Handwork - Needle Keepers

I am starting to work on some handmade gifts.  This year I am making some wool felt needle keepers with a fruit folk art themes.  (Scroll back to the previous blog post to see all four shapes.)  I had seen these projects in a magazine and had saved the article.  I knew that one of these days I would want to make them.

So far, I have finished two of the planned twenty needle keepers.  I started working with the pear shape because the directions were given for that shape.  I am pleased to say that I think theses needle keepers are just as adorable as I had hoped they would be.  As usual though, they take a lot longer than I would have thought to make them.  It took me all day to make two of them.  So, somewhere between three and four hours each.  (This does not include the time I spent cutting out the fruit shapes or the seeds). They are a bit more complicated than they look.

I would like to share a little of what I learned along the way.  These needle keepers are made from 100% Marino wool felt, other than the seed shapes.  I used polyester craft felt for the seeds.  The wool felt minimum order size was a half yard.  I could not justify the expense of a half yard of wool felt for a few seeds.  I would like to thank my friend, Carolyn, for giving me a heads up on working with this product.  She told me that she had worked with it and found that it unraveled when she used it.  She recommended washing and drying it before trying to use it in a project.  I did that and the extra felting helped make the felting much tighter.  The colors of the felt did not fade.  They are still as vibrant as ever.  I washed similar colors such as the yellows and oranges together, but some colors were washed separately.

 I spent about three hours cutting out all the seed shapes for the pears and apples in one sitting.  The pieces are so tiny that it was really difficult to hold onto the tiny pattern piece.   I made a small template out of cardboard and cut around it.  With twenty-twenty hindsight, I realize now that I should have traced a bunch of seeds onto freezer paper and ironed the freezer paper onto the felt.  It would have been easier to handle and made cutting out the seeds much easier.  Live and learn.

Each pear is comprised for four gold pear shapes, one neutral center shape, two leaf shapes, and five seeds. You begin by sewing the neutral center to one pear shape using a blanket stitch.  Then you add the seeds, holding them down with French knots.  Once all that sewing is complete you back that pear shape with another pear shape and sew it on using the blanket stitch.  The second half of the pear is constructed in the same manner.  You sew small strips of wool felt onto a pear shape then sew the pear shapes together.  Sew both of the pear halves together and add a leaf (also two shapes blanket stitched together). 

The needle keepers are thicker than you might think from looking at the photo.  The wool felt is much thicker and heavier than craft felt.  I really think that they are going to make some nice gifts.  So far, I have made two of them.  I have three more pears, five apples, oranges, and pomegranates left to make.  I guess I had better get busy if I am going to get these things done by Christmas.

One more thought I'd like to pass on:  One year I tried to make some felt Christmas ornaments.  I used craft felt rather than wool felt.  I was very disappointed in them.  The craft felt does not have the richness and texture of the wool felt.  I was very disappointed with them.  If you want to make this type of project, I recommend using the wool felt.

New Handwork Project

I haven't been posting much lately.  I think I have had a case of the summer doldrums.  Here in the South, it is hot and humid.  (In recent years, Virginia has been branding itself as being "Mid-Atlantic", but growing up, Virginia was in the South and that is how I still think of it.)  It has been hard to get motivated to get a new project started.  However, I have finally bestirred myself and started on a project.  The year is turning, and my thoughts are turning towards autumn.  This brings up thoughts of Halloween and Christmas.  I am starting to work on some needle keepers that will be Christmas presents.

I saw a project in a magazine some years ago for some wool felt needle keepers.  As usual, I saved the article because "Someday I am going to make those."  Someday has finally arrived for this project.  The needle keepers are in the shape of fruit.  There were patterns for pear, apple, orange and pomegranate needle keepers.  Right now the photos only show the first layer of each item.  At the moment, they don't look like much, but the finished project will have a lot of decorative stitching and some beading on them.   When they are finished, they will be really cute.

This project has been hanging fire for a while.  The fruit is made from 100% Merino wool felt.  I had to order it.  The quilt shops here do not carry a lot of wool felt here, especially at this time of year.  Once the felt arrived, it took me a while to get started.  As I mentioned earlier, I have been having some motivational issues.  Now that I have all the pieces cut out, I was ready to start stitching only to find that I don't have any dark brown embroidery thread.  I had not purchased any while I was out and about because I have a few hundred skeins of embroidery thread.  I thought that surely I would have something that was usable.  Probably, many of them would do, but I want what I want, so I need to make a trip up to the craft store.  I will be heading that way tomorrow.  Now that I have things cut out, I am ready to go.  It is good to start feeling enthusiastic again. 

Anyway, this is where the project starts.  It will look much better as the stitching is added.  I will also be blogging about a Halloween project and some updates on the latest quilt. 

A note to regular readers:  I have been having intermittent telephone and internet access problems recently.  A repair person should be coming out this week and hopefully this problem will be resolved.  My husband tells me that intermittent problems are hard to fix because it could be working when the repair person arrives and they cannot find the problem.  It has been very frustrating.  I did not realize how much I depended on the internet until I started to loose access to the internet for days at a time.

Quilting Completed on my Scrap Quilt

Horizontal view.

I've finally completed the quilting on my latest scrap quilt.  I was working several hours a day trying to get this finished by the deadline for the quilt show.  Unfortunately, I missed the deadline for submitting the application and photo by two days.  This quilt will not be in the quilt show, but I am considering putting it in the state fair. 

Vertical view.

I guess entering it into the fair competition depends on whether or not I will be in town on the drop off and pick up dates for the fair.  They have some very specific dates for pick up.  If I don't pick it up within that time frame they get rid of the item by donating the item or perhaps keeping the item for himself or herself.  I have put way too much work into this quilt to be damaged or lost.  I estimated the number of stitches in the quilt based on an average amount of hand stitching in the piecing and quilting of one block.  That figure comes out to be just under eleven thousand stitches in the quilt.

Close up of the Bird in the Air block.

The scrap quilts size is 45" x 46" (114.3 cm. x 116.84 cm.)  This quilt would be sized to be a lap quilt.  I had enough fabric that I could have made this large enough to be a twin size quilt.  However, at that point I thought I might finish it in time for the quilt show if I made a smaller quilt.  I do have enough scrap that I could make another lap quilt if I use a Flying Geese block rather than the Bird in the Air block. 

View of the quilting from the back of the quilt.

Now that I have finished the quilting on this quilt, I can get back to quilting on my Star and Leaf quilt.  I would like to finish that by the fall, but it is slow going.  It is really hard to get enthused about quilting a 72" x 72" quilt (182.88 cm. x 182.88 cm.) when the temperatures are in the upper 90s Fahrenheit (approximately 35.55 C.).  Even with the air conditioning cranked down, I feel like I am roasting.  So, it will get done when it gets done.  I would like to put it in the fair though.  I just don't know if I can continue several hours a day for another month or so. 

Anyway, after many weeks, I have a project completed.  There are so many things I would like to make, but I just lack the time.  I guess that it will be finished when it is finished.  Check back next Sunday for another update on the Star and Leaf quilt.

More Photos from the Road

Peeling bark of a Birch tree.

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks.  Actually, I have been sewing like mad trying to finish the hand quilting on the quilt I wrote about in the last blog post.  Sometimes I have been sewing for several hours a day.  You would not think that a smaller quilt would take so long.  I really have to put in the hours to get the quilt finished on time; the entry deadline for the show is drawing close.  I hate working on a deadline.  In the mean time, I thought my readers might enjoy some more photos from my last road trip.

It is amazing how much the same scene can change in just a few weeks.  In May everything was a bright yellow green.  By June, the vegetation has turned a dark green.  Weeds have grown up along the roadsides.  The haze in the mountains has changed to a deep blue.  Even though I have seen the same road dozens of times, it is always different than the last time I saw it.  There is just so much to see even just walking around the yard.  I never tire of it.

There are a few different types of Birch trees in the yard.  The type of Birch in the first picture has a peeling bark.  Many of the Birch trees don't live very long here.  This one is one of the larger trees.  Many succumb to the harsh weather and terrain.  Trees that gain height more quickly tend to leave them in shadow.  They don't get enough sunlight.  They don't seem to have a good root structure for the terrain.  Many of them give way to the pull of gravity on the steep slopes.

A church along the road has a graceful presence. It has an old world feel to it.  I have seen a number of churches in this style, but I have not seen any with as much decorative work on them.  Usually they are fairly plain.   

Now that warm weather is back, the Kudzu is on the move again.   It grows amazingly quickly, covering the ground and climbing into the trees. 

Scrap Quilt for Quilt Show

I started a small quilt a few months ago to have something to work on at the sit and sew.  This was a small, lap-size quilt that I made from scrap material in my fabric stash.  The pattern of the pieced blocks is sometimes called Bird in the Air.  Not everyone saw it that way.  While I was making the blocks everyone looked at them and said that the blocks looked like fish. 

When it came time to choose fabric for the stripes, I chose blue, a water color, so that it might actually have some connection to fish.  This choice was also aided by the challenge quilt that I blogged about last Sunday.  The blue color in that quilt closely resembled the paint chip color for the challenge, Jamaica Bay.  I expected the quilt to resemble a school of brightly colored  fish swimming in  azure tropical waters.  I don't really see it myself, but a lot of people do.  And, for people familiar with the block by name, Bird in the Air, the blue color still works as blue sky.

A member of my Guild asked me if I would put the quilt in a quilt show that will be here in September.  I said that I would.  Now the challenge is to finish quilting it in time for the show.  I have to have a photo of my quilt and my application in by the first of August, only two weeks away.  I hand quilt, so it is a case of drop everything and work on this quilt.  Of course that means that I am not working on my Star and Leaf quilt.  I want to have that one completed to enter in the State Fair of Virginia this year.  That show is a little later in the year.  Or more specifically, the date that I will have to have the quilt finished is later in the year.  At this point, about half the small quilt has been quilted.  Those blocks are only four inch (10.16 cm.) blocks.  About a third of the Star and Leaf quilt has been quilted.  The latter quilt takes a lot longer because they are 12 inch blocks (30.48 cm).

Of course, working on these two quilts means that  I probably won't get the Flamenco doll started in time for the fair this year.  I am not sure that I could finish that project in time even if I started now and devoted all my free time to it.  I have so many projects in mind, and so little time to do them. 
I just keep telling myself that this is only a hobby and that there is no part stressing on when things get finished.  I like to challenge myself in competition, but I really enjoy just making things more.  If I have something to put into a competition great, but I do not want it to be the driving force behind my creativity.  Forcing myself for deadlines is probably the greatest killer of my desire to create.  I may put off the doll this winter.  Then I will have something to to put into the handmade doll competition at the fair in 2018.

Road Trip June/July 2017

As many of my regular readers have guessed, I have been out on the road again and up to the cabin.  As usual, we have been working on the cabin.  It never seems to get to an end.  The project of replacing the flooring in the upstairs is going very slowly.  We have been running into one delay after another.  I was hoping that it would be completed by September, but I think it will stretch on into November or maybe into the spring of next year.  I guess the good news is that the delays are things that are not related to the project itself, but to other things going on in our life.  If we can just find time to do the work, we might actually get it finished.

It was a very quiet Fourth of July holiday up there.  Usually the camping areas near the cabin are filled with campers.  However, the weather forecast for that week was for strong thunder storms.  Many people decided that it was not a great weekend for camping.  It did pour down rain on Friday night.  The rain just hammered down for hours.  But Saturday morning dawned clear and we had good weather for the rest of the week other than for one brief shower.  The temperatures were moderate.  Mornings were in the low to mid 60s Fahrenheit (15 to 20 C).  Most of the day the temperatures remained in the 70s, only briefly touching 80 before falling again (21-26 C). 

I wanted to put up some photos of the road trip on the blog.  This time we took a different route than we usually take.  We usually take the back roads because it makes for a less stressful trip.  However, this time we needed to be somewhere before heading up the mountain so we took a different route.  We drove up I81.  It is quicker but the traffic is heavy much of the time, although it was not too bad most of the trip.  It is the main route through the Shenandoah Valley.  Most of the commercial truck traffic uses this route.  It is not unusual to be boxed in on all sides by large trucks.  Even so, it was interesting to have a change of the scenery. 

The Shenandoah Valley is a large valley between the Appalachian and the Allegheny mountain ranges.  The highway runs closer to the Blue Ridge mountains, part of the Appalachian mountain chain.  They are called the Blue Ridge because of their distinctive bluish color when seen from a distance.  When driving in the valley, you can see both mountain ranges in some areas.  Much of the time the hills block the view of the further mountain range.   In other areas, the trees have grown so tall that they block many of the spectacular views.  This is especially true during summer when everything is in full leaf.

The first photo, taken from the Blue Ridge side, shows the Shenandoah valley below.  If you look very closely at the horizon line, you can see the faint shadow of the second mountain range on the far side.  The second photo is a view of the Blue Ridge.

The third photo is of hay bundled in the field.  This field had the hay stacked close together.  Other fields had hay bales left where the bundles were rolled.  Most of these fields don't grow anything other than hay.  Once the hay is baled, the fields are left to grow wild until the next year.  This hay was harvested recently and the field is relatively short and green.  In fields that were harvested earlier, the fields are filled with wild flowers of every color.  The predominant colors of the flowers are white and yellow, but there are also pink, blue, pink, and purple flowers.   We have had a lot or rain this year and the flowers are everywhere.

A tourist attraction called the Dinosaur Store has changed its decoration.  It used to have a dinosaur fighting a soldier holding a sword.  This year it has a huge dragon on it.  The area was a theme park that had many scenarios of humans battling dinosaurs.  Perhaps the owner received too much flack about the alternative history.  Its hard to say.   Maybe the guy just needed a place to put the dragon he made.  His art is generally made of fiberglass and foam and the pieces are very large.

The Maury River is at the moment a lazy meandering river.  And it is right up until it isn't.  Rain coming off the mountain can change this river into a swift moving river.  I have see photos of an historic flood on this river.  You would not think that such a small river could flood so much land. I snapped this photo as we crossed the river and caught the rail in the bottom of the photo.  I guess I should have edited the photo before I put it on the blog.  Next time I will pay more attention.

The last photo is of an old bridge.  The highway was built right next to it.  I don't know whether or not it is still in use for one of the back roads.  I think this was built during the time of the Great Depression (1929-1941).  A lot of the work throughout the National Parks/Forests systems was done during that time in order to give people (okay lets speak plainly here: give mostly men) some work.  All throughout the Blue Ridge Parkway you can see this type of stonework in buildings, bridges, and walls at the overlooks.

Anyway, those are some of the highlights of the photos.  I will be blogging next week on another of my projects.

Challenge Quilt

Challenge quilt.

I have been involved with a Quilting Guild this year.  Trying to keep up with their projects has kept me very busy.   One of the projects this year was a challenge quilt.  A challenge quilt is when everyone is given one theme or idea and told to go make a quilt.  It is always interesting to see that there can be so many different ways to present a single idea.  

A previous quilt exploring random patterns.

The challenge title was "What's in a Name?"  The basic idea was that you selected some combination of the beginning letter of each of your names: first, middle, maiden, last, nicknames, or multiple middle or last names.  Once you had your initials selected you headed for the paint chip aisle at the local hardware store.  You searched through all the colorful paint chips until you found paint chip colors that corresponded to your initials.  Then you had to sort through those until you found some that could co-ordinate enough to make a quilt.  Then you searched through your fabric stash or went shopping for fabrics in or near those colors.  Then you made a quilt from them.

There were a few rules for the challenge.  The size rule was very liberal.  The perimeter of the quilt could be anywhere from 44 to 140 inches.  The shape of the quilt was open to interpretation.  It could be any shape:  round, square, rectangular, or free form.  You could also add other colors of fabric as needed to make the quilt.  And finally, if you had a quilt already made and you could match the colors of your paint chips, that quilt was acceptable.  You did not have to make a new quilt.  Some of the ladies chose that route.  Being new to the Guild, and having made only a few quilts, I made a new quilt.

Generally, I hand quilt.  However, I have been so tied up with other quilting projects that I decided to machine sew this one.  I have so many quilting projects in play at the moment that I was feeling a little stressed about getting the challenge quilt completed in time.  Besides that, we will be on the road again soon, and the quilting will be sitting at home while I am busy elsewhere.  So this is one of my few machine quilts.

The paint chip colors I selected were Classic Red, Lemon Twist, and Jamaica Bay.  I added and orange and purple just to make the quilt more colorful.  Then I had to decide on a design.  The color, Jamaica Bay was the key here.  I grew up in a beach resort area.  My teenage memories were of blue sky, bright sunshine, colorful sailboat sails, and brightly colored flags fluttering in the breeze.  I wanted to incorporate those ideas into the quilt.  That is why I chose such bright colors.  I did not want to make a picture or landscape quilt, but I did want those memories to be in it.

I decided that rather than make something with a pieced geometric design that I would explore randomness.  This would be my third quilt where I have explored what happens when you let random patterns emerge.  I had five colors.  I assigned each color a number.  Purple was numbered one through four.  Jamaica Bay was five through eight.  Orange was numbered nine through twelve.  Yellow was thirteen through sixteen.  Classic Red was seventeen through twenty.  Then I rolled at twenty sided die.  Whatever number came up was the color of the piece that I sewed onto the strip. Each strip was five pieces long.  Most of the strips were cut at four and a half inches long (11.43 cm long by 1 inch (2.54 cm) wide.  Then I threw in a few shorter pieces and some that were not well cut just to mix it up a bit.

I only had two other rules.  There could be no more than two of the same color on one strip.  On strips sewn next to each other there could be no more than three of the same color next to each other. These rules kept large strips of color from becoming solid dividing lines or large blocks of color from taking over significant portions of the quilt.  So with all this in mind, I started rolling the die and piecing my strips together.  As soon as two strips were completed they were sewn together. Then another strip was made and sewn on.  There was no judging whether this strip went better next to another strip unless it violated the rules above.  If it did, I removed the strip causing the problem and rolled the die to choose another color.  It was all random.  And this is the small quilt that emerged from that.

When held with the long edges lengthwise, it appears to be a series of streaks.  It reminded me a lot of some of the photos I take on my road trips.  The photos I post on my blog of the road trips are the ones that came out crisp and sharp.  You don't see the shots that I missed, where they are blurred as we go speeding by in the car.  This quilt reminds me of those blurred images. 

In my younger years, time seemed to pass more slowly.  I had all the time in the world.  Now that I am older, time seems to pass much more quickly.  The day, is gone in a flash.  A week is over before it seems like it should have begun.  Months fly by and I am not sure where they went.  And Christmas seems like it was just here, but now I must begin to get ready or it will be here again before I know it.  And then this quilt, built on the colors of memories, appears out of randomness.  To me it represents the blur of memories moving past.  I guess you could say that the quilt represents memories moving at the speed of life.

Check back next time for a post on a different project.