It’s Official…

I’m a grandmother.

Jen and baby Chase.

Karen

Vancouver…

Well I’m off to the airport in a couple of hours and from there to vancouver for ten days. Will blog when I get back, everyone else have a good summer/winter?

Karen

Violet to Lemon Yellow Run and Tea Wallets

Thought I would post a colour run I did the other day for one of my group swaps. Jaquard’s violet and Dharma’s Lemon yellow.

Purple to yellow run using violet MX-2R and yellow MX-8G

I also made a couple of tea wallets yesterday using some hand-dyes of mine. The blue and white is Shibori using a larch stitch and the other colours are ProChem’s avocado, burnt orange and rust brown.

Tea wallets showing shibori on outside in Prochem’s indigo blue.

Inside of tea wallets, ProChem’s avocado, burnt orange and rust brown.

Tea wallets with four tea envelopes in the inside pockets.

These cute little tea wallets were made using a tutorial from a clever blogger at Christy’s creations. Look to the right bar and click on tutorials.

Karen

I’ve Been Tagged…

I’ve been tagged and this is a new one for me. Judy tagged me and the rules are that you go to your fourth folder in your pictures and pick out the fourth picture.

I did that curious as what was there but found I only had two pictures besides which this is a crafting blog for the most part so I went to my fourth folder of blog pictures and this is the fourth picture:

This is a close-up shot of one of the five scarves I made for the bridesmaids for my daughter’s wedding. The seedbeads were a blue montanna with a jet black bead inbetween. It took forever to make these and part of the reason I’m fatter today as I spent to much time working on wedding crafts instead of going outside and exercising like I should. LOL, or at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking by it.

The next four people I’d like to tag are:
Catherine – http://calidore.wordpress.com/
Thelma – http://thelmassewnthings.blogspot.com/
Michelle – http://stitchandpaint.blogspot.com/
Tracy – http://tracyborders.blogspot.com/

These are all wonderful girls who have fantastic blogs so go have a peek at their work.

Karen

Christmas Tree Skirt

Currently I’m working on a Christmas tree skirt. I’d planned to have it done and it’s possible that I might have except I want to machine quilt it and have decided to wait until after Christmas to do so because I’m getting a new MegaQuilter from Husqvarna for Christmas. My current machine is prone to bunching up thread on the underside of whatever project I’m working on so I’m not even going to try working with that machine.

Anyhow, here is a picture of the skirt so far:

Christmas tree skirt pattern by Lynette Jenson “Thimbleberries”

The pattern is from Lynette Jenson’s book “The Thimbleberries Book of Quilts”. The original pattern was very nice with three different shades of red material for the scalloped part and white in the middle with plaid bias. I didn’t really like the reds I had in my stash so I went with Christmas fabric instead. I found that the piece was too small for my tree and that the presents wouldn’t really sit on the skirt so I decided to extend it by adding some white and gold print fabric. I then blanket stitched around the scalloped edge to match the stitching on the holly leaves and berries in the middle section.

The benefit of adding this material aside from extending the skirt is that I won’t have to deal with fiddly bias binding around scallops. I do have some plaid to bind the edges so hopefully it’ll spruce up the gold print and give it some definition. The extra space will give me more practise room for some feathers I want to learn to machine quilt. I figure even if it turns out to be a rough first piece of machine quilting, the quilt itself will mostly be covered up by presents anyhow.

Karen

The Old Cherry Tree

Two blogs in one day what’s this world coming to? I was going to work on the garden today but somehow the dead cherry tree out back called my name instead. My husband said that he needed a chain saw to cut it down but I thought to myself why couldn’t the new 12″ pruning saw I bought recently work instead?

I have to admit that I didn’t cut the whole tree down and when it does come to cutting the thick trunk then a chain saw would help (not that I don’t think I can’t use the pruning saw). I did do some serious damage on the tree though.

The tree had fire blight for several years but we didn’t realise it until most of it died off last year. Unfortunate because it had gotten to the point of producing some huge cherry crops, the kind you pay big bucks for in the store. Each year the birds and racoons would ravage the cherries and we were lucky to get any at all except for the last couple of years when the tree was so big they couldn’t keep up.

Anyhow it all gone now except for two small branches one of which is a waterspout branch. I not sure what will happen next year with the two branches but we’ll see. Even if the tree still lives I can’t see it doing anything as the one main branch is growing on an limb and at some point will probably break off.

Here is a picture of the mess I have to go clean up as soon as I’m done taking a break from writing my blog:

Dead (for the most part) cherry tree in backyard of our home.

John is fixing the kitchen window, which has been rotting away for the last couple of years. He’ll paint it once he’s replaced the trim.

John working on kitchen window

Time to go the boys are leaving for university and the holiday can be considered over.

Karen

Fabric Organizer

Just a quick blog to show off my new giftie that I received in the mail yesterday from Catherine. It came all the way from Australia here to me in Canada. Catherine is a most wonderful blogger who does the most amazing work and she had a free give away to celebrate her 700th (I think 700th) post and I was one of two winners, yeah me! Her blog is Calidore and can be found in the blogroll at the side of this blog.

Anyhow here is a picture of the organizer.

Outside of organizer, velcroed shut.

Inside of organizer with space for a little notebook and small sectioned off pockets that can hold pens, pencils, crochet hooks, small scissors, etc.

I love how the outside apples are echoed by the apple fabric prints on the inside. Catherine was kind enough to put some brochures in the organizer so I could read all about the area in which she lives, a very clever idea that I’ll have to remember next time I have a give away. All in all a fantastic gift, thanks Catherine so much.

Karen

Turquoise Lemon Yellow Tank Top

Just a quick blog as I’ve spent most of the day away and busy. Here is the picture of the turquoise and lemon yellow tank that I dyed up yesterday. Lol you can see me from a mile away in this top, nice and bright for sure. Kinda pleased with the colour combo even if I do stand out like a whale in it.

Turquoise – Lemon yellow tank dyed with Dharma dyes.

Karen

I’ve been tagged…again.

I’ve been tagged again and so in the spirit of the game I’ll list six unimportant things about myself but since most of the people I know have been tagged I won’t bother tagging anyone else (sorry if this isn’t part of it).

1. I’m a sweet freak, love my chocolate, cookies, icecream etc, etc.

2. I’m a horder to a degree. I love buying fabric, yarn and craft goodies that someday I may make into something, I do use some of the stuff (honest).

3. I listen to Triple M Sydney radio through the Internet even though I live in Ontario, Canada. I love the music mix they have and their music appeals to me more than the North American stuff. LOL, I can sing along to all the commercials.

4. I’m mostly a homebody. Travelling is great but I like being at home. My husband loves the cruises we’ve been on so probably more of those are in our future.

5. I have a cat named Nicky who is an orange and white tabby. He’s about 15 years old and although he looks to be in great shape the poor old guy doesn’t move like he used to. I look at him and see myself as I hobble around with my stiff back, we’re both getting older.

6. I have a fantastic husband whom I love very much (along with four grown kids). He’s very…well I was going to list all the great things about him but it’d probably be to mushy and sentimental and take up a lot of space (as if this sentence isn’t) so I’ll leave it at that.

Karen

Swirl tutorial – The Quick and Easy Method

I showed some of these swirls in an earlier post and people asked me how to do them. I have to admit that I didn’t think up this method on my own, the idea came from my friend Margo who abides in the same fabric-dyeing forum I belong to.

Typically in tie dyeing you take your shirt and pinch it in the middle (or where ever) with either a clothspeg or fork and then start to twist the material around the object holding the cloth. After you’ve gathered all of the material you tightly bind the fabric with twine or elastics and then dye it.

For this method you do the same thing but instead of binding off the material you just plop it into a bowl or container and then dye it. It’s a more relaxed way of doing the same thing. Personally I don’t think the swirl is quite as defined as the first method but for the amount of effort involved its great. I wouldn’t recommend using this method on a large amount of material rather we’re working with about 12″-14″ square here. (Having said that I used a left-over scrap of a fat-eighth so mine won’t be exactly circular when it’s washed out.)

Piece of soda-soaked fabric ready to swirl.

Fabric being pinched in middle.

Starting to twist material around clothpeg.

Keep twisting adjusting folds into smaller pleats as necessary.

Finished swirl.

Plop into small bowl.

Hair dye bottles with MX dye.

Applying boysenberry dye in pie-shaped wedges.

Filling in the other spaces with sapphire blue.

Flipping over swirl.

Applying dye to the other side.

Transferring swirl to clean bowl to prevent fabric from getting soggy with collected dye in bottom of bowl.

Personally I didn’t feel I’d applied enough dye to the first side so I flipped over the swirl and added a bit more dye over top the areas already dyed. I wiped up the extra dye in the bottom of the container after doing this to prevent the colours muddying.

Final step covering the bowl to let the swirl batch for 24 hours before the wash-out.

And that’s all there is to it. I’ll have to see how it turns out tomorrow when I wash it out. I might point out that there are different ways of dyeing the swirls. I was going to keep it simple and just dye with two colours in which case I would have applied the same colour of dye to the corresponding pie shaped wedges on the back. My problem was I grabbed the yellow instead of the boysenberry. So since I grabbed the wrong colour I decided to dye the whole back area yellow. What should happen is that I’ll get yellow stripes in between the red and blue. It’s a small piece of fabric so we’ll see how it turns out. If you’ve ever seen a rainbow swirled tie-dye with black stripes in between the colours you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Karen