Give Away--Jinny Beyer's Quilter's Album of Patchwork Patterns

a gift for Christmas! and a give away for you.
It seems that the order was doubled and Amazon told us not to return it so I am going to have a giveaway. It will involve a drawing and I would like to ask that you describe your favorite charity and then make a donation to it for the new year. It does not have to be money. It could be a meal to a less fortunate neighbor or a scarf knitted for the red scarf project, or a quilt donated to a shelter or the Quilts of Valor. Or you could even donate blood. It does not need to be a human charity-it could be for a nature preserve or an animal shelter.
And it will be on the honor system. I do not expect you to report back. I believe you will do the right thing. After all, are we not quilters?
My daughter will pick the winner. It may or may not be a random drawing but I think it may have to be in order to be fair. I will do the drawing on January One. Drawing will be from the comments here and my other blog. (see side bar)

making piles

I have been lazily making piles of three inch diamond shapes from the Inklingo collection. I do not really have a direction or a color scheme although mostly it has been blues and violets piling up. I have raided my hand dyed stash and my plan is to cut up as much as I can in the next couple of days off.
I am most recently inspired by the Quilters Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer,which I was given for Christmas!! And not only did I have one delivered but by the grace of Amazon, I received two! And so I have been told I can do what I want with the second. Amazon is donating it because the error was made by them!
so loyal readers......what shall I do?

Got a yarn winder:)

Inklingo Giveaway!!

Be sure and visit Linda and Tilde to see the details. I guarantee you will be inspired!
Let me know if you can resist!

finished in time

Long term work in progress (wip) finished in time to be a gift. Unfortunately the recipient will not be here for Christmas day as she will be working. But at the least it is finished for her and she knows it is here.
It has been ready to have a binding applied since it was quilted by Sue Baddley a long while ago, but I guess I just did not get around to it.I even had the binding cut, left over from another quilt. How many tops do you have that need to be made into quilts. I can think of a few I have tucked away...

What I do on my day off

basically I am a big kid. One of my fondest childhood memories is looking over the deck of a ship waiting for mermaids to appear. I may still be waiting. I bought myself a new box of water soluble crayons in the city last week and they have been calling me all week. I should have spent the morning on baking and gift wrapping but this is what I did instead.

I made these...

Pattern By PurlSoho
Very Cute and what a fun way to use your felted scraps. I did a corrugated k1p1 cuff and 54 stitches to get a right sized cuff. I guess it will be different depending on what yarn you use. Good walking the rabbit mittens.

Jane Austen top

The center is done and I await the fabric ( crimson tone on tone) for the planned two inch inner border. I am not sure yet what to do for the outer border since
I am .not. no. way. going to sew together two thousand tiny diamonds. Nope.
No way. Not happening. Well, maybe just some of them..
*edited to add* This top was entirely done using Linda Franz revolutionary quilting system called Inklingo. I would never have had the patience or precision, using traditional methods, to make this top. I did use templates for some of the shapes, rather than printing, because I was using 5 inch squares from 'nickel' swaps in addition to fabric that I could use in my printer. But that just goes to show you that you can combine traditional template tracing with Inklingo with ease. Linda has many shape collections on her website! Maybe you want to let Santa know-just saying. My only affiliation is as a thrilled customer and freind.
pps. I will send the quilt our for machine quilting as soon as I save enough shekels to do so. That may take a while.

Gee's Bend Quilt Kits from Purl Soho

I love this web site. All sorts of really nice stuff, inspiration, patterns materials and tutorials.
I think I may do my own version of this. I could probably pull these colors from my stash. I absolutely love this. Did I say that twice? O well.

two more seams

I am almost finished with the center...just two more long seams which require more time than I have presently to pin and stitch Maybe tonight? more likely next week. And then I am considering the borders and heaven help me I am already planning another in my head using brights so I can use my Spoonflower panels! Without Linda Franz' Inklingo, I would not have been able to do this pattern. Printing directly on the fabric with the seam lines made the stitching effortless and accurate. As for the fabric, it was collected swapped received as gifts and purchased over the last several years. I am a fabric collector! My stash is legion!

think of the possibilities!

Juicy Bruce

my kids have a page on my space, if you want to hear their band...
They are playing at clubs in the city and will be publishing on itunes soon.

The votes were unanimous for the lighter colored center when I auditioned it from the computer. However it looks kind of drab in real life so I am tempted to choose another, The picture has three pieces cut from the brighter fabric and one from the drab one. can you guess which one I like? it is on the bottom left. My designer dh says, "It draws the eye to the center."
I think if I add some color to the border it will work well.

poppet

fabricguru.com

I am thinking one of these may do-hard to choose without auditioning...hate to buy both!



the expensive one!cat nap
birthday cabbage
Maybe you can help. I have narrowed my choices down to two possibilities....thnks for the website-Dakota essense:)

love this picture

Cute mittens from the Purl Bee

I am enjoying these quick mittens. Almost feels like cheating because
I am using felted wool and not knitting the whole things.

Not a complete loss

There may be another, brighter quilt inspired by this fabric. I am
thinking a 60 degree inklingo diamond star shape may be in the works.

NY SHeep and Wool Festival

We had a lovely time at the wool festival in spite of the weather report. There was not so much as a drizzle or a drop. The temp was nippy and the sheep were turned out in their finest. I resisted the urge to buy a whole unprocessed fleece to spin, knowing I will never actually do all the work that is entailed in actually involved in processing a raw fleece. I did come home with a couple of reasonably small bags of nice fluffy undyed corridale to play with. One day I would like to spin enough to actually make a sweater. heh. Have I told you of the theory that knitting is actually responsible for civilization as we know it? no? well maybe another post. Many fiber addicts already know this in the fiber of their being. Ahem.
(The fourth picture is the inside of a tent made of felt-a yurtish structure in that it is round. Very Cozy.)

in pursuit of a panel

I could not find a panel for my Jane Austen center, so I decided to try and make one. This is my first attempt. I will see how it works out and then if it doesn't work, I will do another! this is four panels and I will give each one a test drive.

collections

I get the need part-the feeling that you must have something to fill a need. This need comes in many forms, the need to look "right" the need to have supplies to make stuff or books to instruct or amuse, music to fill the air, space to arrange it so that you can find it, money to keep it coming. But isn't this need really just one big need that never gets filled?
Isn't it in the nature of the need itself to be unfulfilled or it ceases to exist and what part of ourselves has a preinstalled self destruction option?
So the need just keeps shifting from one aspect to another: shape shifting- to insinuate itself into whatever part is left unguarded, unprotected.
In some more refined context, it is called collecting, and this may be valid for some, safe and even profitable if a market exists. But I think for most, it is just unspecific need, drifting into our lives, fitting into whatever shape our wounds have assumed. Perhaps until we do whatever healing we need to do, before it goes away, or it does us irreparable harm.
I collect books on knitting and quilting and decorating and building: more than I will ever use...more than I can even find....in my piles. My personal stacks. I have bought bookshelves to house them and even joke about our library, but they are overflowing, unruly, and threaten to overtake what little open space we have unless the need is tamed or more likely replaced with a different, less demanding need.
Ah, but my needs are very demanding, the need for supplies and rooms to put them in, and the need for inspiration and time to implement and money to feed the supplies and keep the house and fund the inspiration. I have always been at odds with my needs, sometimes denying myself to an unhealthy degree and at other times self indulgent to the other unhealthy extreme of addiction, and mostly I have wavered somewhere in the middle, balancing on a high wire. With no net, the hushed crowd of my needs, gathered below in the dark tent.
This rave is precipitated by my not being able to find a book. One book. A book which has the pattern I need to begin the other mitten. It is here somewhere. I just know it.

pictures from out east

Pixie climbs into my bag as soon as I come home.

the girls

not much fibery activity taking place around here. too much time at work and in the car. My commuted has pretty much tripled and I am taking it day by day.
but the kittens are really cute.

the ritual

Things are preternaturally quiet here with no kids in the house.
We are performing the ritual of "cleaning of the child's room when they leave for college" today. Bailey's was not nearly as bad as the others!! I am left with several loads of laundry which may or may not be clean already but since it was wadded up into a little ball and left in a pile, who knows?
....And a couple of bags of non kitten friendly debris-but nothing too alarming. (there have been other children (plural) who shall remain nameless, whose rooms needed to be dug out with a shovel while wearing a hazmat suit but we shall not go into the sordid details here).

I have made an order from Mz Kathy Smith -do you know her? email me if you would like an email address. She supplies me with all of my notiony needs! I am ordering, "The Farmer's WIfe Sampler and cd" from her. What can I say the picture looks awesome!! I am also ordering some ginghers from her because I have been wanting some for a long time and I work!! so I can treat myself once in a while and stay away from big box places (except when I need jeans,) and support my small enterprises who work hard to compete against the wally worlds and tarjays. etc. end rant.

Yahoo woes

Hello out there! Apparently yahoo has decided I am a persona non grata which pretty much eliminates my email activity from my fellow group members. So if you are out there, I am still here, just unable to post! either on the web site or from my own email server.
sigh, life without email.

selfie

day tripping

...into my sewing room. Audio will be "the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society", on CD. Task at hand: to make serious progress on my Jane Austen Patchwork top. It is possible that I could finish the large diamonds part of the center today and then i will have to decide if I have the stamina for the 2500 tiny diamond border. Only time will tell. I am not making any promises.
I also have a physical therapy appt for my shoulder. A good tme for a break in the machine piecing activity.
I am in denial that Bailey is leaving in spite of tripping over her packing detritus every time I walk through our tiny house. How quiet it will be when she is at school. It will hit me next week I suppose when I am not seeing her each day. Twenty nine years of parenting people. Do I get a crown or something?
I did cut out a Mimi Kirchner doll and some gloves (this month's issue of Threads has a glove pattern. How cool is that?) with the wonderful felted wool that Val sent me I cannot wait to stitch on these, but I will wait till I have made some hay on the JA top.
And yes Ms. Calico, I will surely use the wonderful hand dyes that you sent to me, I was THRILLED when I opened the box and saw them along with the wonderful kitten fabric! The hand dyes will be a part of my Piano keys blocks.
And finally.......drum roll or french horns or something.... my Bird fabric. I cannot tell you how much fun this was! right up there with getting my poetry published by (someone else). One of the reasons I love my kitties is because they make us smile. Sometimes we forget how. This fabric also made me smile:) if you have ever thought about trying it, go to the Spoonflower web site and give it a whirl.It is not hard and there is a lot of inspiration and help on the site. Best 21 dollars I have spent in a while.
Just so you all know, I do not get paid for any endorsements. I only share things that I use and like. sometimes love.

Hoarder

Am I a hoarder? when did I become a hoarder? It seems to be a common thread, if you will excuse the pun, amongst quilters and knitters. I think I became this way in the same way one becomes fat. You prepare for lean times, you stock up the larder, the stash, in the same way, to forestall that inevitable time when you will not be able to get to the fabric store, not be able to find the perfect thread, notion or color. Or dinner.
I was bone thin for many years and also fit most of my belongings in a foot locker. And now-not so much. I am much rounder and have a house full of supplies to create my every whim and yet I still shop for more, rather than enjoy using what I do have. I have every kind of pencil, pastel, paint, glass, fabric, fiber, needle, cutting implement, support, gesso, journal, and container for the afore listed.
And by shop I do mean spending hours on the internet- just looking .But even the looking is a waste of that most priceless commodity: time. I do not often buy now. I have stopped collecting and now wish to decrease my stash, my girth, my corporeal weight and as I do I find I am less interested in holding on to the possessions that I have accumulated. I long for minimalist clarity.
I pass by people's tag sales and I do judge. Usually I think "what a bunch of (&*^^%.". Honestly why does any one think anyone wants to purchase their old junk. The lamp with the ladies in fruity hats dancing on the base, the three legged chairs, the bedding that they bought at the church charity sale and never opened, now encased in sticky yellowing plastic.The stuff you want to throw away but hold onto out of some misguided moral compass heading.
And then I buy something. Out of guilt maybe, for being so judgmental, so unkind in my thoughts, I once bought a book about the history of Virginia as told by rodents because I felt sorry for the author at the book signing. (It was a series, no less). yep. add that to the list of noggin thumping ways of thinking.
And now I think I will go plan for my yard sale.

plans for vacation!!!!

Make a six inch dove in the window block using english paper piecing
print out some shapes for the piano key blocks
work on Jane Austen top!!!
Cut out another mimi kirchner doll
clean my house...
at least a little...after Bailey leaves-there will be a path.
take bailey to school-boo hoo
walk every day at least once maybe bike too
physical therapy for shoulder 2x wk
make fabric designs---mine has shipped! I can't wait to see it!
paint walls pictures floors anything
cook healthy meals (poor mike needs a break from the kitchen)
post some poetry to new blg -more will be announced later on down the road.
Picture is at Allman bros concert

Mimi Kirchner

I have written here before about the wonderful dolls of Mimi Kirchner.I even made one with the pattern that was published on PurlSoho. Now she is having a giveaway on her blog. Stop in and see her Tiny World pin cushion.
It must be the season for giveaways, but I am going to end with this one:)I promise.

Frummie's giveaway too!

Frummie is having a giveaway too!!Click herefor details!
I am entering both!

Civil War Fabric giveaway

Elaine is having a giveaway of Civil War fabrics-go check out her post here
or just click on the title! She has had many posts in her comments but don't be shy.

dawn on the beach

I went to look at the ocean this morning at about six thirty. I brought my coffee and my camera and my knitting, of course. It was low tide and there weren't many people there when I walked onto the beach.
After Mike came home we went down to the beach again. The waves were huge and the tide was coming in. The jetties were completely covered and the surfers were arriving en masse. The life guards were meeting at the end of the boardwalk and I imagine that swimming will be banned. The waves looked as big as fifteen feet and the rip tide was very powerful.
Now it is noon and I want to take a nap. Twice to the beach in one day. That is more than the whole summer.