Headway!

After a fall devoted to baby, baby, baby, it feels really good to be getting back to normal programming: UFOs and other commitments. And this weekend, some headway was made.

I'm part of the Give a F*ck Challenge put together over at Completely Cauchy. Yes, I am! Chawne contacted me about this idea when I was in my most seething, tied-up-in-knots state in the late fall and it seemed like an idea tailor-made for me right then. I don't have an inordinately pottyish mouth, but there are times... And late fall of 2011 was definitely one of those times for me. I couldn't sign on fast enough.

The idea was to contribute a quilt block containing the F-word, pieced or appliqued. After auditioning fonts for some days (I have a wonderful Word document with pages and pages of gigantic renditions of the F-word in about 8 different fonts. Sometimes it does me good just to look at them...), I settled on the font Whimsy, and did a quick fused applique. The block goes in the mail today. Or tomorrow, seeing today's a federal holiday.

By the way, Chawne's blog offers endless inspiration for quilters, kniters, and crocheters. I'm not sure when, or if, this woman sleeps.

Profanity alert.... Look out below...

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All righty! And with that cathartic commitment out of the way, I turned my eyes to my very oldest UFO, the one that has sat at the top of my Works in Progress forever--Strips that Sizzle. I had been really intrigued by the color studies and possibilities in Margaret J. Miller's 1997 book Strips that Sizzle, and had begun my own quilt in late 2005.

Here it is underway in a photo taken at a retreat in 2006:

And actually, it was well-underway at that point. After much fumbling and musing, this was pretty much the final layout, minus a few blocks. Those blocks were made, the top was assembled, and then it languished, folded on a shelf, until YESTERDAY.

Yesterday it was layered and pinned,

and quilting began.

I'm feeling immensely good about this.

Midwest Moonlight

Presenting Midwest Moonlight...

This scarf was born from the ashes of a dead-on-arrival cabled scarf project. Dead-on-arrival--meaning I knew it was all a no-go from the time about one inch had been knit. And so it sat in the bottom of a knitting basket for several years. But the yarn, a merino in a rich olive green, was too pretty to end up unloved and forgotten.

In early 2011, I frogged what there was to frog and started in on this chunky lace pattern in the book Scarf Style by Pam Allen. I knit about six inches and then it too ended up in the bottom of a basket. But the approach of Christmas has a way of.....clarifying.....one's thinking. I finally got serious about the project, and decided it would make a perfect gift for my son's fiancee.

It was a fun knit. There's just enough knitting variety to keep it all interesting, even as it all goes on for what seems like miles. The various twists and turns in the knitting put some tilt in the design and it was fun to watch the see-sawing pattern emerge.

It visited Washington, DC with me in December, well into the home stretch by then..

It was easily finished before Christmas--a scary concept for me. A project completed on time with no last-minute terrors? Yes it was! When it was finished, all that remained was the blocking.

And once again, I was so, so glad I invested in those blocking wires. They are just invaluable for establishing nice straight lines. Highly recommended!

The details:

The pattern: Midwest Moonlight from Scarf Style by Pam Allen.

The yarn: Zara Filatura di Crosa, DK, 8 ply, 5 balls used.

Colorway: 1503.

The needles: 6 US.

Begun: January, 2011.

Completed: December, 2011.

And the recipient was very pleased, as is the knitter.

Wordless Wednesday

Red and White

Happy New Year!

And down to business--time to catch up with some recent projects that couldn't be shown right away when they were finished...

One of the Milwaukee Art Quilters' 2011 challenges was Red and White. Probably half the quilting groups in the world played with this idea, in the wake of Infinite Variety, the spectacular red and white quilt show at the American Folk Art Museum in New York last spring. In our challenge, the theme could be expressed in any way, leaving media and technique wide open. Here was an idea I could get excited about! The finished quilts were due at the group's November 2011 meeting.

I knew my quilt would be pieced, and as the finished quilt could have a perimeter of no more than 120 inches, it would be smallish, so I could do some fairly detailed piecing. I've long been a fan of this pattern,

but knew the pattern as it existed made blocks that were way bigger than I wanted.

So, using the pattern sketch as my jumping off point, I drafted several different sawtoothy blocks in Electric Quilt for paper piecing and set to work.

Paper piecing is no one's favorite thing, but as a means to an end it has its value. The end I was shooting for was crisp points, and there would have been no way to successfully negotiate piecing the long triangles otherwise.

And that's a lesson I learned the hard way, but that's another story.

So paper piecing it was, and it was fun using stripes and other red and white prints from the stash to chop things up visually.

Once the blocks were made, I played with layouts and configurations,

finally settling on a setup that pleased me. Paper pieced blocks assemble very nicely, but then comes the character-building penance of ripping all that paper off the back. And it was typing paper...

Once the papers were removed, the quilting was quick and dirty, with red rayon thread.

All done:

Details:

Name: Redrum

Made for: 2011 Milwaukee Art Quilters' Red and White Challenge

Dimensions: 24" X 36"

Made from: 100% cotton

Batting: 80/20 cotton/poly

Quilting thread: 30 weight rayon.