Domestic creativity

Radio silence, because this is what has taken up much of my creative, as well as physical and mental energy.

Many, many packing boxes. Note they are all unpacked.

On the upside, the boxes revealed this:

I'm in here

Which contains this:

See?

and this:

And here?

This came through while we were on the move, so I'd not had a chance to properly dwell on it before.

Nothing like seeing your name in print to tide you over some creative doldrums.

And the best thing is, there's another in the pipeline. 

WIP or UFO

This is a project that is inhabiting that limbo land between WIP and UFO. Which is it?

This is when I started having doubts. 

Even Dearwife is finding it hard to stop laughing be encouraging, and she is usually extremely supportive of even my most misguided creative endeavours.

Its the beginnings of an elephant, and it was to be my first softie.

It looks less like a poo now i've attached the ears.

But, you know, I'm not sure about the pattern. Im still reserving judgement, because its hard to tell until its finished, but I'm not chuffed that the animal will be top heavy. Rather than weight it with beans, which means it cant be washed, I foolishly stuffed it with toy pellets, which are now working their way out between the loops and shedding all over the floor. Poor thing looks like it has some awful disease.

My softie's shedding choke hazards. I see here he is mysteriously covered in cat fur, so someone in the house must love him.

The yarn is just awful to work with - its flocked, so it gives a lovely soft fabric, but the stitches are impossible to see, which makes the work impossible to read. That means there was a lot of rework going on, and I found it nigh-on impossible to reuse the yarn that had been frogged.

So, I  ran out of the yarn which I bought in the UK, and is not available here, so he's going to have to have pale purple legs. And possibly eyelids. (and oh jeez, don't even talk to me about safety eyes. Safe for whom, exactly?)

Disaster all round, but I'm not quite ready to give up on him.

I am going to have to do something about his pellet problem, though, and I fear it might be terminal.

Planning, and packing, and planning to pack.

Whoa! Life has been a little chaotic recently, in a good way, hence the radio silence.

Below is a post I never got around to posting. You'll see why...
 

We are looking down the barrel of a big, big move in a couple of weeks time, which will entail all of my beautiful Stuff being out of bounds for something like 3 months. Eep.

I've spent an unsatisfying few months not quite finishing things, but getting my WIPs into a parkable state for shipping. Last weekend, while the BoyGoblin had the Biggest Nap Of All Time, I finished the machine sewing on the final project I will make in the UK. I know this is true, because when I was done,  I packed up my machine, removed the needle and foot, and tucked it gently into the corner of Stuff To be Shipped. (Momentuous times call for Many Capitals.)

We ended up with 100 of these.

And it feels pretty momentous, frankly. Never mind that we have spent the last few weeks cleaning shoes, counting CDs, sorting paperwork (essential (to be shipped), irreplaceable (to be flown on our persons) and shreddable (not to be confused with the previous)) and revaluing everything from lithographs to lampshades. The moment I really felt my stomach drop was when I unscrewed the little knob on the machine and removed that needle.

I'm not quite going cold turkey as I’ve already started planning a strategy to keep me crafting throughout. Some projects will need to come on the plane, and others will be stashed in the suitcase. Some wull be stashed in the suitcase and then removed at the last minute in favour of traintracks and sticker books, and posted instead. (Its a tough call, but I think Boygoblin is marginally more cranky than I in the absence of playthings.)



BoyGoblin was quite clear he wanted to come
 in the plane with us, but he did think hard when
his train set was packed for the ship.

Some might think there are better things to plan for (job search? housing? childcare?) but I know better.

Revising a rewritten fond memory

So, you know when I said I had cracked it – a crochet motif that would make up into a cosy and lacy blanket?


These feel to me like currency when I stack them like this.

Turns out I hadn’t. When I laid them out, they didn’t pass muster. too small and bitty looking, but more importantly, DearWife thought they were too solid.


What seemed to be a promising start, wasnt...

Now, though, I think I’ve cracked it. I added a round of well-spaced trebles and chains. Fiddly, and it’ll be a ‘mare to sew together (I hate working into chains, but forgot that until it was too late) but I think it works.

I think they'll come together nicely.



Chasing rainbows

For the past four weeks my sewing studio has been out of bounds – first filled with houseguests, and then packed up for the painters, (neither DearWife nor me being the sort of domestic goddesses who relish redecorating, our response to chipped walls being “get the little men in!”)  and finally carefully dressed and posed for sales viewings.

Well, the men have been and gone, as have the estate agents. I spent most of last night reassembling the space the way I really like it, and rather a lot of time simply fondling my stash, if you know what I mean.



Lovely rainbows



And all this led to me starting a bit of an impulsive project – a colour-sorting table mat for the BoyGoblin that I’ve had in mind for a while. Using spare charm squares from the Eye-spy quilt, and scrap batting too.



Coloured cars waiting for their parking spaces



I’m using it to practice quilting freemotion quilting, and I am truly rubbish at it. I’ve stitched and unpicked so many times that the cotton is starting to look like tulle, and I have a pile of threads the size of a pelican’s nest on the sewing table. Arrgh! and those threads are getting everywhere! I noticed one caught in my stockings yesterday at work. Whoops!

Updating a fond memory or two

DearWife remembers a couple of old-fashioned granny blankets she grew up with, and asked me to make one for the BoyGoblin.

I had an old-fashioned granny blanket when I grew up too, and remember the gaps in the crochet making me feel cold and catching my toes.  DearWife remembers wrapping her fingers through the holes in her blanket and feeling cosy.

So, my challenge was to update the granny afghan, making it solid and cosy and lacy and cosy. It’s going to a hot climate too, so it needed to be fairly lightweight. Oh, and not scratchy – we’re all sensitive to wool over here.

And, of course, I still have a thing for hexes.

Lacy centre and solid border

And I think I might have cracked it. And Best of all, I can make 2 or 3 or these a day on the train to work.

Lovely yarn

I’ve picked a set of grey foamy greens from Red Heart’s Bamboo Ewe. Not easy to get hold of over here, but a delight to work with, and quite reasonably priced.

I wanted blue greys, like the colour of a dark twilight sky, with a red or yellow highlight, but you can see here how the oceany greens won me over.

The yellow yarn is for some the sky-themed motifs that will be appliquéd on the bottom corner when I’m done.

Here are the prototypes – the plane is just how I imagined it (just need to extract the pattern now) but the balloon needs work.

The pink protoype yarn was binned last night -
its horrible to work with

My studio assistant has the final word...

A calendar quilt of kittens

Goodness me, what have I done?

In 2010, World of Cross Stitching magazine gave away a diary featuring twelve little designs of Nelson and Tibbs. I like a portable project for  my commute to work, and I thought these would be ideal. So far so good.

By mid-March I had finished the twelve, and as by that time we found we were pregnant, I thought that taken as a set they would look good as a wall hanging for the nursery. Again, so far so good.

The next bit is a bit hazy, but I suspect it has something to do with the excellent and beguiling Fatquartershop and resulted in a package arriving containing a jelly roll, 3 yards of backing fabric, and a pattern book.

The pattern was perfect. Almost. I set about altering it so that the central squares could accommodate the cross-stitch panels – they needed to be bigger.

And then my head exploded, as I realised that that meant the inner framing needed to be longer as well, which meant I had just enough fabric. Just. But only if I juggled everything around a little and made not even one little mistake.

Combine that with the embroidered panels and the fact that I had only been using a sewing machine for a week and my rotary cutter was still in its packaging. No pressure.

After a couple of sessions of stitching and unpicking, and slightly more than one little mistake, I very sensibly and calmly put Nelson and Tibbs (temporarily) into the “Work in progress” pile.

Now that the baby is nearly 18months old, and far, far more interested in diggers than kittens, I thought now would be a great time to dust the pair off and get the quilt finished.

The thing is enormous – laying it out took up most of our double bed.

Certainly too big to hang on a wall!

And its been a rescue job at every stage. My seam allowances have been just a fraction over ¼ inch, which, given that every alternate block is made of 5 jelly strips (that’s four seams) has meant I’ve had to trim all the blocks down by ¼ inch. Which is just as well because the piecing on the first embroidered blocks was so dodgy that even working to the smaller size, it required considerable fudging and ingenuity to get it all together.



 Trimming and finessing



Fudging the seam allowances

But now its nearly there. I have a back, a front, and a juicy roll of binding, and am wiating for delivery of my batting. Oh, and a free motion quilting foot.

Juicy binding

A wild night in

This is what I'm doing tonight.

sigh...

Thats right folks, I'm sewing buttons on my winter coat.

Yuk Yuk Yukky Yuk.

Last year, my coat shed buttons all winter. I wore it right with no cuff buttons, and then no double-breasting buttons, but when the actual fastening buttons on the front came off, i finlly had to admit defeat. Its been hanging in my wardrobe, sans buttons ever since.

This week, the snow, and the fact that my spare coat looks like its been lived in by a stray cat, has conspired to get me to stop procrastinating.

On the other hand, there's pinterest...

A Hex on all your houses!

This would be a very clever title for this post, except that a good portion of my hexes are actually pentagons, and “a polygon on all your houses” is less catchy, somehow.

Hexes and Pents

Four corners just aren’t enough for me at the moment. Three very different projects have conspired to make piles of polygons in our house. More later.

recycle-bin refugees

These little guys are at the heart of one of the patterns I'm picking away at at the moment. 

Two bottle caps with a shirt button ready to go inside.

The blue cap is from a 50cl buxton bottle, and the green is a 1.5L highland spring cap. The fact that with a bit of gentle coaxing they fit so neatly together is possibly the most pleasing thing I’ve done all year.

A scrunch of ugly

Sometimes when I'm working on something I suddenly think Why? Why? Why?

This was one of those times

To be fair, it a prototype, and the real thing will be rather less lurid, but still...

Christmas countdown

 

Actually, Christmas started for me about three weeks ago when I dug this out from my WIP bag.

It’s a feltworks kit from Dimensions that I’ve been pecking at for the last couple of years. I think it will take a few more to be honest.

Although I’m up to the fun bit now – these little felt tokens are useless, and fiddly, and some of them are not even that pretty but there is something about them that is oddly satisfying

sparkly!



And I’ve even managed not to leave the floor scattered with beans and sequins (otherwise known as choke hazards). Needless to say, its not quite as portable as my usual handsewing projects...