Project-a-month resolution: February

Only two months in, and already the challenge has gone off piste somewhat. Lately I haven't been working on a neglected project, but a new one that needed to be completed in time for a birthday.

I started out wanting to do some beaded knitting, but I couldn’t find a pattern that seemed right, so I ended up inventing my own pattern for a crocheted scarf instead. The first step was to string quite a lot of beads onto the yarn. This was a no-brainer task for craft night, when I tend to be too distracted by alcohol, friends and funny stories to be able to concentrate on anything complicated.


(I was thinking while stringing hundreds of beads that it would be very helpful if yarn came pre-beaded. I've since found out that it does – Artyarns Beaded Silk Yarn is one brand, and jolly lovely it looks too.)

Although beaded crochet isn’t difficult as such, it’s slow. I've never done it before, and it seemed to involve a lot of pushing beads down the yarn to get them out of the way when I didn’t need them, and an equal amount of pushing them back up the yarn when I did, and not much actual crocheting.

Every second stitch on every second row has a bead added to it. The base fabric is
double crochet (or single crochet if you're North American.)

Things started to speed up when I got to the unbeaded lace part, though, which was encouraging. I chose a fairly heavyweight lace pattern so that it wouldn’t be distorted by the weight of the beaded ends. It’s a four-row pattern (called shell or fan, depending on which source you use) that’s pretty easy to remember.

The edges were a bit ragged, so I tidied them up with a row of double crochet. 

I also put some scalloping on the ends, which were looking a bit naked and wrong. 

I finished the scarf with about 30 cm of yarn to spare – lucky! I probably should have blocked it properly, but as I only finished it at 10 pm the night before it had to go in the mail, it wouldn’t have dried in time. Instead, I steam-blocked it with the iron.

And here it is, before being sent to its new home in Melbourne. Happy birthday, Louise!

  

Shameless self-promotion

I've always envied people who are good at selling themselves (except for the really pushy ones – I just want to slap them, of course). I'm a self-effacer, not a self-promoter; it's all I can do to send my CV to people to ask for freelance work. 


I've often wanted an outlet for my craft, though, in the hope of selling the odd bit of it. The idea of hanging out at Saturday markets and spruiking my wares in person fills me with dread, however. So today my clever and obliging friend Kitty came to the rescue by photographing some of my stuff –

Craft and the city – the view from Kitty's rooftop.

Japanese hexagons quilt top. (Someone pass me my sunglasses.)

William Morris lattice-patterned quilt top – out of the Chest of Shame
and on its way to a new life, I hope.

Arty shot, dahlings.

One of my knitted hot water bottle covers.

The Four Hotties. Like the Three Tenors, but woollier.

– and then setting up a MadeIt site for me.


So as of now, I will be selling stuff here. 


Thanks for tolerating this act of self-promotion. I hope it hasn't made you want to slap me.

Too many quilts!

My most recent task has been to attach the borders and mark out the quilting design on a quilt I started several years ago. This provoked me to wonder just how many unfinished quilts I have, so today I dug them all out of the Chest of Shame. There are six. 


These are just the completed quilt tops, mind. There are partially finished quilts and stray blocks all over the place, too, plus all the fabric.

The one I'm working on at the moment.

The oldest one I have lurking about, started about 15 years ago.
I still like this pattern. The thing's massive, though, and will take a lot of quilting.
Fingers, be warned.

One I started twelve or so years ago, to use up the scraps from the project above.
But there weren't enough scraps for a whole quilt, so I bought more,
creating more scraps. The vicious circle of crafting ...

Started about twelve years ago. The feature fabric is from my seemingly bottomless stash of William Morris fabrics. I was disappointed with this quilt, which is why I abandoned it. Although I like the lattice pattern and the feature fabric, the Goth black and lollipop pink are way too strong and create a licorice-allsort effect that I don't like. I'm going to try to sell this quilt top on Made It or eBay.

This is about ten years old. I started machine quilting it, as you can see,
but didn't like the effect. I still like the design, though, so will re-quilt it by hand instead.

  

The most recent of the unfinished batch. I made this as a sample for a quilt book
I was working on about six years ago. Some of the fabrics I like, others I really don't
– those spotty ones make my eyes go woozy. Overall I don't like it enough to want to put
more time and money into it, so it's also destined for Made It or eBay.

Out of curiosity I did some sums. These six quilts total more than 20 square metres (or 218 square feet, if that's how you like it). That's about a third of the floor area of my flat! 

I'm not putting them back into the Chest of Shame. They're staying on display to force me to do something about them. 

I can't afford to work full time. I've got too much craft to do.

The project-a-month resolution: January

Although it usually takes me a long time to get around to finishing a quilt, when I do finally decide to tackle this stage, I generally get obsessed and finish it pretty quickly. This project was like that. I've put in a couple of hours every day, mostly in front of the TV but occasionally when I should have been editing a cookbook, and it's done.


My favourite parts of quiltmaking are constructing the individual blocks (especially when they can be chain-pieced, a process that combines production-line efficiency and speed with the satisfaction of hand work), and then sewing down the binding. I know that many other quilters hate this bit, but I find it really pleasurable. For one thing, it means the quilt is almost finished, and that's always a relief (and frequently a surprise). For another, it's the kind of repetitive, basic hand-sewing that I find really meditative and therapeutic. And once I work up a rhythm, it's surprisingly quick. I can get through metres in no time. Very satisfying.


The quilting on this quilt is basic, but that's how I like it. The object of this exercise is to finish things, not to labour intensively over intricate heirlooms – so job done, I think.  

I've outline-quilted the centres of the blocks and run a line of quilting 
down the sashing strips.   

The border and binding. The finished size is 105 x 130 cm (41 x 51 inches). 

Three spare blocks, randomly placed on the back of the quilt.

So that's one unfinished project down, eleven to go. A good start to the crafting year, I say. 

New Year's craft resolutions

Lately, I've been seized by an uncharacteristic urge to tidy things up and sort things out, and by an even more uncharacteristic urge to act on the first urge. As a result I've completed and lodged three overdue tax returns and, less important but more relevant to this blog, I've sorted out my wool and fabric stashes. This is useful in one way but does rather hammer home what a ludicrous amount of it all I have. 


Although goal-setting has always been an alien concept to me, it occurred to me today that there might be a way to both whittle down my hoard and revive this moribund blog. 


So, here is my New Year's craft resolution: finish one neglected project a month. 


It's the quilts that are really bugging me at the moment, as they are so large and represent so much money, time and storage space. So first up is one that I started five or six years ago. The fabrics are jaunty 1930s reproductions.

The design is by Ruth van Haeff and is from Handmade Style: Quilt by Murdoch Books.

There are two different blocks, one of which has a retro fabric in the centre showing a slightly harrassed-looking woman washing and ironing, supervised by a small black dog and what appears to be one of the Flowerpot Men.

I've just noticed that I've cut the fabric in such a way as to leave two feet macabrely dangling at the top of the block. Oops.

I last worked on the quilt about three years ago, and had finished piecing all the blocks. Today I cut all the sashing strips and sewed them to the blocks to complete the quilt top, as well as preparing the backing and sandwiching the whole lot together. 


I ended up with an odd number of blocks, as I ran out of fabric and refused, for once, to buy more. I've machine-appliquéd the three spare blocks to the plain white backing, so as not to waste them (or, worse, hoard them in a drawer for the next twenty years in the hope of finding a use for them). 

As a bonus, I found everything I needed among my stash rather than having to go out and buy anything extra or new. The background fabric isn't the perfect colour – a cheery aqua would have been ideal, but I decided to go with what I had, which is a gumleaf green. That means the only extra thing I will need to buy is a small amount of fabric for the binding. 


Now it's all ready to start quilting tonight while I watch Grand Designs on TV. I call that a pretty productive and thrifty crafternoon. 

Making time

I'm constantly moaning to myself that I don't have enough time to make all the things that I want to make. It hasn't escaped me that this is because I spend a lot of time in front of the TV. I keep telling myself that this has to stop; but as much as I love making things, sitting in front of the TV is just easier. After a day of brain-straining work like editing, sitting and staring mindlessly at moving pictures appeals strongly.

Two Fridays ago, though, there was nothing on the TV and I really couldn't face re-watching a DVD that I've watched several times already (namely any Jane Austen adaptation). So instead I got out a quilt that I've been meaning to finish. I love Japanese fabrics, and this is about the fourth quilt, and the most recent, that I've started which uses them. None of the others is finished either. (The first I started was so enormous that I don't think I'll ever be able to lay it out and sandwich it together unless I borrow someone's ballroom, or maybe a sailmaker's loft.)

The design is by Ruth van Haeff and is from Handmade Style: Quilt by Murdoch Books.

I made the top of this one about six years ago, and the backing about two years ago, then stopped where I normally stop – at the thought of having to put it all together then quilt it. This is a throw-size quilt, though, so it's just small enough to be assembled on my table, which takes a lot of the tedium out of the process.

I marked out the quilting design on Friday night, pinned the lot together on Saturday morning, then spent an enjoyable few hours stitching away to the accompaniment of George Michael and the Buena Vista Social Club. I pretty soon got a blister and quite sore fingers, but as it hurt even more whenever I came back to it after a break, I decided just to sew through the pain. (Yeah, I'm hard).

I did a bit more to the quilting most nights last week (much of it in front of the TV, killing two recreational birds with one stone and making me feel less guilty about watching the box). Last night I attached the binding, and voilà, one more unfinished project finished.

I'm now inspired to tackle another neglected quilting project – once my blisters have healed.

Sorted — sort of

One of the annoying things about all my craft supplies is that they're not organised. Both yarn and fabric live in three different places, none of which is logically arranged, and my general sewing stuff lives mostly – but not entirely – in two drawers. Plus there are assorted bits and pieces – beading equipment, cutting mats, patterns, ribbons and plenty more – stashed throughout the house. The result is a lot of frustrating and messy rummaging whenever I want to do anything, which of course exacerbates my constant procrastination problem.

Yesterday I decided to take in hand one small but frequently used section of it: my knitting needles, of which I have a lot. They had been stored in three different places – how sensible! Some were randomly scattered, others still in their packets, some in a plastic box (I don't like plastic storage; it's practical, yes, but not pretty, especially the box in question, which was designed to hold one's toothbrush and toothpaste).

Now they, plus accessories such as needle gauges, cable needles and stitch holders, as well as my crochet hooks, are all here:

 

When it's not in use I can roll it up quite compactly. The roll doesn't fit some of the other doodads, such as the cables and tags for my interchangeable needle tips, but I made a matchy-matchy zippered pouch for them. 




That leaves my fixed circular needles, the ones you can't unscrew, which are a bit more of a problem. I haven't yet come up with anything that really works for these, so that's a problem for another day. In the meantime, a small section of the craft hoard is sorted.

That feels better.