New Beginning

I know this blog has had more new beginnings than the run of Doctor Who, but I'm going to give it one more go. Basically, I listen to podcasts while I walk, and would love to join the podcast community, but am not sure how feasible it is to make the leap. So, the blog will become my new podcast substitute, and we'll see how it goes this time. Pam from Hip to be a Square records on Fridays, so maybe I should commit to Thursdays with occasional Monday bonuses? We'll see how it goes. Let's see, the niece of a handful of posts ago is now 2 1/2. She's still beautiful, and also wicked smart, strong-willed (family trait) and hilarious. I'm now an apprentice in the SCA. Ok, everybody knows what a knight is. In the SCA, a knight is a peer, it's the highest rank someone can reach without having been king or queen. Knights, as one would expect, receive their peerages for being really good at fighting, and also chivalrous behavior and good character. There are two other orders that are the equivalent of knighthood, the laurel for arts, and the pelican for service. Knights take squires, people they believe have potential that they personally mentor and sponsor. Laurels take apprentices and Pelicans take proteges. So, basically, I'm a squire to a knight who was knighted for arts and crafts. What I am working on now: 1. I'm working on a commissioned quilt for a friend in Memphis. I'm using the Parasols pattern by Fig Tree and Co. It's a nice pattern, the blocks are cool-looking, but they're kind of tricky, and they use that sew and flip method of making half-square triangles, so all the blocks have all these flaps of fabric hanging off the back, and it's really tricky to line the squares up to make those half-square triangles. So this one has been slow-going. I wanted to have it finished by now, instead, I just have the blocks almost done. I'm going to deviate from the pattern some and add sashing between the blocks. I'm afraid with my less-than-perfectly-square blocks, if I just sew the blocks together, the quilt itself won't be square. 2. I've picked up a couple of projects I started and put down. One is a sock I started knitting, the other is an embroidered Elizabethan coif. Think Pilgrim girl cap, but embroidered all over. The pattern is really cool, it's curling vines with different flowers and stuff in the middle of the curls. Cause the Elizabethans had strawberry/pea/rose/carnation vines, didn't you know that? It makes total sense. 3. I'm fixing a dress I almost finished a while ago. It needs to be adjusted a little in the shoulders, and the sleeves need to be taken off and re-done. I used too big a seam allowance on the French seams, so the sleeves were too tight, and I had trouble moving my arms. Now that I have a Juki sewing machine with an overlock stitch, I've been overlocking the seams, instead of doing French seams. That doesn't take up as much room, and it should fix the problem. Ok, so, Thursday, another update.

I have to admit, I feel a little inadequate compared to my favorite crafty podcasts. It sounds like those ladies are always finishing something, while I seem stuck in crafty backlog. Of course my favorite quilty podcast ladies have higher-end sewing machines, have been sewing much longer, and do more by machine than I do. Still, how do they get everything done? Most of them have kids and full time jobs, and still finish enough projects to make me envious.

*I'm still working on the wildflower shawl.
*I have about 2 inches left on the sweater I'm knitting for my niece, then I have the sleeves to pick up and knit.
*I'm quilting the Firefly wallhanging.
*I'm cutting strips for the hidden star log cabin quilt.

Today, my goal is to finish cutting log cabin strips and start working on the background for the TARDIS hanging. I want it to be a giant hexagon made out of triangles of two different fabrics. I have a ruler for the right kind of triangle, but I'm going to enlarge it. Those two have to be in Memphis by March 20. I'm a little nervous about making the deadline, since I haven't started on one of them yet. Well, I should get off the computer and get going.

Monthly update! As opposed to forgetting to blog for, like, 3 months. I'm calling it progress.

I'm still working on....I think most of the things I talked about before. I'm quilting the first Firefly wallhanging. This one is Wash's quilt. I'm really happy with how it's coming together, I just wish it was coming along faster. This weekend, I'm going to start working on the Doctor Who quilt. This should be interesting. I also want to start on a log cabin quilt from the Jelly Roll Quilts book. I bought fabric in November, finally figured out what to do with it about a month ago, and still haven't started. *sigh* C'est la vie.

Here we go again.

The idea for this blog was to sort of be an idea notebook for me, and I need to get back to using it. Yes, yes, I've said this before.

Okay, most of what I've been doing lately is knitting. Here are the knitting projects I have on deck:

1. A wildflower lace shawl, which is a very simple pattern, but this time, I'm going to try a knitted-on lace border. I'm using Madeleine Tosh merino light in Geranium.
2. Sweet Fern fingerless mitts in a nice worsted weight green wool.
3. A baby sweater for my niece, in hot pink cotton.

I've actually got several other lace shawls on tap, or at least I have multiple skeins of lace weight or sock weight yarn in my stash, and shawls are so lovely.

Here are the quilting projects I have lined up (in my head):

1. (WIP) a whole-cloth Provencal-style quilt, which got put aside to work on Christmas presents.
2. A winter lap quilt in reds and greens. I bought a bunch of fat quarters for this, and have added to it since. I think I'm going to use a log cabin/hidden star pattern from the Jelly Roll Quilts book.
3. A Japanese-inspired quilt using Kate Spain's Good Fortune line. I bought a layer cake with some of my Christmas money. I'm going to buy a yard of a print to use as a border and some solid navy blue fabric to use as background fabric, and I should be good to go.
4. I have a pattern from Fig Tree Quilts, from the newsletter, Fresh Figs. It's a translation of a vintage quilt, with red tulips set in a lattice. I wanted to make this for myself in red, aqua, and apple green. I might still, but the sheer volume of quilts I want to make and keep, just for this year, is disturbing me a little. I'm thinking of making this with pink tulips for my sister for her birthday.
5. I have a Ruby jelly roll that's burning a hole in my stash, and would pacify my need for something in the red, aqua, and apple green color palette. There is a quilt in a magazine I wanted to make that was alternating snowball and 9-patch blocks with a wide border that had swags of thick green rickrack and yo-yo flowers. I had been collecting fabric for this, but I have a similar pattern in the Jelly Roll Quilts book, and I think I could easily add the elements that I like from the other quilt to this one.
6. I want to make a classic Dresden plate quilt in 1930's reproduction fabrics.

So that's my wish-list. What am I going to do first? Well...

Neale had an idea about a year ago to make science fiction art quilts, and display/sell them at the art show at MidSouth Con. I've kind of slacked on this. It was one of those things that I thought I'd do when I got a more lucrative job, to buy the materials, but stuff happened. So I'm going to try to start small. We'll see how it goes.

No good resolution goes unbroken

Wow, I guess it's been a while since I updated. I got really busy with the end of school, and finding out that I need to look for another job (again!). I've been really stressed about that whole business, because my options at this point are: 1)get a job by July 8 and go through the Non-Traditional Licensure Program through the Department of Education (my preferred option), 2)If option 1 doesn't pan out, if I get a teaching job later, I can enroll in a Master of Arts in Teaching program which would be really expensive and involve a much more drastic reduction in leisure/craft time than option 1, 3)find a different kind of job.

So there you go. If anybody has a lead in the Little Rock metro area, I'm open to suggestions.

Lately, I've been knitting and crocheting toys. I've done a knitted bunny and started a second one, I've crocheted two octopi, and knitted two "plumps" from a pattern I found on Ravelry. Right now, I've been working on a TARDIS quilt. I've got the doors done, but one of them is kind of wonky, so today, I'm going to try to fix it.

Neale had an idea for me to make some science-fiction themed quilts and display them at the MidSouth Con art show. Of course, right now, I really shouldn't buy the materials for a new quilt, but I have some really interesting ideas.

So, there you go, that's pretty much what's happening. Oh, I got the first produce from my garden yesterday. It got really hot really fast, and my peas are about done, but I did get a handful of pods from my peas. There's one small green tomato on one tomato plant, and blossoms on the other one. There are blossoms on the zucchini, and a couple of little proto-peppers on the bell pepper. Unfortunately, something bit into the green tomato, so today, I put some bags of cat litter in the garden, to keep small furry thieves away. I suspect this may have been the work of a squirrel. I know that, oddly enough, squirrels love tomatoes. A squirrel stole a tomato off one of my grandfather's plants once and took it up into a pine tree to eat, and I remember watching from the kitchen window as he stood at the base of the pine tree yelling at the squirrel, and the squirrel chattered back, eating the tomato.

Next year, I want to do really work on landscaping the yard. The planting beds around our house need some work. The reason we haven't done more before now is a combination of time, money, and reluctance to get out in the heat. There's a house in my neighborhood with a bed I covet. Right now, it is crammed full of daylilies, irises, and other cottage-garden-type flowers, planted so densely there is no room for weeds. That's what I would love to have in front of our house, in the space where we took out a coupe of azaleas that died. I'd like to re-vamp the rosebed, and either fill the space with other plants, or mulch heavily to discourage weeds. I'd like to take the azaleas out in the bed in the back and put in a proper shade garden, with hostas and hydrangeas, which would be a better fit for the corner with the clump of dogwood trees. I also want to clean out the bed along the back of the house. There's a massive azalea that needs to be pruned, and I'd like to put a rosemary bush there. I also want to get rid of the vine that keeps coming up. I think it's some kind of passionflower, but the blossoms are tiny and pale green. I originally wanted to take the creeping vinca completely out, but now I think it just needs to be managed better. It looked beautiful when we bought the house, it was this mound of green leaves, but if you pull the top layer back a little, it's a mat of naked stems, like felt made of plants, with these dead leaves caught in the mesh. That just can't be healthy. One of the big things I want to do, though, is get all of the beds to a point where I don't have the massive week incursion. The rose bed probably looks the best, except for the weeds in the back corner. The wildflower seeds I planted two years ago were great at the time, but now, I think I want to do something different, so next year, except for the California poppies, I'm going to try to actively discourage them. Here's hoping I have a good-enough job that, come November-ish, I can afford the massive quantities of mulch and bulbs I need to make this vision happen.

The top of the quilt is done! I'll post pictures eventually, but my camera has pretty much bitten the dust, and Neale can't find the charger for his. This week is spring break. So far, I've been working in the yard. This is the time of year I want to be outside. Projects for the week: I want to put The Niece's quilt together and start the machine quilting. I'm going to put in a garden, and work on killing the vinca.

I wasn't going to plant anything this year, but then I read an article in Garden Gate about growing veggies in a bed that's 4' square, and it was quite a bit of food, so I'm going to do it. I found 50+ bricks in the backyard, half buried in the flower bed by the back fence. I've got a 42x46" area staked out in the middle of the yard. The plan is to dig up the grass and loosen the soil, then build up a bed with the bricks. All I'll need at Home Depot is a big bag of garden soil, maybe some compost, and plants. Right now, I've got pea, lettuce, and radish seeds, so I'll start with those, and then in a month or so, I'll put in a couple of tomato plants, a bell pepper, and maybe a zuccini. I think a lot of my previous garden issue has been that I started too big, I tried to do too much, so I'm going to scale it way back this year. That, and the bed I was using didn't have enough light. I don't know when the previous owners last planted a garden, but now, there isn't enough sunlight getting to that bed, so I planted mint there, and I'm hoping it takes the bed over.

I've gotten most of the vinca out of the bed in front, and I started on the bed in back yesterday. The best way seems to be to cut it down to the ground, without leaving any clippings lying around, because they'll root, and then spray it with either Round Up or white vinegar, tack ground cloth over it, and leave it for a few weeks. I'm going to try the vinegar first in the front, because #1, I don't like chemicals, and #2, it will make the soil unsuitable for planting anything else for months. I'm going to try the vinegar for a few weeks, and if it doesn't work, I'll get some Round Up.

I have a niece! She's beautiful. Soon, very soon, she will have a quilt. I am almost finished with the top, I have one more row to add, then I have to put it all together. I'm machine-piecing the border and the back, and I'm machine quilting the center. I think I want to do just a little hand quilting on the borders. Basically, a bee in each corner and a couple of looping lines through the edge. I bet I can finish by the end of Spring Break.

I'm working on an amigurumi octopus. I want to knit bunnies for Easter.

For Lent, I am giving up beer, coffee, and baking desserts. Now, this is the spirit of the last one: I am going to cut back on sweets by promising that until Easter, I won't make a big batch of cookies, or a cake or pie to have lying around the house to snack on. Not that I do this all that often, but in the spirit of Lenten sacrifice, I'm going to refrain. If I remember correctly, feast days are exempt, and Sundays are considered feast days, also biscuits aren't dessert, so we can still have our standard weekend breakfast of biscuits and eggs. I did make some shortbread for my sister last night, because she's apparently been having a rough time of it with the baby, and, although I did lick the spoon, I'm not eating any of the finished product. I think God will understand.