaways with great sponsors and discount codes for fabric shops. 

Click on the image above to read more and sign up!

Patchwork By Machine and Hand

The cover for my Japanese sewing machine ( a borrowed Janome) was quite pale and mellow.

I left that one with the machine so when my new Singer arrived I needed to whip up something new. I have been quite affected by the beige-y neutralness of the temporary flat so, with our boxes having arrived from the UK, I unearthed a pack of 20 Kaffe Fassett charm squares I'd had for a while.

The 20 squares were only enough for the top and front so for the sides I used "Dysfunctional Family" by Michael Miller.

For the back I used a similar black and white print, although it is about sewing!

There's a great thought bubble near the bottom:

"Look at the way she's dressed. She must be throwing Harry's money around."

Except of course it turns out she made her dress herself. Tsk!

My machine came with an embroidery foot so I decided to try a bit of machine embroidery again.

Pebbles have always been my favourite pattern so a stream of them go across the top and down the front. I also tried some writing on the top.

Not great but a useful bit of practice.

While digging around in the storage unit I found the quilt I started aaaaaaaages ago for my Mum. All the pieces - hexagons and diamonds - are ready so now it is a case of laying them out and sewing them together. I've started at the bottom which is just hexagons, and this is the biggest bit so far.

The challenge is going to be deciding the layout of the rest. There must easily be 50 different fabrics involved with low value neutrals as well as blues so I'll need to go back to my original drawings and see if I can work out what should go where.

Join a Pouch Swap

Come and join in!

Sign ups open until 1st April.

Aligning Edges and Corners

Getting points to match in patchwork tends to be something that happens to other people rather than myself. Give me EPP type stuff and I am excellent, but machine piece some patchwork and it all goes Pete Tong.

 

I did read about a way of getting it right about a year ago but didn't re-read it before I got started. Had I done I would have realised you precut the squares, not just the strips, before ironing and sewing them.

Doh.

Still, straighter than my usual efforts.

The reason for this strip sewing is that I am prototyping something to make for Etsy selling. I was hoping to get some regular income that way but as it turns out I've been sent the details of not one, but two jobs that sound ideal for me. I could yet end up working more or less full-time which will come as a bit of a shock after these 16 months of housewifery. My CV has been tweaked and hopefully I'll get something sorted out quite soon.

Free Fabric Fatigue

Can you believe such a thing as "free fabric fatigue" exists? Yesterday saw me at the fabmo.org building in Mountain View, the town where Google has its HQ, about 45 mins drive south of San Francisco. I was with Ambur, who does actual installation art pieces and exhibits them and everything but I had found it and suggested going after some google research consisting of "Fabric San Francisco" typed into the search engine. I therefore felt responsible for our presence and concerned it might disappoint.

It didn't disappoint. That is just part of one table and there were at least five, plus rolls of fabric in boxes and stands around the room. And then there was the room of wallpaper samples...

...and then the room of tile, marble and vinyl bits.

BUT...after half an hour of going through endless piles of silk, wool, cotton and the odd polester/viscose thing I was feeling like I'd had my fill. There was TOO MUCH free stuff. Much like my first visit to Scrap when I first got here. Still, I managed to pick some up.

Neutral linens - either for embroidery backgrounds or for ickle niece's height chart.

Interesting patterns - some embroidered.

Woven.

Dotty.

Wool (yes, that is a real Ralph Lauren label - this was high end stuff).

Pure silks and silk/cotton blends.

That's most of it but there is more, plus some slate tiles I'm making into coasters, some vinyl for carving and printing and some cotton fabric bits for patchwork.

There can't be many more free/discounted fabric places left for me to find...

Hunting the White Elephant

When I heard about the Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale my mind went back to the flea market I visited a few days before leaving Tokyo. That had been ginormous. There was no way this one could be as big. Ha.

19,000sqft. They had everything. 

(I wanted all of these hangers but limited myself to just five at a dollar each.)

I fecking hate brussel sprouts. Why would someone ever make this tureen?

Since Pooch hasn't yet been paid either wages or transfer costs we are on a budget and I only had $50 with me. Plus I don;t know where we'll be living or what we'll need for the place. My take-home was therefore confined to some pristine photo albums, lovely vintage photo frames, beautiful silk padded hangers and this:

Fabric had been washed, ironed and sorted into 1lb bags. I got three plus a few odd FQs. I also got a novelty scrap bag.

I'll be adding these to my collection of scraps for my niece's i-spy quilt.

I am hoping there will be similar sales in about a month's time when we'll be moving into our proper flat.

Chinese New Year Parade!

This was my first ever chinese new year parade. I am sure there must have been one in Tokyo but I seem to have missed it. This one is quite epic - even Pooch came along.

Lots of big dragons...and a few little ones.

This float was shooting glitter everywhere. So pretty!

Lots of small children dancing and twirling things.

And then there was a dragon overload.

The little kids watching squealed with delight as they came snapping at them. And special mention to the dragons up poles in the back of cars.

Pooch, who like a lot of hounds does not like crowds or loud noises, defied my expectations by liking the marching bands the most.

This one was about two hundred strong. There were also the alternative ones. These kids were playing buckets.

The kanji for this year's animal can be translated as a goat, ram or sheep. Being a dedicated knitter, I have to go with the sheep.

Awesome.

Finished Objects Abound and Knitting Too

It is *so* good to have a sewing machine and space for fabric again. I have been using the one shoulder bag for 10 weeks now so I whipped up a new one this week.

I even used one of the new stitches on my sewing machine - an arrow - on the pocket flap.

The sewing machine itself (a Singer 7258) is rather noisy and not as smooth as my pre-Tokyo Brother but we are getting on very well nonetheless. The main fabric and several of the squares are from what I found at Scrap when I visited last week. I also used that for this little notebook cover using 1/2 inch hexagons.

I learnt from my previous notebook cover that the flaps need to be as wide as possible to stop the covers falling out.

All important shopping list and cafe/shop destinations noted there.

I was making many notes at the second knitting group I attended this week which was in the Haight. I don't know why but I always thought the T on the end was silent, but it's not.

The people there were really friendly and one of them is even a WWE fan! It was so cool to have a conversation about wrestling with someone other than myself! I also gave my ridiculously girly knitting an airing.

Isn't it obscene? The UK Knitting and Crochet Guild have an online challenge to knit something for a baby in March so I decided on something I would never normally knit and set out to make the most girly thing possible. It is using this free Drops pattern but I've changed the chart to reduce the long carries of yarn behind and I'm only using two colours.

Last night we went out for dinner with some friends and I wore my penultimate finished object of this post - the Crazy Stripes Tee.

I could not be any happier with the fit of this. The length is perfect, the negative ease is elegant without being nasty, the overall fit is great. The pattern was excellently written too in a large range of sizes - I can see myself knitting this again in different colours.

And then finally, I have started making a set of coasters, of which two are finished.

These are inspired entirely by Pins on Pinterest and also gave me the chance to try my sewing machine's blanket stitch function, which is very handy for raw edge appliqué. I only used it on the cat's stripes but it worked well so that opens up another avenue of sewing to be explored.