Category Archives: sewing

October 7, 2013 · 8:58 PM

How not to finish a quilt in 10 easy steps

1. Ignore the fact that your diet is consisting of more and more mutant produce and get to work.

2. Plan a queen-sized quilt when you don’t have a queen-sized area in which to work. Alternately, plan a queen-sized quilt when you bought a house with a big studio, but the sale wasn’t final. Alternately, continue with said queen-sized quilt when you could have easily scaled back.

3. [Sidestep] While struggling with the space issue, contemplate the boxes and boxes of books hidden beneath Indian bedspreads (that once adorned dorm walls), pictures without walls, and the weak light from the single window in your sh*tty apartment living room.

4. Focus your attention back to the quilt top. Realize that though you usually have a fairly high tolerance for wonkiness, one square looks too sloppy, so carefully rip it out to fix it without thinking about the possibility of how your “fix” might not make it better, only worse. Feel sad that it could have just been a little extra wonky instead of a lot extra wonky now since there’s no way you’re going back in there to fix/mess it up even more.

5. When ironing the top (hopefully for the last time) discover that one of the fabrics can actually shrink and warp once it’s already been ironed many many times. No time for flailing about and shrieking WTFs, just rip the bitches, replace them, and re-iron the whole thing c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y.

6. [Sidestep] In anticipation of quilting, play with a few samples of top+batting+backing. Discover that your machine is entirely rejecting this action and refuses to obey proper tension. Feel immediately panicked, then feel immediately in denial and move on.

7. Discover that it will be impossible to lay and smooth out the layers flat. Even if you hop from chair to sofa, you will never be able to perform the long jump necessary from end to end and will fall several times trying.

8. Consider crying.

9. Investigate paying someone else to do this part.

10. Consider scrapping the whole thing.

4 Comments

Filed under home decor, quilts, sewing

Tagged as basting, batting, DIY, failure, how not to, layers, living rooms, not enough space, quilting, quilts, sewing, space, top, working

October 2, 2013 · 7:58 AM

Needle in a scrapstack

I’ve been having a run of good bad luck lately. Not luck that is at first bad, but then allows for something awesome to come in,* but good in terms of a good dose of it. Don’t get me wrong, it could be much, much worse, but it is annoying as all get out.

I’ve barely spent any money lately, but my last two online orders involved a bottle of shampoo ending up all over a book, and an item of clothing needed in a timely manner arriving with a giant slash – and I did not cause it myself by opening the box with an evil box cutter or anything so keen.

I’ve been trying to set up a new doctor here and ended up with a $558.00 bill for a physical that should have been free. For the last month, I have been calmly and persistently contacting the doctor/billing office/lab/main office/insurance company to resolve it. All say they can’t but the other guy can. One kind soul read back to me the transcript of the call log at the doctor’s office – I sound like a f*cking obnoxious demanding crazy bitch. In this instance though, I am not – I have been perfectly professional with them, and only cry with rage and shake a little about the potential of having to part with the money that I don’t actually owe when I’m off the phone.

But with bad, sometimes good shows up a tiny bit.

I dropped one of my current favorite sewing needles into a big box of scraps. Bad, but not too bad, but then I sometimes use my scraps to stuff things and what if someone bought something made with them and then gave it to a toddler (though I specifically say my things aren’t meant for kids) and then the toddler sucks it down his slobbery germ-hole and requires a dramatic surgery and then my precious needle ends up accessioned with the other surgically removed swallowed things at the Mutter Museum. Bad (although I like that museum). But after shaking and scrounging and hoping to find it when it penetrated my own digits, I finally located it without bloodshed. Good.

I stitched up a little piece with my own white hairs. Bad? Well, I’ll give you kinda gross, but it is what it is. The bad part was the haircut I got a few weeks ago that was supposed to be an inch and ended up three and more in various hideous feathery layers. And the annoying routine I go through with every hair cutter when she/he tries to convince me to color my hair. I rarely get a haircut, you think I can keep up with roots? And hello, money? And hello again, chemicals? And ciao bitch, I’m aging, that’s what happens! But the biggest bad is that my greys are coming in at an alarming rate and falling out at the same pace. I figure they’re my newest strands so they should be sticking around longer… Needless to say I had more than enough to finish the piece and now I don’t know what to do with the leftovers – I don’t think I want to use hair-thread again though. (And not to worry, I’m not saving boogers, ear wax, and toenail clippings… well, maybe a few fingernails, but they’re for art purposes too.) Sounds scarier than it is.

And the last is a bad me for not finishing the epic summer-long quilt yet. I’m terrified to do the quilting part (and my machines are getting tensiony), so I’m considering my options of finishing the top off and calling it a coverlet. I don’t intend to use it anyway.

And the good?

I found my rotary cutter!

* And speaking of rotary cutters and needles, if one more person/media outlet/memoir tells me that loosing their job was the best thing that ever happened to them, well I just might get slicey and pokey.

Leave a comment

Filed under collecting, home decor, quilts, recycling, sewing, unemployment

Tagged as bad hair, bad luck, doctors, fingernails, found things, frustration, germ-hole, good luck, grey hair, hair, insurance companies, lost things, Mutter Museum, needles, quilting, rotary cutter, scraps, sewing, stitching, swallowed things

September 17, 2013 · 4:14 PM

My eggplant…

is ____. or has a ____.

(Fill in the blank with your favorite sexual innuendo or phallic euphemism, or else think of a proboscis monkey instead if you’re blushing).

And according to the latest science, this eggplant would make a terrible father.

I’m a little concerned that our organic CSA is within spitting distance of a large campus of a “global BioPharma company.” That’s a big-assed evil major pharmaceutical mega-corporation to you and me. When you drive past it on the way to the seemingly bucolic farm, a high-pitched hum slithers into your brain and vibrates your fillings. I can only imagine what its doing to our vegetables. I think it’s possible I’m growing another ovary.

I do know my thoughts and actions are becoming increasingly random.

I’ve nearly completed several portfolio pieces, but I either need to come up with several more, or be able to make the case that these few are enough to stand on their own and carry the whole thing.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately in the hopes that an artist statement and clear language about what and why I’m doing it will just tumble forth from my fingers without any effort and to my surprise. Instead, I’m increasingly realizing that my hold on grammar is quite slippery, my comma usage is most certainly often wrong, and I really need a refresher on the basics in order to feel more like an intelligent and concise human being. I am not a millennial, I don’t text, and I had to use typewriters and rely on knowledge of spelling for much of my early education so I don’t have an excuse – not that anyone should have an excuse.

It’s bumming me out a bit at the moment.

You know what else is? At home in our rental in the vinyl village, a tree company came in and sawed off half of our trees. They didn’t take the three dead pines that will smash through our windows and walls with decapitating fury during the next superstorm, but instead took away 25 feet of branches (leafy shades) from the lovely Sweetgum right outside my window.

The bastards.

And now I’ll have to use my depressing vinyl blinds.

And lately WordPress keeps telling me that advertisements might appear from time to time at the bottom of my posts. I do not endorse anything that might be down there (unless of course I do, but I doubt they advertise wool). And I don’t think I have any control over what is there. For $30 a year, I can take away these ads which I’d love to do, but then another year will go by and another $30, then another $30, and so on (boldly assuming I keep this up). So my $30 will be going to things like health insurance and oats and toilet paper (and sexy mutant vegetables) instead.

2 Comments

Filed under art school, sewing, unemployment

Tagged as biopharma, bummed-out, cross-stitching, depression, eggplant penis, eggplants, evil corporations, frustraion, grammar, grotesque eggplant, mutations, no more trees, sexy eggplant, trees, what is wrong with the world, writing

September 4, 2013 · 7:25 AM

I am not a sock monkey… I think?

Though I am trying to keep my mouth shut, I’m still angry sad depressed cynical pissed hopping-mad bitter rapidly-aging rabid seething kicked-in-my-imaginary-balls over that house sale f*cked-uppery.

But I will say no more.

Except this:

And excuse the watermark, but I actually spent time modifying that image, so don’t steal it. I need to work on the watermark thing though, so bear with me and get used to it.

In the interest of further experimentation in the art of procrastination, I thought I would check to see if any of my fibery images have been savagely pirated from webworld. I know of one on Pinterest (which I’m largely on the fence about, but leaning on the hate side, or perhaps really really hate side) and I don’t really have many readers here, so I wasn’t expecting to find any gross violations.

So I did some Google Image searches by image.

I started with a pic that I’ve had on ravelry for a few years, and I actually loved the results:

(I won’t get any bigger with these because I don’t want to commit image gankery myself).

What you can’t quite see is my picture of a grey cowl matching images of owls in tree bark, cathedrals, shaggy dogs, rocks, chandeliers, and even a few other faces and knitted items. All of the matches relate to color, texture, and shapes in my image.

Another image that I posted a few months ago – and again, I love the matches:

Golden fall foliage, a fish caught in a net, a Byzantine Madonna.

But it failed to tell me that the picture did exist in webworld and was pinned on someone’s Pinterest board and on this blog. Nothing came up for ravelry either, but I think that has greater privacy settings?

But otherwise, so far so good, no image theft yet.

So I moved on to other images I’ve posted in this blog.

Remember my artsy-fartsy sock monkeys from this post?

Sock monkeys are very popular.

Sock monkeys are everywhere.

Sock monkeys are made with socks and possibly some buttons.

Sock monkeys are for sale.

Sock monkeys are definitely not people (though friendlier).

So why dear Google, did my picture of sock monkeys bring up people!?!?!?!?!

If it’s some facial recognition algorithmic magic thing, then fix it ’cause I’m not buying that the ratios and comparative data and secret science are there.

My initial reaction was that this was horribly, horribly, horribly racist since many of the faces appeared to be from people who are not predominately caucasian. But once I scrolled through more images I saw that it was very much an equal-opportunity free-for-all of people = sock monkeys.

Yes, monkeys are our cousins and they have skulls similar to ours – more similar than that of say a skunk or a horse, but stuffed toys with bulbous mouths that don’t exist in nature? Knitted texture and only three colors? No nose of any dimensions? Eyes made of shoe buttons? Exaggerated floppy ears? No eyebrows, eyelashes, head hair, facial hair, (yes, I know some people don’t have that either) bumps, lumps, wrinkles, pimples, scars, beauty marks, or irises for that matter?

So I slept on it – maybe it was a joke.

The next day I tried the same image again:

More people.

And as a bonus, some soaped up ass cheeks. (It did locate it on my blog though – the monkeys, not the cheeks).

So I tried some more monkey pics – I’ve got oodles of sock monkeys (or perhaps I should call them a troupe or troop).

This was a scan of some vintage monks wearing snazzy outfits made by my great aunt for my brothers:

More people.

At least it picked up on the red.

I had another clearer pic of the same little guys in the first image:

More people.

Though a couple of pine cones add some nice diversity.

So I thought that perhaps anything resembling two eyes and a mouth would always equate human faces and thus I was just making too much of this.

So I searched with an image of a pie with a face:

And I got pies and other foodstuffs for f*cksakes!

So I thought that perhaps there was a sock monkey apocalypse and it will now be up to me to re-populate the planet.

(By sewing of course, not lewd acts with a stuffed sock).

Just to be sure, I searched the term “sock monkeys” in Google Images.

What’s this?

Thousands, perhaps millions, of images of sock monkeys?*

There are so many sock monkeys that you can browse by various categories!

So what’s up Google?

Is this a joke?

Is this an evil plan that only you know about and we don’t and we’re about to become a new of Planet of the ~~Apes~~ Sock Monkeys?

Are we actually just a bunch of stuffed socks?

Is walking on a sock an act of torture and murder?

Should I fear my own sock monkeys?

Should I cut some holes in their box for air?

Please tell me.

*(It’s cool that Rebecca Yaker’s sock monk couture comes up right away).

6 Comments

Filed under home decor, knitting, recycling, sewing

Tagged as confusion, google images, image editing, image theft, images, knitting, monks, pictures, pie, piracy, planet of the apes, sewing, sock monkey, vampire pie

August 20, 2013 · 10:29 AM

Child stitchery (not in a sweatshop)…

On a trip to visit my folks (I won’t say home because they tragically (for me) sold it some years ago) earlier this summer, I finally found this little fabric picture that used to hang in my bedroom.

The scene is one I drew, and drew quite often as a slightly obsessive little sh*t, and at the dumbsh*t age when I didn’t comprehend that the sky wasn’t just up there and therefore depicted it as a stripe. So let’s say I was four, or should four-year-olds understand how the sky works? So maybe I’ll say three… Regardless, my mother deemed my “Bird In Flight to Nest” precious and decided to turn it into a sewing lesson. I’ll say that it was my first, but I really don’t know. She cut out the pieces, sewed the margins on the machine, and gave it to me to applique. I do clearly remember getting somewhat bored or frustrated with it, and it is also quite clear that she finished it for me and then added a few embroidered embellishments. I don’t know if this took place in the span of a day or I abandoned it for some time and she got tired of having it only partially completed for weeks or months. I also don’t remember if it was during the one truly massive blizzard of my youth (though I think I was down with the chicken pox then) or in the leisurely long days before I had to go to school. Either way, it was something I did as a child wherein my hands and mind were engaged (and it wasn’t so traumatic that I didn’t want to do it again).

This was before the recent cringe-worthy days of fashionable “upcycling.” Smack in the 1970s when fuel crises, a renewal of the back to the earth movement, thoughts of Silent Spring, and the birth of Earth Day were kicking around. My parents left their urban home to escape air pollution, overcrowding, and to grow wholesome organic food on a few idyllic acres. We were also broke-ass poor, so recycling old clothes into craft projects was both a necessity and entirely practical – how many thousands of years have we just used what we have and then used it some more? Why should this now be a trendy buzzword to help sell our crafty stuff? Convince the buyer that her materialism is ok because it’s upcycled and therefore she is a conscientious fabulous person?

Fabric is fabric is fabric… and is infinitely re-usable. Sometimes the perfect print is on a bolt, sometimes it’s a pair of pants… you’re not special for using or buying either one.

But back to the picture.

The components are:

Sun: I assumed the terrycloth sun was salvaged from a much abused towel, but my mom said it was leftover fabric from some shorts she made for my brothers as small children in the 1960s… I’m not sure I’d like terrycloth shorts… they seem so, absorbent?

Tree trunk: Yep, that’s my dad’s old tie – gotta love plaid neck wear…

Sky: Leftovers from a quilt my mother made for me of yellow, green, and blue gingham to match my wallpaper of the same colors (only the wallpaper also had puke tones in it too).

Flowers, eggs, bird parts: Felt scraps – who didn’t have random felt scraps lying around?

Nest: Burlap feed sack – we lived on a little farm with little animals and a pony. Food for them came in burlap bags.

Bird: This is an odd denim/oxford cloth hybrid that was probably clothing in its former life.

Grass, leaves: We can’t remember what these scraps are from, but I wore various homemade calico skirts, shorts, halter tops (remember, 1970s over here) and dresses.

Background: This could have been leftover paining canvas or material for rustic curtains.

And even though this turned into a rage against the preciousness of upcycling, it was originally meant to be a rage against not teaching children how to sew or make bread or brush animals or do anything constructive with their hands. Yeah, there are a few schools that teach such things, but as a whole we’re becoming such boring dumb-asses with our iSh*t.

1 Comment

Filed under quilts, recycling, sewing, Uncategorized

Tagged as 1970s, applique, back to earth, bird in flight to nest, birds, childhood, children, craft, earth day, education, embroidery, environmentalism, handiwork, iShit, nature, nests, organic farming, pictures, recycling, reuse, screens, sewing, silent spring, stitchery, teaching, upcycling, youth of today

August 14, 2013 · 12:25 PM

Mid-August progress…

We spent last weekend in the Adirondacks.

It was the last of the summer hiking trips for us.

Our cottage was decorated in “Wal-Mart for cabin.”

I actually miss the tacky painted saw blades, crude whittlings, and sh*t made out of driftwood and antlers of mountain/country crafts of yesteryear (or just a few years ago really).

Now it is plastic sh*t from China (often copied from domestic crafters).

But I managed to finally finish basting all of those damn letters.

The pile looks smaller than it really is.

I will never be so wordy on a quilt again.

Our CSA has been offering loads of lovely flowers.

It is a nice thing to have fresh flowers, but not in place of food – they really need to step it up in the veg department. And as vinyl village apartment dwellers, we can’t compost, so I don’t like to have too many fresh flowers.

The letters are ready to mingle with the as yet unmade quilt blocks.

I’m also getting wordy with a fair isle scarf.

I don’t love stranded knitting.

I don’t hate it though.

My Tour de Fleece spinning goals fell short.

But I finished plying my Pigeonroof Studios “lettuce” and have one braid left to finish spinning for a particular project.

I spun this one a little too thin and it came out lighter and softer in color, so it might have to become a different project.

Or the original project will be scrapped altogether.

That will have to wait.

I also started a major embroidery piece.

It will take some time.

It is pink.

I don’t love pink.

Leave a comment

Filed under hiking, home decor, knitting, quilts, recycling, sewing, spinning, travel

Tagged as Adirondacks, ADK, applique, bears, crafts, crap from china, CSA, fair isle, fiber, flowers, food, handspun, hiking, knitting, merino, mountains, Pigeonroof Studios, pond, quilts, racoons, recycled, sewing, spinning, superwash, Tour de Fleece, travel, vacations, wool

August 5, 2013 · 4:50 PM

Cutter please come home

I bought a shiny new rotary cutter a year or two ago. I’m pretty sure I even bought extra replacement blades. It was during one of those mega-sales at the big box store and back when I had a bit more cash to burn. I cannot find it now. I have an old tiny one with a dull blade that sits unused in my sewing box, so I went to purchase new blades for it. But then I didn’t because they are so inexplicably and maddeningly expensive.

So I continue to search for my lost one.

I have several boxes marked “art supplies.” So far, it has not been in any of them. Instead I’ve found some other useful things.

A box of faux cardinals. I have some bright red roving [red rover, red rover… ] in my stash that I got unenthusiastically in a grab bag. I think I was thinking of making cardinal-themed art yarn out of it. I don’t think it’s a great idea. I still might make it one day.

Dyestuff. I just knew I bought Kool-Aid a few years ago for yarn dying purposes, but hadn’t been able to find it until now. And yay, I have greens, blues, and darker red now! And the henna – why not try it on wool?

Yeah, I had a couple of wisdom teeth extracted (and one quite violently) and had to keep a souvenir.

And since I don’t have a new real bathroom, I can play with this vintage/antique? dollhouse set. I forgot I found it at an antique store just a couple of years ago as well.

The box should have been labeled sh*t from a couple of years ago but not including your rotary cutter.

Leave a comment

Filed under dyeing, home decor, sewing

Tagged as bathtub, birds, cardinals, dollhouse furniture, dye, dyeing, forgotten things, found things, henna, kool-aid, looking for things, lost things, pulling teeth, rotary cutter, sink, spinning, teeth, toilet, tub, wisdom teeth

July 25, 2013 · 1:31 PM

Stash

No, not that kind of ‘stash you silly hipster.

I’m referring to yarn. Lots and lots of yarn.*

I’ve come across many instances lately of people talking about having stashes so large they exceed life expectancy (aka SELE). I’m not quite there yet, but I think I’m awfully damn close (or you could live by the thought that you could always get hit by a bus at any given moment and then nearly ever knitter would leave a wooly estate). I don’t know what my comfortable stash level is or should be. It might be exactly where it is right now? If so inclined, I could start a few sweaters, tights, a drawerful of socks, and a whole sh*tload of accessories at any given notice. Yet it’s starting to make me a little uncomfortable… I feel almost as if I’m eating a giant delicious sandwich in front of a waif-child. I try to live as simply as a typical American (who still needs an auto, has outdoors hobbies, has tools for a major house renovation and small farm, has a teensy nostalgia problem, etc.) can, yet my stash requires a whole closet or very small room nearly all to itself.**

Some of my recent test-knitting has been a half-assed attempt to slim the stash, yet most patterns call for yarn currently on the market and easily available, so that also leads me to the occasional justification for a purchase when I don’t already have something quite right. My yarny souvenirs from travels are justified to some degree since they are only material thing I buy, but sometimes (but not so much these days) I’m a sucker for the $3 or less skein of 100% wool or bag sales of the stuff for a song (which is also how one can end up with loads of discontinued stuff). Wool can always be used in/for something – it felts/fulls, can be mixed and matched, dyed, used for embroidery, and in my mind never needs to be destashed.

I’m horribly tempted to catalog it all and post it on my ravelry stash page, but I’m embarrassed to show I have this much and I don’t want to turn off any current or potential ravelry friends. I have to admit when I see ginormous stashes full of primo yarn (though mine isn’t the fancy stuff for the most part) I think the person must be very rich, and if you are very rich you are probably evil (or you might be a designer with a sponsor or a LYS owner, so that’s ok). And then the work of photographing and logging the data would take a few days to do and it’s something that my tedious-loving other evil Gemini twin*** would love to do, but really is a waste of time. But on the other hand, I can choose to list things as available for sale or trade, so it could be a win-win – I may have something discontinued that someone needs to finish a project, or make a buck or two on the side. That, and I could check my inventory without having to unstack, unbag, or generally make a mess of things. But don’t I have other things that I should be working on…?

*There’s a good amount of spinning fiber and a couple of sewing machines in there too, so it’s a little deceiving, but then again none of my WIPs (or possible froggers) or sweaters waiting to be unraveled and harvested are in there…

**Really the bigger problem here is my fabric stash. So much bigger. So much more unwieldy. So much heavier. So much less organized and contained. So much it’s actually a problem worthy of an episode of reality TV hoarding show. So much that it really does need a room of its own. So much that I will never share the extent of it with anyone other than N. And my “fabric” is mostly carefully curated but old and wrecked clothing so it’s not like I can re-sell it or even give it away. Maybe to a rag picker… Ah, the olden days…

***Both twins are evil – an uptight bossy bitch and an unmoored drifter.

3 Comments

Filed under knitting, recycling, sewing, thrifting

Tagged as anal work, balls, boxes, cataloging, closet, evil rich, evil twin, excess, fabric, fiber, gemini, hoarding, knitting, moustache, organization, plastic tubs, rag picker, ravelry, rich, SELE, skeins, spinning, stash, storage, tedious, too much stuff, waif-child, wool, yarn

July 4, 2013 · 8:17 PM

Back to the woods…

We were in the Adirondacks last weekend for a couple of days of soggy hiking and down time away from our frustrating and increasingly desperate home (and my job) search.

I know that I said earlier that I needed another bout of cabin time to finish designing that shawl but I have to focus on other projects at the moment now. I took all of the letters I need to cut out and baste for my newest quilt (I think there are 26 total) but I only managed to finish a whopping four. Pretty lousy progress. And I’m not entirely sure I’m doing them right or how to handle some of the narrow slices that I really can’t fold down.

So I easily got distracted since basting is tiresome to me and doesn’t seem to amount to much since I still have to sew the damn things on. In my current overwhelmed and distracted state I forgot to pack socks for the weekend. It was a good excuse to buy a new woolen pair, though I could only justify the one and had to wash them after every hike and hoped they’d dry enough for the next time. Our cabin was infested with carpenter ants and chasing after one to photograph it was a perfect basting procrastination activity. Do you realize how hard it is to get a clear shot of a very busy (and harassed) little ant?

Bugs were definitely showing off their strengths over the weekend. Inexplicably, black flies were suddenly crazy about my eyebrows and one little f*cker bit me so successfully that blood was shed on my favorite wool t-shirt.

But the weekend also held one of those magical and rare summer afternoons when all that mattered was swimming in a mountain pond and feeling the sun.

(Thanks to N’s family for their hospitality and the afternoon at their awesome lakeside cottage on Sunday!)

And since we were away, I had a late start in the Tour de Fleece, and promptly suffered a wipe out when I sliced open my thumb on a yogurt container of all things.

I need my thumb to spin dammit! I should probably lower my yardage expectations now but I’m willing myself to heal quickly.

Leave a comment

Filed under hiking, knitting, quilts, sewing, spinning, travel, unemployment

Tagged as Adirondacks, ADK, ants, bandage, basting, black flies, blood, bugs, cabin, Church Pond, hiking, injury, knitting, lakes, mountains, New York, Phelps, ponds, procrastination, sewing, socks, spinning, superwash, thumb, Tour de Fleece, trees, woods, wool

June 23, 2013 · 12:18 PM

Stick a fork in it…

I pre-wrote this post to publish while I was away on yet another brief jaunt to sum up a few things I recently finished. Yet the thoughts in my last whining rambling post have continued to fester and raise many more conflicting/contrasting brain furies. I still don’t have anything even remotely answered or concluded, but in a way I do have a decision. I am going to move forward on creating pieces for a portfolio and if they are done by the autumn (crazy insane deadline now) I will apply to school. If I don’t get in or I do get in but without funding, then I at least have a body of work to throw around out there (outside of the craft scene). And I don’t want to blog about it much apart from keeping track of new techniques I might learn or continued thoughts on craft vs. art, artist vs. art museum, academic artist vs. independent artist, lone-wolf artist vs. social media butterfly.

So on to finished sh*t that has nothing to do with the above.

Several members of my family are encountering hernia surgery these days so I made a Happy Hernia mini-quilt.*

And I have become very ~~paranoid~~ conscious about the way I lift things and contort myself these days…

I finished my Pigeonroof Studios BFL “Mimsy” May/June SAL roving as a felted/fulled single. I spun it with a heavy hand and dunked and steamed and iced and thwacked and whacked and unspun it and made it my fibery bitch. And for a much-abused yarn, it became surprisingly sturdy and bloomed beautifully. It’s a bit shy of 450 yards of a fingering-ish weight. I love fuzzy yarn but I rarely actually knit with it – just ask the balls of neglected mohair in my stash. But I did start something with it right away which I’ll show next time.

Since I was infected with group think during this spin-along, I joined team PRS in the Tour de Fleece (you spin during the Tour de France).** I don’t have any crazy goals for it apart from spinning my recent purchases (of which I have to confess that there was another, and then another).***

Finally, my brother and sister-in-law are the hiking sort too, so I sent a set of butt warmers their way.

With the oilcloth, I think these are a little more practical than my original ones (which have gotten a bit shredded) but can also brightly and gaudily serve as a distress flag to wave about. I’m concerned that they’ll be a bit slippery until they’re scuffed up a bit and unfortunately this sweater was thinner so it provides less ass comfort. Also my stashed oilcloth has some creases I can’t seem to get out – can’t iron the stuff, so what to do…?

Everything else is still half-baked. And I also recently realized that I needed to get much busier in order to become more productive, so I’ve taken on a load of new projects (and may also get to up my part-time work hours soon) but I’ve got also got a newly festering anxiety that I may have bitten off a little too much…something might have to give.

*Sh*tty picture intentional since I’m paranoid about image theft and f*ckery these days, and get used to seeing that annoying tag on everything too.

**I like bicycles, and I ride mine (awesome story behind it too) several times a week, but I don’t think I’ll be watching the Tour much… as Italophiles, we do often have calcio (soccer) on the tube though…

***I talk about this way too much! I don’t know the person/people behind the company in real life nor do I get kickbacks – just love the stuff, and the last acquisition was someone’s bargain de-stash so my spending is ending for the time being.

2 Comments

Filed under hiking, quilts, recycling, sewing, spinning, thrifting

Tagged as BFL, blues, butt warmers, camp seats, greens, handspun, hernia, hiking seats, Mimsy, mini-quilt, oilcloth, oranges, Pigeonroof Studios, quilts, recycling, reds, sewing, singles, sit-upons, spinning, TdF, Tour de Fleece, wool, yarn

Category Archives: sewing

How not to finish a quilt in 10 easy steps

Needle in a scrapstack

My eggplant…

I am not a sock monkey… I think?

Child stitchery (not in a sweatshop)…

Mid-August progress…

Cutter please come home

Stash

Back to the woods…

Stick a fork in it…

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Meta