Have a Nice Frog!

Here's what I came up with for this groov-a-licious combo! I thought I'd have a whole top to show you today, complete with borders, but... okay, here's the story. Friday is quilting group. Here's my routine:

1. pack up my portable machine and my current project in a rolling bag
2. set it outside the back door
3. put my other stuff in the car
4. walk around the house to the back door
5. put rolling bag in car
6. drive

Well, I went straight from step 3 to step 6 yesterday. It was more like this:

1. pack up my portable machine and my current project in a rolling bag
2. set it outside the back door
3. put my other stuff in the car
4. drive
5. get out of car
6. realize that I am one rolling bag short
7. call home and ask the man of the place to put my stuff away.

So it was time to find out what opportunity I was in line for. We do have an extra machine and plenty of supplies. I yanked out the blue, purple, and green scrap bins. I started finding fabrics that might want to go together. Then I noticed a bunch of 3.5" width-of-fabric strips in the blue bin, all the same blue funky floral. To me, that just screamed, "Border!" Already cut and ready to go. I used it as the inspiration fabric for the quilt and pulled in some pinks and oranges for sparkle. I cut the fabrics into 4.5" width strips, not worrying about their lengths. I also cut a few 6" squares and folded 'em into prairie points. Then I made long strips and laid them side-by-side. I scattered in the prairie points and assembled the whole thing. I still needed an outer border, so I grabbed the fushia bin. No dice. The dark green. Ew. Purple? No way. Yellow really wanted to play so... Here is the final product. I'm calling it "Transporter Malfunction." Get it?

Heh-heh-heh...

If you were given this: and this: and this: ...what would you make? I'll post my answer tomorrow.

Mayday! Mayday!

Okay, Kids, I'm stuck. I started this post:

SABLE that's ... Stash Aquired Beyond Life Expectancy. I think I may be SABLE at
this point. I have so many creative supplies, I could open a store. So, why not? I'm not going to use it all. But it's hard. I bought this stuff because I like it and I believed I'd use it. I've got to say, this is a hard bullet to bite. I'm... opening an etsy store. I'll preview the stuff here, and a few days later it'll pop up in my (gulp) online store. I am starting with the cross-stitch tub. I have some gorgeousness just languishing away in there. Then perhaps I'll move on to the acid-free papers.

And then I got stuck. Yup. I took pictures and wrote a description or two. And then nothin'. I like my stuff. Even the stuff I don't like as much as the other stuff. So I don't know what I'm going to do. Any suggestions? How do you manage your oversupplies?

Injured Pride

My office chair broke just now! And you gotta know that when your chair breaks, it doesn't just fall over when you're out of the room: no, it dumps you out and suddenly you're not sitting where you thought you were sitting. No worries, though. I'm not hurt. I'm just applying a little ice to my... pride. And we have no lack of chairs in this house. But that was the only purple one. Phooey.I've been doing an online team workout program. It's called Blue and You. My team is Lime & Violet. With it, you check in each day you work out. With every day's worth of exercise, you are moved to another place in the USA, as though you are walking really fast. Today I'm in Beachwood, Ohio, near Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Color me well-travelled.Dream Dancer was getting a little monotonous so I pulled out In a Garden again. (I really don't understand those people who can work on just one project at a time.) I finished up the lemon tree, complete with backstitching to pick out the details. I like backstitching as I go. I get to appreciate the picture more. And if I really get moving, I can get Sheherezade done today. We'll see. And if wishes were horses, we'd all be eating steak. Anybody know what show I'm quoting there?

This was started right after our trip to New Zealand, possibly on the plane home. That was five yea--cough-cough!--some time ago. I pulled it out and stitched for, oh, probably half an hour. Then sewed down the ends on the sewing machine: less than ten minutes. And there was the blocking--wetting, ironing, pinning, and leaving it to dry--maybe five minutes. So, a maximum of 45 minutes and I can kick a project off the Way Too Many Projects sidebar. (This is where you cheer. That's okay. I'll wait.)
So I'll look at that list again and ask, "Is anybody else a quick finish?" Well, the Nine Batik Stars should be done in a few hours. I'm just sewing down the binding--I've done three corners already--and will have to make a label. The label always has my name, the city, the year, and the name of the quilt. It's art; it needs a name.
And I've finally found the name for this one. I was thinking desert (because of the sand color), jewels (because of the tones of the blocks), and night (because of the stars). This took me to the middle east, then to Arabia, then 1001 Arabian Nights. I thought about the stories of Sinbad, djinn, mysterious caves, harems, surprise twists and then I thought about the woman who told all these stories: Sheherezade. And that was it. That's the name. Sheherezade. Cool, huh? I'll change it in the sidebar.

While Tiny's away, we cleaned the carpets. That's right, we did. We didn't call a company. We didn't figet and fuss that someone wasn't rinsing it enough. We actually went to the store and picked up a Rug Doctor and did the work ourselves*. And rinsed it three times. Yeah, that means we didn't do the whole house, but still it's very nice. If soggy.

*By ourselves, I mean the Man of the Place ran the machine. I just moved furniture, mixed the solution, and poured it in. It makes too much noise for my tender little shell-like ears.

The Camera Doesn't Lie

Oh, sure it does! When you look at these pictures, you can't tell if the room is a mess or straight out of Better Homes and Gardens. In fact, you can't tell if my home is really in a hollow tree or an alien ship orbiting Earth and looking for signs of intelligent craftwork. But wait. That also applies to you. I don't know if you're even human or possibly some exotic mix of gorilla and butterfly. A gorillerfly. Butterilla? I gotta get my mind back.

I pinned these two quilts in preparation for actually quilting them.

Definition

Quilting, if you don't know, is the action of attaching a quilt top, fluffy stuff in the middle, and back together. Usually a sewing machine is used for this, but hand-quilting is highly respected. Also, there's something called a tied quilt. In this case the quilting is done with small bits of yarn, cording, thread, or very flexible pasta* that simply goes through the quilt and back up and is then tied. Many quilters will actually pay to have their quilt machine-quilted. This is referred to as credit card quilting. I have credit card quilted my three largest quilts as Molly, talented as she is, simply isn't big enough for some things.
Miss Running Water, my Dream Dancer, has made some progress. I believe that everything except her skirt and feet and some little background do-hickeys (that's a technical term) has been cross-stitched. Backstitching is still needed for almost the whole picture.
*Quilting with pasta is not recommended for quilts that you expect to ever wash as it is biodegradable and will disintegrate. Cooking with pasta, on the other hand, can go over quite well.

A Finish and a Review

I did it! I kept my focus on this little darlin' and The Secret Life of Limes is finished, top and back! This one is ready for Red's deft hand. I don't usually make backs, but I was inspired. And--Stashbuster Alert!-- I used up this 2-yard piece of chartreuse, not to mention all the scraps that went into the cross! I also used a little cross-stitch piece I made when teaching a class. Applecheeks really likes it when I throw in some cross-stitch.

Movie Review, from a Knitter's POV

We rented The Hurt Locker. If you need a film that will move knitting fingers fast, this is a good one. The action just keeps moving and the sock practically knit itself. There was one point that I needed to leave the room to escape from a particularly gruesome scene, but otherwise I found it a good film. If your project is low in patterning detail, like my Joyleaf Cable Socks, The Hurt Locker can be a great film. However, for a project that requires more attention, you'll be better served with The Reader. This is a film that my regularly looking away did not cause me to lose the thread of the plot and may have, in fact, enhanced the movie-watching experience.

Preview

Tiny's off to Greece today. She flew out of LAX last night and has landed in Zurich. Greece soon! I'm so excited for her (and a little jealous.)Consider this a preview. I'm working on this quilt today. I hope to have the top done by 3 pm. I think I'll call it "The Secret Life of Limes."

Hoard No More

Have you ever watched that show, Hoarders? It's about people who have allowed stuff to rule their lives. They have so much stuff that it affects their ability to live normally. Police and psychologists are called in--it's really extreme. Do you know why we watch shows like that? To make us get rid of stuff. I watched an episode just the other day and it worked. I looked at the overabundance of fabric scraps I had and immediately posted on Freecycle. OFFERED: Grocery Bag of Quilt Scraps. Yup. Before I even went through my stash. Then I started in on it. I wound up with not one, but FOUR bags of scraps. I sent 'em off with four different responders to my ad. Oh, I still have plenty of scraps. Don't get me wrong. But now they FIT in the boxes.

Gretel Dropped Bread Crumbs

You know how a paper that you handle often gets worn out at the folds? Like a pattern? Like a cross-stitch pattern that takes a long time? Yeah, that. What do you do to avoid losing those stitch symbols right in the crease? Here's what I do (when the brain is operating well): I stitch the creased areas first! The column of stitches down Miss Running Water's skirt is right where the fold occurs. And it goes right down her left boot. You know what this means? That's right! It's gonna look weird.Since her last time in front of the camera, I have completed:

1. the white parts of the shield
2. the shield points
3. the blue line at the bottom of the cape
4. the portion of the skirt in the column

I was having a devil of a time trying to stitch that skirt. The usual way I stitch is to thread my needle with one color and do all of that within reason, mapping it out ahead of myself, until I run out of thread (or get bored). But that wasn't working here. However, I have learned various ways of managing my stitchery. You might notice the faint green threads running through the stitching: those show where the bold lines are in the pattern, every ten stitches. It makes a complicated pattern much easier to follow: it's like marking the major intersections on a map. Then all I have to do is fill in the blocks. Even so, the bold lines on this pattern are easy to lose. So, I went further. If I'm going to fill in the block, I don't want to have to search it out every time I look up. I made a little frame, ten squares across and ten squares down. I place it around one of those blocks frames on my fabric in green. I keep it in place with a cut-up post-it. (This is where I waggle my eyebrows to insinuate how clever I am.)