For those who have been in the studio and even just those who have read the blog, it is apparent that light colored carpet was a very bad flooring choice for the studio. I have been considering my options.

The studio is the original 1930’s garage for the house, so is just an oil stained concrete floor beneath the carpet. One option would be to just clean and paint the floor and call it good. Easy maintenance, but a big bummer on the legs and back when standing to cut or dye fabric.

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Late last year I noticed a new book on skinny quilts. I was immediately drawn to the quilt, but in looking at it, I determined it was something that I could do. Showing up at my weekly Friday sewing group 3 of the other 4 members saw the same book and were also drawn to the quilt. Fast forward to January when the designer of the quilt visits our quilt guild and has a workshop to create the quilt from the book.

I didn’t really feel I needed the class, but I knew that if I signed up, I would actually get the quilt made. That turned out to be true.

This quilt required lots of different pieces of fabric. I used 4 colors and I dyed 4 shades of each color and 6 values (light to dark)  of each color so that made 24 pieces of fabric for each of my 4 colors for a grand total of 96 pieces. Thankfully I only needed a small amount of each fabric. I ended up using fat 16th’s (9×10 inches). That said, the quilt probably only uses only 40 of those pieces of fabric.

This project also got me to dry dyeing yarn. I’ve always wanted to try it, but have never gotten around to it. It was a lot of fun and it turned out much better than I could have hoped for in a first try.

Now that it is temporarily hung in the bedroom I think it needs to be a triptych. I don’t like the light just at one end. I think I will make a second one and cut it in half and hang one above and one below with the light on the opposite end. That way I visually get light at both ends. Hopefully it won’t take me another 3 months to make that happen and see if it matches the vision in my head.

I needed a quick quilt for someone in the hospital. Hospitals are so drab and if you have to spend any time there you really need something brighten up the room.

I designed a quick layout of squares and rectangles. Two squares and one rectangle make up the quilt blocks. I played around with sizes and decided to make quick work of the project, bigger was better. A good size turned out to be based on 16 inch blocks.

To ensure that it was nice and cozy, I used flannel for both the front and the back. The colors didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted, but it worked for the purpose.

I am working on some UFO’s that I inherited from my grandmother. She had several boxes of projects in various stages of completeness when she passed away.

I have been working to complete some of the projects to give to the grand kids. My goal is to try to divide up what I have so that each family gets a lap size quilt. Since I only need 7, I think I will have enough pieces to work with. All but one of them are scrappy quilts. The projects that she was last working on were simple one patch designs using 5 inch squares of scrap fabric. I have one completed and she has enough squares cut and started for at least 1 or 2 more.

Another box contained scrappy 9 patch squares. She saved her small scraps and using a piece of cardboard and a pen, traced squares on her scraps and cut them out with scissors. Many she already had sewn together, but there are several fabrics left in the box to make squares out of. I think if I put some borders around the squares I can get 3 or 4 quilts out of these squares.

So the question is, do I border the squares in Light Tan or Black? Click on the pictures to see the full view.

Light Border Option

Dark Border Option

There is a book out on skinny quilts that all my friends seemed to have. It has a quilt on the cover we all liked and kept saying we were going to make, but none of us got around to it. Along comes the guild speaker for January, the designer of the quilt, Carol Taylor. I knew this was my opportunity to play with the technique and give me the motivator to dye all of the fabric needed for the project.

Dye Cups

My hand dyed fabrics work great for gradations of value, so I was excited to get started. We needed 4 values; light, med light, med dark and dark. We needed 10-12 pieces of fabric for each value. I wanted to have 4 colors, so that worked out to a minimum of 3 different hues of each color. I decided to do 4 just to have some extra to choose from. I also decided to do 6 values of each color. Just in case I didn’t like the lights and trying to get as dark as I could.  So off to work I went. The first step was to cut up 96 pieces of fabric. We didn’t need much fabric so I died Fat 16ths of fabric. For the non-quilters a fat 16th is a piece of fabric approximately 11×9 inches. Then it was on to the dyes. Mixing fun colors and putting everything in tiny cups. I know it looks like they are all black, but really they are each a different color.

Rinsing Fabric

Purple floors

Everything was going well until the rinsing began. I did my usual quick rinse in the sink and then ran buckets of hot water to let the fabric soak. While it was soaking I called mom to chat and began cleaning up a bit. At one point I noticed one of the buckets didn’t have enough water in it. I figured I was distracted and just didn’t fill it up, so I added about 2 gallons of water to the bucket. Time passes, the room is looking better, but ….. The purple fabric bucket doesn’t have any water in it. Now this time I know I had water in there. Sure enough, one of my favorite buckets cracked and let all the water out of the bucket and on to the floor. It leaves a lovely purple circle on the carpet and takes 3 days of fans and heaters to dry out…. Not so much fun.

I am very late to post my update, but I did get my room cleaned up. Of course it has been messed up and cleaned several times since this picture was taken and could use another pickup. Especially in the often neglected closet.

Just in case there are some doubters, I took the following pictures on January 14.

December was a very busy month in the studio. I had to complete 4 photo memory Christmas trees and a baby quilt before I could start on my Christmas cards. Since December is also the month of deliveries, several needing signatures, I also needed to spend a bunch of time in the house. The result was a quilt room in chaos and a family room not much better.

Today I packed up everything that was laying about the house and carried it out to the studio. When all was said and done, this is what I was left with.

I started the cleanup today and made some real progress. I hope to have it finished by Thursday. I need to begin dyeing some fabric for a class I am taking at the end of the month. Unfortunately I can’t dye with the studio this messed up. I would end up with dye all over everything.

The really funny thing is that this happens almost every year. This year Bill asked me on Sunday evening if I would like his help straightening. As much as I would have loved the help. I don’t know if I could have even begun to tell him how he could help.

I was reminded last night how much I have been neglecting my blog.

I have been busy the last couple of months on some surprise Christmas gifts. They seem to be taking me a lot longer to finish than I had thought that they would.

Unfortunately that means that I haven’t been working on other projects like Christmas cards and a baby shower gift.

I am hopeful for a very productive next couple of days…. We will see.

I challenged myself to finish my braid quilt in time for the SCVQA quilt show. I knew that I would put off quilting this one if I didn’t have a deadline. The quilt show seemed like the perfect opportunity to give me that deadline. I thought the quilt lent itself to a fairly easy choice for a quilt pattern, even on my standard domestic machine.

I decided to follow the zig zag patter of the braid across the quilt. I started with the middle row and quilted from one side of the quilt to the other. I then worked my way to the top and bottom of the quilt by quilting every 4th row. By only quilting every forth row I got the layers sabilized more quickly and it enabled me to give up sooner, if I ran into a lot of problems. I can’t say that I was super speedy, but it really wasn’t difficult. I was able to use my walking foot, since it was straight lines, so it wasn’t stressful at all. I ended up quilting every other row. At the top and bottom border I just continued the same quilting pattern.

I’m happy to say it is complete and it looks great in the guest bedroom.

Bill’s Grandmother fell and broke her knee this week. She is going to have to spend several weeks in rehab. While Bill and I love being out here, it is really hard at times like this, to be away from family. We really wanted to do something to let her know that we were thinking of her. I thought about different things I could make for her room to brighten it up, but in the end we decided that a colorful pillow would be the best choice. Thankfully I had a stash of flannel to use but I needed a pillow. I made a quick trip to the fabric store, but would you believe that they were out. Thankfully Michaels was right down the street and they had just what I was looking for.

I sketched out my design and starting cutting fabric. I decided to put the heart on with a fringed edge so that I didn’t have to worry about fraying flannel applique. I’m not sure that I loved how that came out, but it worked for this project.

Update: Grandma is out of the hospital and doing well. Our hug from California was a huge success. If you know someone who is going into the hospital I highly recommend something like this to let them know you are thinking of them, even when you can not be there.