Blessings Blanket

Well after spending about 7 hours yesterday on this blanket (and I do not exaggerate) crocheting the squares together I finally finished it. It was a long haul and I don’t want to see another for a long, long time. An uncharitable feeling I know given that the blanket is supposed to be made with love and care for the one it’s going to but given that it was dumped on me (can’t think of a better description) at a time when I’m snowballed under with projects I was somewhat resentful, which I guess explains why I’m human and God is God.

Blessings Blanket.

This looks good, you may not think so but given what I had to work with it turned out really well if I do say so myself. The squares were all contributed by ladies of our group and were “supposed” to be 12″x12″, needless to say they were not and a lot of them weren’t even square so the challenge was how to join the squares together and make them look good and to tell the truth they didn’t even look good colour-wise sitting on the bed. I should have taken a before picture but I’m always forgetting the before pictures.

Once again I turned to one of my favourite bloggers “Thornberry” and in one of her posts were these two links:
Heartmade Blessings comfortghans

Flat Braid Method

In her post Thornberry posted a picture of a flat-braid method that she had used to join some crocheted squares together. Imagine my surprise when I went to the first web page and found out that this method is being used by a lady in another blessings group to join donated squares into blankets. I’m wondering which of the people I complained to prayed for me, lol.

Anyhow the biggest problem was trying to figure out how many stitches should be in each square and then crocheting a single row of crochet around each square so they each contained the same number of stitches. I couldn’t decide on the number of stitches so I added up all the stitches in each square, added them together and divided by the number of total sides I had from 12 squares. Then I either added or subtracted stitches from each side.

Once each square had this row of stitches it just became a matter of learning how to do the flat-braid join and crocheting the squares together. The second web address is a link to youtube where a wonderful lady spent the time to demonstrate this method. She does a good job of it and this method of joining the squares together helps to ease in the differences in the lengths of the squares.

I had been given a large ball of navy (that’s all we had in the bin) but ended up using some black that I had on hand at home. I think the navy would have looked good but the black helps to perk up the colours. I needed two balls of the yarn. I used up one ball and then part of a second; each ball was 7 oz so I probably used 8-9 oz of yarn total in joining the squares.

Karen

Edited to add: I dropped off the blanket today and the ladies were thrilled. It was agreed that joining the squares were a major chore and hassle so now I’m feeling better that it’s just not me that feels this way. LOL, I was feeling uncharitable because it’s supposed to be a blessing blanket but I’m muttering under my breath the whole way.

Newsboy Cap

One of my most favorite blogs to visit is Thornberry – http://thornberry.wordpress.com/ – and a couple of weeks ago she posted a picture on her site of a newsboy hat that she’d crocheted. Inspired I decided to make one of my own.

“Swirls Cap” pattern by Sophia Kessinger of Ravelry.

This is my version of it done in Paton’s Classic Wool Merino – Harvest. The hat is on the small size for this type of yarn and hook size but since the girl I made it for is undergoing chemotherapy and has lost her hair I’m hoping it will fit. It’s snug on my head but I have a large head and she’s more petite so I hope she likes it and it’s not to scratchy for her. I told her grandmother if she wants another type of yarn and colour to let me know. Hard to be so young but have to endure such an awful disease as cancer.

Karen

So Cool

Just a quick picture I thought I’d share of some material that I dyed to match some Handicrafter Cotton that I’d crocheted for a tote. This is a simple tote bag that I’m working on and I’m going to put a lining in it so items won’t fall out through the holes.

Bernat Handicrafter cotton – English Lavender and Hand-dyed fabric – Lavender Mist by ProChem. (I swear I didn’t know the names before I typed them out, lol)

The thing that I find is so “cool” is that I now have the knowledge to go grab my swatch book and match colours to objects that I am making. No more being limited by what the fabric store has to offer.

Karen

Potato Dextrin Resist

My fabric-dyeing group had a Water Resist swap this month and I decided I’d try using the potato dextrin that I’d had sitting around for about a year. This is one of those projects that you think to yourself “That looks cool, I’ll give it a go” and you order the stuff but then you keep procrastinating doing it because it looks complicated and time consuming. Of course the reality is that just like other things you put off doing, once you start it’s not hard at all.

The first step is to pre-soak your piece of fabric. I had a piece of ecru that I didn’t care for but always thought would look good with some black added to it so this is the piece I used. I let the material dry and then made up the dextrin. I looked up the instructions on ProChem where I bought the dextrin. I found it somewhat disturbing to find out that I’d need the whole bag for 1 yard of cloth. Call me a tightwad but at over $5.00 a bag all of a sudden the price of my homemade fabric shot up.

I didn’t have space to lay out the whole one yard piece so I divided it into two pieces. This turned out to be a good move on my part as after practising on the first piece I was better at the second. I taped a piece of plastic down to the table and then taped the fabric to the plastic and spread half of the dextrin over the material and let it dry.

Dried potato dextrin.

I guess the idea behind taping the fabric (aside from making it easier to spread the dextrin) is to keep it taut while it dries, it didn’t work as the plastic pulled away from the table and buckled. This happened both times so I don’t know the answer.

Anyhow next I made up some print paste from a recipe that ProChem has on their site. I did this because I wanted to slow down the rate at which the dye crept into the cracks. I’d heard from others that if the dye is too liquid then it just seeps under the resist and you get yuck results. The print paste was very thick and I was worried it was too thick but by the time I added the dye solution it thinned out. It was kind of interesting because I kept adding more and more dye and every time I stirred the dye stock into the print paste at first it’d be runny and then thicken up but by the time I reached the end of the dye stock it was of a good spreading consistency.

Thickened dye made with print stock paste.

Next I applied the dye into the cracks with a foam brush.

Material with dye applied over top of the potato dextrin.

I covered the top of the material with plastic and let it batch for 24 hours and then did the washout. In some areas the potato dextrin worked but in others I had applied it to thin and the dye absorbed through the resist and instead of a crackle I got a more solid looking area.

Finished material.

I wasn’t pleased with the fabric because it didn’t turn out the way I was expecting. It’s very washed out and how I got some darker tan spots in there I’m not too sure. The dye was blacker along the edges where there was no resist so it made me wonder if the resist was interfering with the action of the soda ash (you can see some darker dye just at the bottom edge of the photo). In Ann Johnston’s book “Color by Design” she recommends adding the soda ash to the potato dextrin when you’re cooking it up, unfortunately I followed the ProChem website recipe.

For my second piece of cloth I decided to add soda ash to the print paste/dye mixture as I’d already cooked the dextrin. The results were much better – darker so it does make a difference. On this piece I also tried to apply the potato dextrin in a thicker layer. Unfortunately I ran out of the dextrin so on the one end the dye is darker because the resist is thinner. The thinner the resist the finer the crackles and they are closer together as well so overall the fabric looks darker. I made up a paste of flour and water and applied that to the rest of the fabric.

I’d either made the paste to thick or didn’t spread it thin enough because it was very hard to break it up into cracks and I found when I applied the dye that the dye didn’t seep down through the cracks but some did so it’s interesting. I might had gotten better results if the whole piece of fabric was flour/water because it was difficult to manipulate the fabric to get the cracks because the potato dextrin resist was a finer resist and it was easier for it to flake off when I moved the fabric.

Potato dextrin resist on left with flour/water resist on right.

Larger overall photo.

Potato dextrin resist.

Flour resist.

I’m pleased that the second piece of resist worked out. If I had a cheaper supply of potato dextrin then I’d try another couple of pieces but given how much I pay for importing fabric and dextrin it works out to about $12/yard and I can buy ready made fabric cheaper than that. I think I’ll try this again but with a cornstarch resist and see how that works out, it’d be less costly.

Karen

Flooding…

I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the creek that flooded yesterday. We had a couple of days of temperatures around 8-9 degrees C and with the higher temperatures and rain it was inevitable that the creek flooded.

If you scroll down a couple of posts you can see a picture out the back door that shows the creek as it normally looks. We’ve had a tremendous amount of snowfall this winter so in a way I’m glad that we had a partial melt-off otherwise the flooding would have been even worse in the spring and with much more rain besides.

Creek February 12th, 2009 in the morning very overcast and raining, high winds. This shot was taken about an hour before the creek was at the height of the flooding. Some ice floes over on the right blocking the creek bed.

Later in the afternoon more chucks of ice.

Empty sunflower seed hulls from the birdfeeder on my deck, what a mess…

Creek February 13th, 2009. The water has receded somewhat. Nice sunny day and I’m near the edge of the bank. Some big ice floes there and the water current isn’t flowing as fast, wonder if it’ll freeze up and kids will go skating?

Another shot down the bend.

More ice floes. The trees are willows down there.

Karen

The “Oh Well” duvet cover.

I have been working on several projects but haven’t taken the time to blog them as most are as yet unfinished but I thought I would post some pictures of a quilted duvet cover that I helped my friend make for her daughter. Her daughter is returning to Australia to finish up her schooling so we were under a time constrant to do this so as two heads and four hands are better than one person I invited my friend over and we used the new MegaQuilter to piece the top together.

“J” working on assembling the pieces.

Moi sewing squares together.

The problem with this quilt top was that J’s daughter had bought two single bed pre-cut kits but the duvet itself was for a double-sized bed so we had to adjust all the measurements to fit 86″ square. Shouldn’t have been a problem but J’s mom had pre-cut the material with her grandaughter but seeing as she was elderly her hands didn’t have the strength to cut straight and many of the blocks were off in size. J’s mom has since passed away so the material was precious because it was the last project she had worked on and J’s daughter had been with her at the time.

J’s daughter had bought extra material to go along with what was in the quilt kits – the kits didn’t include border material. Some of this extra border material had been cut for the four patch squares we were sewing together. Well long and short of it was there wasn’t enough material to make all the squares needed for a double sized top and there wasn’t enough material for borders because some of it had been cut for squares.

Somehow they managed to cut the material in such as way that there was no extra. It’s the one thing I hate about pre-cut kits, there isn’t any extra material if you should happen to make a mistake and the kits were bought long enough ago that we couldn’t go and buy extra fabric. J’s daughter said that she bought two identical kits but the fabric just didn’t work out. Either the quilt shop shorted them fabric or there was different material inside each kit. It didn’t matter what each kit had as somehow we had to make it fit.

The mantra for the quilt top soon became “Oh well”. The seams didn’t match – “Oh well”. The blocks were cut different sizes – “Oh well”. There wasn’t enough of one colour – “Oh well”; you get the drift. In the end we reduced the number of blocks and just added more borders. The top was officially dubbed “The Oh Well” quilt/duvet.

Trying to figure out a workable block placement with the squares we had.

J took the top home to figure out borders and added the purple.

Top with first border of purple.

There wasn’t enough material left to add more borders so I dyed up 4 yards of boysenberry to add to the front. After I dyed the boysenberry it occured to me that fuchsia would be a better match to the daisies and it did match but the boysenberry made it pop and it matched the purple in the fabric and border better anyhow.

Boysenberry with flower block.

Flower block against some fuchsia fabric, we didn’t use this.

J brought over what she’d done of the back of the duvet. Floral and purple borders make up the back with a floral heart yet to be added to the inner purple square. There will be floral hearts added to the corners as well so basically J’s daughter will have a double-sided duvet cover and can choose which side depending on her mood.

Fabric kind of squished as there wasn’t enough room to spread it out.

We had a good time working on the top together but it was frustrating at times with lots of head scratching at points but a job well done I think.

Karen

Winter

There’s nothing much new happening around here. I’m still working on my Granny afghan in my spare time between bouts of reading and computer. I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the snow we’ve been getting here in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.

Looking out the front window.

Looking out the back window.

The deck with bird feeder.

I have a friend coming over today and we’re going to be working on a quilt/duvet/doona cover for her daughter who is going back to Australia next week. I have my new MegaQuilter sewing macine so I thought that two people are faster than one so hopefully it will get done quicker with one person sewing while the other is ironing and assembling the pieces.

Meanwhile since I hadn’t tested out the machine I thought that maybe I should and worked on this little project yesterday.

Cottage tote from the book “Quilted Bags and Totes” by Denise Clason.

This is just the front panel of the bag. I used print fabrics for the block and hand-dyes for the strips that I received in my secret sister swap. I’ll post more pictures when I get the bag done.

Karen

More Snowdyes continued…

Here are some pictures of the fabric I dyed the other day. My last post showed the fabric as it was being dyed and these pictures were taken after the washout and ironing.

Boysenberry snowdye, hoffman lawn. I’m somewhat disappointed with how this turned out. Kind of weird speckling of the dye. I did add some more dye after but I don’t think these spots come from that. The bit of blue dye powder didn’t really affect the boysenberry that much, I guess I needed to use more of it.

Lemon yellow and mixing blue the over-all spatter pattern. Nice muted piece of fabric like a spring green almost.

Lemon yellow and mixing blue with the larger blob pattern (see last post). This was the star of the three, fantastic piece of material. Fabric like this draws you back to dyeing, having you trying to obtain this result. It really looks good in person. The fabric gives me an idea of trying the same technique but with just the blue to try and create some fluffy clouds.

The last couple of pictures are some material that I just received in the mail from Thousands of Bolts. These two fabric are from Kona Bay fabrics. You can order six yards in the priority envelope and that’s what I did. I was thinking of using the floral for a quilt backing, it wasn’t until after the order I realised that all six yards should have been floral and not the four I ordered. I guess I’ll have to get creative and use the other matching two yards as well in the backing.

Kona Bay fabric, it has some gold metallic in it.

Close-up of flowers. I have a weakness for the Kona Bay line of fabrics.

Karen

More Snowdyes…

Well we had a nice fluffy snowfall the other day so I did a few more snowdyes. They are batching right now but I thought I’d post some of the before pictures and then I’ll post the fabric after it’s been washed and ironed.

Dharma’s Lemon Yellow and ProChem’s Mixing blue.

After snow melt.

Lemon Yellow and Mixing Blue but in a more intense pattern.

Whoops, to much yellow, it’s gone right through the snow to the fabric.

After snow melt.

ProChem’s Boysenberry with a sprinkle of mixing blue powder.

After snow melt.

I have to admit that when I checked on the boysenberry piece I noticed that there were some white spots sprinkled throughout the piece. Since there were only a few and they were very random I took some left-over dye and covered them up so we’ll see how it washes out.

The two pieces of lemon yellow and mixing blue were an experiment to see what difference the dye pattern would make when the snow melted. It’s very noticable and I haven’t spread it out so we’ll see how it goes, always a surprise.

After I squirted on the yellow for the second piece I noticed that it went right through the layer of snow directly onto the fabric and I was worried that I’d have these very intense yellow spots but they seem to have diffused somewhat.

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