Bingo Christmas Oven towels and Hat/Scarf Set

Well today I finished off a couple of small projects that have been on hand for a while. I’m currently hostessing a Bingo game over on the DyeHard_RunOff forum that I belong too. Up for grabs is a couple of oven towels that I’ve made for Christmas. Anyone that’s read my blog knows that I make these towels up every year to give to friends and the seniors at church and this year is no exception.

My bingo theme is Christmas words and what better prize than a Christmas themed one? If anyone is interested I have an oven towel tutorial over on the side bar.

Christmas oven towels.

I also finished off a hat and scarf set today. I’d had the scarf done a while back but finally got around to working on the hat a couple of days ago. Very easy to do in one day if you want to put the time into it. I’d originally planned to make this for a younger girl but it was the first time using the hat pattern and the yarn I used had a bigger gauge to it so it fits me fine, which means it’s too big for a young child. Hopefully there’s some teen out there that likes pink. I make the hats and scarves for charity as well. I figure it’s a freebie so you take what you can get.

Here I am in all my goofy pink glory.

I usually get Ted E Bear to model but since I’ve had a request for pictures of moi in them I decided to do the modeling myself. I don’t think it’s possible to take a picture without getting the arm holding the camera in the picture. Of course the picture that looks the best is the most goofiest one, oh well off to finish off some more hats.

Karen

Toronto’s creativ’ festival – Fall 2008

I went to the craft festival yesterday. The main reason I went was to look at sewing machines, material, wool and a spindle.

I have been looking at Husqvarna’s Sapphire sewing machines. These machines are a step down from their top of the line quilting/embroidery machine but I don’t really want an embroidery machine although if I get some of those features with a machine it’ll be nice. The machine I was looking at was the 905 Sapphire, which on sale is around $1699.00. This price range is still a bit too steep for my budget or rather my husband’s so I thought that maybe the machines on display at the festival would have a cheaper show price or maybe come with an extra bonus package. Unfortunately this was not the case and I believe that the machine was $100.00 cheaper at my local sewing shop. Oh well I met the owner of the company (awesome man) and Joyce Hancock who is local to my area where I live. She has a fantastic studio/store and after talking to her I decided the best way to figure out what machine I would need would be to take a couple of classes and get a feel for a machine. It just might turn out that I don’t like machine quilting so we’ll see how it goes.

I’d also dropped by to visit the Janome exhibit because I’d researched those machines as well. What a difference in the way the two exhibits operated. The Janome sales clerk was all for selling me the show special which had this and that features and was only XX amount of dollars. She didn’t really want to listen to what I wanted. I compare the two experiences to going to a used car lot and BMW. One is pressuring me to buy, the other is confident in their product and willing to let me find the right machine for my needs knowing that I’ll be back. Nice “Glad to meet you Karen.” and shake of the hand from the president and Joyce. These people know how to treat a customer, very classy.

Anyhow after looking at the machines I headed on over to the Len Mills exhibit. Now for years I have been going on and on about Len Mills and the deals they have on their cotton quilting fabrics. For years I’ve bugged my husband to stop off at any nearby outlet as we’ve driven by, not any more. It was a shock to see the price of the fabric knowing that these were the sale prices. I guess I’ve gone beyond retail pricing. I am quite bluntly an Internet online shopping junky. Every exhibt I went to I knew where to find the product at roughly half the price online. For the Len Mills prices I could buy 2 yards online for the price of 1 from them.

This extended to the hand-dyed wool I saw at the fair as well. At one exhibit the wools/yarns were exquisite. They had some fine Alpaca yarn for $40/hank. All I could think of was that I could purchase the same stuff for $19.98 at Dharma. At one exhibt I saw some hand-dyed cotton fabric that was $28.00/yard. This is the same stuff I make up in the laundry room using my Procion MX dyes. The cotton fabric costs me about $4/yard and the dyes, water, electricity a bit more. I guess I’ve been undervaluing my work.

I’d pretty well given up on buying anything at the festival until I came across a booth that came all the way from Chilliwack British Columbia. I spotted some Thimbleberries fat quarter bundles. I adore Thimbleberries and these ones were marked down from $99.00 to $54.98 – sold done deal with tax at $63.23! And yes I checked, I couldn’t find a cheaper price for the bundle anywhere on the Internet.

The really neat thing about this bundle is that when I came home I realised the top fabric looked familar. I went and checked in my shopping cart over at Thousands of Bolts and sure enough I’d had a yard of it in the cart. I ended up ordering six yards of the Gardener’s Touch line. Two more each of the floral cream, green and raspberry prints. That will give me seven yards from the bundle plus the extra six yards I ordered for borders, should be enough for a decent sized quilt. LOL, the fat quarter bundle is still sitting on my desk top as I type. I feel like Gollum in the Hobbit, picking it up every now and then and muttering “My preccccious”.

One of the spinning exhibtors had mentioned that she’d seen some spindles at one of the booths but darned if I could find it so I gave up and just as I was about to go out the doors I discovered Gemini wools and several beautiful spindles. These were beautiful but at $65.00 did not fit my budget for having a go at trying to spin my own yarn. After talking with one of the sales ladies I came away with a basic beginner spindle from Ashford at $21.00. I have some carded wool stashed somewhere so I’ll give it a try and see how it works out.

Ashford beginner spindle.

Well I’ve written an essay so time to go. Final thoughts on the festival – glad to have made a connection with Joyce Hancock, bought my fat quarters and spindle – but no, wouldn’t go back again; I’ll stick to Internet shopping.

Karen

Thrift Shop and Dollar Store Finds

Yesterday was a travelled filled day for me. First stop was the chiropractor then I had to pick up some filter sponges at big Al’s aquarium place then of course since the Value Village store was right across the street and I needed some props for a halloween party John and I are going to, in I went. The reality is Value Village has become my new favorite store to pick up used books and of course I managed to find five at the buy four get one free price. Now I may never use any of the patterns out of these books but I figure I don’t buy magazines and at $3.99 for most of the hardcover books it’s cheaper than a magazine. Most women buy magazines don’t they? How’s that for a big case of rationalization?

Thrift store bargins at $19.00 for five.

After the thrift store it was back home for lunch – a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on whole wheat bread. It hurt to eat the sandwich which led to my next stop – the dentist. Long and short of it, the TMJ I thought I had was really an abcess wisdom tooth so off to the next stop the library where I parked my car and walked down to the oral surgeon to make an appointment Tuesday to get the tooth pulled. Back to the library to take out five books to read, most of them by Patricia McKillip.

After the library it was on to the drugstore to pick up some penicillin for the tooth infection (which by the way really, really, hurts as I write). Well while waiting for the prescription to be filled I wandered on in to the dollar store to have a look at the yarn section to see if they’d gotten in any new balls of yarn. Bingo! Not only did they have new stuff in, they had yarn that was very similar to the yarn I’d almost bought at Walmart the day before. To borrow an Australian expression, I was quite chuffed to find this yarn at a buck a ball rather than the four dollars a ball Walmart was selling it for.

Chenille type baby yarn from the dollar store.

Eye lash yarn for charity hats and scarves from dollar store.

Needless to say there was some really cool eyelash yarn as well. I was debating buying some lime green and saw the purple at the bottom of the pile and completely lost it and grabbed all they had. I’m such a sucker for purples and blues.

That was the end of my day outside the house. It was a big splurge but I guess I was feeling sorry for myself and weak. There are days when you don’t feel like you’ve accomplished anything but then you realise that you’ve wasted the better part of a day running around and no wonder you feel exhausted by the time you get home. Hey, I managed to do dishes….aside from spending my hubby’s money… (in a very small voice). Dang, I hope he doesn’t read this.

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

Steamer Trunk

I have this old trunk that I think of as a steamer trunk because it came over on the boat with John’s many great grandfather. I volunteered to take it when John’s mom recently moved into her apartment from her house. I didn’t really want it but could see it bothered her that no one was going to take it when it had such a family history to it. I’ve always wanted a hope chest but since I’d given up on the idea I thought okay I’ll take the trunk.

Many greats-grandfather Waldie's trunk

I figured I could store my craft supplies or quilts in it. There are two problems with this trunk. One is that it’s “huge”. You don’t quite get a perspective of it when it’s off by itself in grandma’s basement but having it up in the sewing room well…let’s just say it doesn’t fit.

The other problem is that grandma stored her quilts in it. You might wonder how storing quilts in a trunk is a problem but grandma’s quilts were older utility quilts that were made of any scraps there were and they were constructed to be heavy and warm. Well…wool keeps you warm and I guess my mother-in-law came from an era where wool meant little wool moths that ate the fabric. So now you see my problem, this trunk reeks of mothball odor. I’ve tried airing it out in the garage but it still smells.

Inside of trunk.

The trunk seems to be made of canvas covered wood/pressboard? The interior is lined with plastic shelving paper, which John’s mom probably added later. I don’t know what would take the smell out and I’m kind of hesitant to store stuff in there that is going to reek of mothballs later. The only thing I can think of is to use cedar balls to mask the odor but I guess then everything would smell of cedar.

I do have my yarn in plastic zip bags (the kind that come with comforters or duvets) so I might just dump the whole lot in there to free up some room and take my chances. I guess I’ll find out but any suggestions are welcome.

Karen

Rice Bag

I’ve not been doing much of anything lately, well I guess that’s not true, lots of stuff but most of it boring normal everyday stuff. I got in an order of books from Amazon so I’ve been on a bit of a reading jag.

John’s aunt passed away this past week so Saturday saw us attending the funeral. The kids stayed home because they’ve only really seen this aunt a couple of times besides which our Thanksgiving dinner was on Saturday so I had the pleasure of coming home to dinner already prepared for me by the girls. This was great because really I didn’t feel all that well what with being up half the night with TMJ (jaw pain) and a massive headache.

One of the girls in my fabric dyeing forum mentioned using a rice bag on her jaw that she made out of flannel material so I thought I’d give it a go. I made the bag that held the rice out of cotton and then made a slipcover out of flannel to go over top.

Cotton bag filled with rice.

Rice bag with removable flannel cover.

We’ve had some fantastic weather for the holiday weekend and I should have been out doing the final gardening chores but admit that I just didn’t get around to it between playing games and talking with the kids. I did end up doing some cleaning today so all was not lost. Tomorrow is a holiday as well so we’ll see what can be acomplished. I guess it sounds weird to be working on the days off but nothing seems to get done on the week days so you make time where you can.

Karen

Amish Diamond blocks

The latest project that I’ve been working is the Fall Block Swap with my fabric dyeing forum group. This block – Amish Diamond – is based on a pattern from quilterscache.com. It’s a fairly basic block which is what our group wanted since we would be sewing quite a few of them. The block is based on three colours, one of which is the standard Amish black.

The idea is to pick two different colour combos and then swap out a block of each combination to every person participating in the swap. This current crop of members seems to be a bit on the tentative side so we only had six people sign up for the block so I had to come up with 12 blocks. Given I’ve been trying to find time to do them in the past four days, I’m kind of glad only six signed up.

Anyhow here are the two colours combos that I chose.

Amish diamond - Navy blue, Pagoda Red

Amish Diamond - Olive, Butterscotch

The navy blue was Dharma and the other colours from ProChem, the black was Kona black. Kona black was chosen as the standard so that when all the different blocks come together the blacks should match fairly closely given dye lots.

I was going to choose purple but when I went through my fabric samples somehow these colours looked good together. Maybe because it’s fall I was influenced by my colour choice. It should be interesting to get all the other blocks back and see how the quilt turns out. These blocks are a good way to use up smaller pieces of fabric so I’ll be going back to the stash to see what I need to finish the quilt.

Karen

Marbles continued…

Well I did the washout today and the material came out sort of how I expected.

Final step.

The purple wasn’t as intense as I’d like, in fact I’m not too sure exactly what it is. I re-applied some of the mixing red to the marbles so there are some spots that are more reddish in the background than others. I do have some purple spots and the rest is well I don’t really know.

The thing that I found interesting was that the circles of yellow were for the most part subdued. There are some really yellow circles but for the most part they are a mix of the yellow, red and purple. This surprised me because I applied the rubber bands fairly tightly and I had a good 1/4″ or more of elastic covering the fabric so you’d think there would have been more of a resist. I think if I hadn’t re-applied the red I wouldn’t have covered up the yellow so much.

All in all, it’s an interesting material. I’m not sure what it can be used for but since I’m swapping most of it away…hey…it’s not my problem.

Karen

Marbles

Well the wedding is over and everything went wonderfully. Jen and Phil made a beautiful bride and groom. I’ll post pictures when I get them. Jen had a photographer and we had a friend of the family taking pictures so I didn’t even try as I didn’t want to spoil the day having to worry about that part of it. What a mad run around though. I made the church five minutes before the ceremony was supposed to start (well before the bride). Truly a scramble trying to get there but more of that later.

I have a September swap that needs to get done but because of the wedding I’m running a bit behind. I’m almost done, just the washout tomorrow after it batches overnight but I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of the process just so I could have something to blog about.

The first part of getting the material ready was to dye it Dharma’s lemon yellow – MX-8G. This is truely an almost neon type of yellow. To bright for my taste but it does give some neat results depending on what you use it for.

The next step was to wrap the fabric around some glass marbles and tie them off with rubber bands. I started out with the flat type of marbles that people use in aquariums and vases but I ran out after two bags so then switched to round marbles.

Marbles in cloth held in place with rubber bands.

The idea of tying off the marbles is to create a resist with the rubber bands. I’ve done this before. What I did last time was to just plunk the whole thing down into a vase and fill it with dye. When the piece came out and the rubber bands removed I had a purple piece of cloth with rough circles of the resisted colour. This time around I wanted to try dyeing the top of the marbles one colour and the background another.

I decided the easiest way to do this was to set the piece of cloth onto a plastic lid and apply the dye. As I was arranging the material I realised that it wasn’t going to work exactly as I’d imagined. Somehow I pictured in my mind applying the dye to the top of the marble and then squirting dye onto the fabric below the marble. This is all good but what I didn’t think of was how do you prevent hundreds of marbles from touching each other and the underlying fabric? Anyhow I tried standing the marbles up as best I could.

Fabric placed on a plastic lid with marbles on top as best I could.

Next I applied mixing red MX-5B to the tops of the marbles.

Marble tops applied with mixing red MX-5B

After applying the red I put purple on the background fabric. The purple is one I created from a mixture of the mixing red and colbalt, it’s a nice deep purple but I’m not sure what it will look like when it hits the yellow.

Purple dye applied to the fabric background.

I re-applied a bit more of the red to the tops of the marbles to try and re-inforce the colour as the purple did hit the tops somewhat. It should be interesting to see how it all washes out. I’ve used the lemon yellow and purple before and because the yellow looks almost neon it does some neat things to the purple but having said that I don’t think I’ve used this colour of purple with the yellow so we’ll see. Also the purple is not as saturated as it was when I did the low water immersion piece, it might not be that purple. I figured the tops of the marbles would turn out an orange colour because red and yellow give orange but who knows. Regardless, I’ll have yellow rings on the fabric from the rubberband resist.

Karen

Swarovski Bracelet

Well I have four days to go until the wedding. I have been busy doing various stuff getting ready running around doing chores. Just thought I would post a picture of a bracelet I made from one of the local bead shops in town.

Swarovski crystal bracelet in moonlight and black diamond.

Same bracelet I like to wear them loose.

I ended up making two of these. The first one I had made for myself but it went so well with my daughter’s wedding dress and she liked it that I made another one. The second has a nicer clasp on it and the wire is softer so it drapes a bit better.

It was hard to get the shiney bling bling in the photos but its very sparkly so I guess thats a good thing

Karen