Dragon Rambles

Yep, I’ve been pretty quiet on blogland this week. I’ve skimmed through most of the blog posts in my reader but haven’t responded to them all. So if you didn’t hear anything from me, sorry, but I have been reading.

So what have I been up to? Well, remember the last time you were in constant pain for a solid week? Not enough to stop you functioning, but enough to make you very very tired, all the time? Well, that’s been my last week.

Sat, I succumbed after my trip into town, and curled up on the couch to knit for the afternoon. But I did rouse myself enough to go out with a friend to a local pub quiz. And it was confirmed that I am crap at pub quizzes. Especially those aimed at people who have been living in the UK for years, if not their whole life.

Sunday, I had friends over. We had a belated “xmas” meal and exchanged gifts. I got an awesome interchangeable needle holder. And I’ve just realised I forgot to take a photo, and it’s upstairs and I can’t be bothered to go get it right now. Perfect colours for me and just what I need. I had been considering trying to make myself one. Getting one as a gift was a much safer option

While my friends were here, I brought out the pile of fabric I had compiled for possible alien colours for my space invaders quilt. One of my friends does graphic design for publishing, so I figured he had to be helpful for picking colours . His first move was to pick out all the Kona solids and discard the rest. His comment was that they were shiny and popped up from the matt-ish black background better. Of course, this might just be because the Kona fabric was the only ones that were not prewashed. I’ll wait and see what they look like after I’ve washed them. But these were the colours he picked:

Still really hard to photograph with any colour accuracy. So, ignoring the purple on the left which I’ve had in my stash for ages and will be used for the bonus ship, the greens are: emerald, jade, candy green, pond and ice frappe. He was suggesting the three lighter greens with one of emerald or jade as the darker colour. But I still think the jump is a bit much, so I’m thinking of using both emerald and jade and dropping ice frappe.

Of course, if these lose their “shinyness” after being washed then the Bella solids and other ones I have are back on the table and I can probably get a smoother gradient.

Originally, I was wanting more teal greens for the aliens, and was then going to pick more royal blues for the home bases and gun. But if I do go with these colours, then I think I’ll go with Kona turquoise and peacock.

It will be interesting what the Kona looks like after washing, because if the Bella really is a flatter colour, then that will be the black I buy.

Wednesday night saw me baking 3 dozen cupcakes. Enough to take to the meet up at the local craft store on Thursday evening, and to take some in to work. Well, I wasn’t completely happy with how they turned out so I baked a batch of brownies on Thursday morning before work. Thursday evening was a blast. There were many of us there, all who don’t do Valentines day (and no, we weren’t all single). Lots of fun, chatting, cake and brownies (as I wasn’t the only one baking) and a very small amount of knitting.

And what have I been knitting off and on this week? Well, remember the birthday yarn I bought on my last trip to London? Well, I’ve started to turn it into one of these.

It’s going to be scrummy to wear. And I’m still loving this colour.

Other highlights of the week… I got a message from my brother. He and his fiance love the shawl and really appreciated the thought and time behind it. So they haven’t been crossed of the hand-knit gifts list . I’ve also continued to jog and have been out three nights this week. We are now in three weeks of an eight week program to be able to jog 5Km. I’m finding it’s much easier to do with someone else than relying on being able to make yourself go. Oh, and I’ve booked my holidays from work for later this year. Five weeks off in Nov/Dec. i have lots of fun planned and it will be my last big spend before I get serious about saving for a house deposit. I’ll tell you all about my plans in another blog post. This ones getting kinda long.

And this weekend? Well, since I’ve been so tired all week (and still am), I’m planning a quiet one. I have some work that I have to do before Monday, but otherwise my plan is to dig out my winterkist quilt and put in some quality sewing time. In between the naps. Basically, this is one weekend where I’ll be minimising my interaction with the outside world and just recharging.

Hope you’ve all had a good week and have an even better weekend.

Yesterday, I had a lovely day out in London. Nicki joined on the train down, and we met up with Charlotte in West Hampstead.

We stopped for some sustenance and a chat before Charlotte took us to Village Haberdashery, which Annie opened up for us. She’s so sweet.

I picked up some scrummy yarn that I just had to have (looking forward to seeing this knit up into a jumper).

And some kona solids to add to the bella solids I have in the hope I can get 4 colours to make aliens.

I also found out that Annie sells the batting I need for hand quilting, so I’ll be ordering some for moonglow. And that she’ll be starting some classes that I may want to attend. Given all the pretties that were there (including a brand new yarn shipment), I’m really impressed that I came home with just this. But I’ll be calling her soon to arrange for more stuff to come home to me.

Unfortunately, Charlotte had to head home after this, so we were down to two. But the fun didn’t stop there. We headed to Camden Rd, where I had a great chat with a guy who knew just what I wanted in leather hiking boots. He’s going to order some in for me to try and I’ll head back to London in a couple of weeks to pick a pair. Why am I not buying some closer to home? Because everyone is now all about gortex and it’s really hard to find full grain leather boots, let alone decent ones.

That important business over, it was time to hit Camden Lock markets for a browse and some late lunch, before heading to Islington to visit Loop. Yes, I bought myself another present, some yummy madtosh dk, which I’ll start knitting with this week.

We finished off our day in London camping out in a coffee shop having a drink and a good chat, before heading back to Bishops Stortford to join Nicki’s husband for dinner. We tried a new (?) place that serves tapas-like meals to share. They were ok. We probably could’ve made better ourselves, but the whole point was that we didn’t want to.

A leisurely meal and more good conversation and then I was heading home, getting back to Saffron Walden at 10pm. It was a fun day, but a long one. And I’m tired today. Like I always seem to be after a day in London. Why is that, I wonder.

Thanks Nicki and Charlotte for a fun day

A couple of years I bought the Dear Jane book. But as these blocks are 4″ finished size (I think), I decided to do the farmer’s wife first (6″ finished size). But deferring the start didn’t mean I stopped thinking about Jane.

Originally I thought I’d do jewels on black, a little like this, but with only 4 or 5 jewel colours. And no yellow/orange.

Then in Oct, I was at Ally Pally and discovered a hand-dyed fabric company. Looking at their colours on the wall, I started to think of doing a Stormy Jane. I came home and ordered fat eighths of many colours to audition for this quilt. I even started thinking that I’d start it in Feb. Well, I only just got those fat eighths on Saturday, so no Feb start for me. And I now have the urge to start under control, and will finish my farmers wife blocks first (keeping with the goal of one sampler at a time).

I went throught the fabrics and pulled out the group that looked the best. Here they are. The idea is the ring of colour will be the block colours and the centre colour will be the background.

Nicki was here helping me look at them. We’re thinking moonlighting (at about 7-8 o’clock) draws the eye too much and should be excluded. Also that the background might want to be a little lighter than charcoal slate (in the middle). But that these two would be great together in a two-colour quilt.

I have time to decide, then there will of course be the time delay while waiting for the fabric to be dyed. Plus I need to find a background fabric as the other options from this mob were too light. So I guess I’d better pick up farmer’s wife again as I still have 70 or so blocks to do.

Yesterday I summed up life in 2012. Today I thought I’d look back at my sewing and knitting progress in 2012.

First up: knitting!

I made my first pair of socks (thanks Granny)

And my second.

A shawl

Or three

A throw (though it’s STILL waiting for me to block it)

Some lace. One of which I can’t show you yet.

And two cardis that are just waiting for me to finish the sleeves (no recent pics of these).

In sewing, I started learning to make clothes using a sewing machine (It’s progressed beyound here but I haven’t hemmed it yet)

And continued piecing quilts by hand. I didn’t do much on my farmer’s wife sampler, but I managed to bring the total of blocks up over 30.

Instead I focused on finishing moonglow. Well, at least the piecing.

Oh, and I made a cushion for Macros

Hmm. That really was a lot. Especially for me. Can’t wait to see what I can accomplish this year

I’ve started getting fabric for my space invaders quilt. The black, purple and blues are easy to find, but the four different teal-greens, not so much. Especially if I want a nice gradation.

I didn’t even try picking the four colours from off the computer screen, instead, I ordered several different options plus picked up a couple more from the local craft shop. I wanted a nice selection to play around with and narrow down to four.

And can I tell you, it’s still really difficult. I’m definitely not going to get as nice and smooth a gradation as I’d like. But I’ve come up with three options from the the bundle above. Bear in mind that it’s really hard to take decent colour-true pics in winter.

Option 1, the greener choice (if you could but tell):

Option 2, the bluer choice:

Option 3, the more muted choice:

What do you think? Any and all opinions are welcome. Or can you spot four from the group photo that you think would be just the thing?

Don’t get too used to all this frequent blogging, I can guarantee I won’t keep it up. It’s just after not having much of anything to show, I’ve had several things all reaching sharing point at the same time.

Edited to add:
Look what we woke up to. It’s a beautiful day!

With one thing and another going on, I haven’t done a monthly recap since the beginning of the year. Thought it was time I started it again. Especially as I completed a milestone this month. So once again, I’m linking up with fresh sewing day over at Lily’s Quilts.

November was a great month for sewing, seeing me finally complete my moonglow quilt top, just over two years after I started it. I am so proud of this, my learning-to-quilt quilt.

For new visitors, this quilt top was hand sewn. Yes, even the long border strips. It’s now waiting for me to buy some batting and a hoop then I’ll start hand quilting it.

I also took part in the Travelling Pic-Stitch bloghop. And made two mariners compass blocks based on photos from Iceland.

Well, ok, ALMOST two mariners compass blocks. You can see the details, including the photos I used as a colour palette, in my post here.

Plus, yes there’s a plus, I managed to knit an entire shawl ready to wear to the work xmas ball next weekend. No photo yet though as I had to wait until today to pick up the crochet hook I need to cast off. And as it’s a circular shawl knit in the round, it currently looks like a very uninteresting knitted bag. Will post a reveal tomorrow.

As promised yesterday, here’s my post on how to hand sew a mariners compass block without having to cut lots of little pieces of paper.

The great thing about hand sewing over EPP (apart from not having to cut paper and tack) is that you get to do a lot less stitches. Just use a running stitch, remembering to put in a back stitch at regular intervals. I usually put one in after a needle full of stitches. This makes it faster than EPP, but also you don’t see the stitches on the front like you often do with EPP.

First things first, when hand sewing it’s important to mark your sewing line, or at least your points. You then pin your pieces together matching the points.

Start your compass by attaching the little triangle pieces to alternate sides – sewing on four out of eight. The main thing to keep in mind is not to sew into the seam allowance. Stop and start at the points.

Then fill in the gaps

Now you want to attach the north, south, east and west compass points. You need to sew some small Y-seams for these. But they’re nothing to be afraid of, just line up on side of the inner part of the compass point and sew from edge to the middle point of your Y-seam, then swing it around and line up the other side, you’ll then sew from middle to edge. Clear as mud? Hopefully this pic helps.

I thought I’d taken a pic of those four points attached. But if I did, I must’ve deleted it (which sounds like me), as it’s gone. Here’s what I do have though, showing the Y-seam started on the fourth point, before the second side is pinned.

Now you put aside the center and start on the four corners. You sew them together like so…

This time what you have to remember is not to sew down the seams like you might do on a machine. Instead, when you get to a seam, do a back stitch before, poke your needle through the seam as in the pic below, so that you are not going through the two layers you are now sewing together, put in a stitch and a back stitch on this side of the seam and keep going.

That last pic also shows you how I pin the pieces to make sure it’s lining up properly, even at the seam point. This isn’t as important on this piece, but what if that seam point also matched a seam on the bottom piece – you really want your points to match.

Once your four corners are done, it’s time to add on the curved pieces to turn your circles into squares. If you forget to do it before you attach the corners to the center, don’t worry, you can attach them later. I’ve done it that way too. To attach the curve, fold your curved piece in half to mark the center on the curve. Now pin this to the center of your corner – handily marked for you by a compass point. Now pin the outer edges of the two pieces together. You’ll now have three pins in. Carefully bring a middle and an outer pin together, pulling out the fabric of the curved piece in between. This is o you can effectively fold this side in half again. Pin the middle of this half to the corresponding middle point of the compass corner. Do the same on the other side. You’ve now got the two pieces joined with five pins, divided evenly. Now have at it with the pins, easing in the fullness that remains. The first five points that were measured means it’s much easier to now ease in the fullness in between and pin the rest together.

When I’m sewing this curved seam, I don’t usually mark my sewing line – I just eyeball the quarter inch seam. If you’re worried you might cut off points though, you can put little marks at regular intervals rather than drawing the whole curve.

Once the curved pieces are attached to the four corner compass units you made earlier, you can start attaching them to the center. Here you’ll be doing Y-seams again. Do these the same way you did before, only this time you have seams to worry about, so pin them at the points to make sure you get nice clean, matching points. Just like before, you start from an edge, sew to the middle point, then sew out to the edge again.

Once all four corners are attached, you’re all done. Faster and with points that match better than if you’d done it with EPP.

If you’d like to make your own mariners compass and don’t have any books to help you draft the block and the templates, may I suggest you go to Jinny Beyer’s website and download her Moonglow pattern. It’s free! Here’s a link to the pdf. The mariners compass block is month 11. It contains all the templates you need, including foundation templates for those who prefer foundation piecing and machine sewing. Plus there’s all the construction info you need.

If you end up making a compass block yourself, please let me know – I’d love to see it.

It’s finally time for me to share my sewing as part of the Travelling Pic-Stitch Blog Hop. This of course means that it’s almost over, as I picked the latest day possible (Dana had already snaffled tomorrow). For those of you who have been joining in, don’t forget there’s a linky party on Friday, with prizes. Click on the blog hop pic to go and read all about it.

When Laura, mentioned the blog hop to me, I thought it sounded fun. I’ve not been part of a blog hop before, and this was something I knew I could easily knock together some ideas for.

I have EPP’d before. That’s how I learnt to quilt back when I was about 12. It was a hexagon something. A bib, I think. My mother is very jealous of her hobbies though, so that was it until I was in my early twenties and wanting to quilt. I picked up a few fat quarters, cut out some papers and started making little log cabin blocks. My mother laughed when she saw and asked what the hell I was doing. It was the only way I’d done patchwork before, I thought it was the only way to do it. After the “don’t be stupid” lecture, I ordered one of Jinny Beyer’s kits to learn how to quilt properly. Without lectures. And hadn’t done any EPP since. So I thought this blog hop was a great chance to try it again. Since I know none of you would laugh at me. Or if you do, well it’s easier for me to tell you where to shove it

I knew exactly what block I wanted to do. My regular readers had really loved the mariners compass block that I made as part of my moonglow quilt, so I thought I’d try one in EPP in case anyone was game to try one that way. So, block picked, on to the photos…

I visited Iceland almost two years ago. I was only there for 2.5 days in the middle of winter. It was my taster trip and I REALLY want to go back. The great thing about Iceland in the middle of winter is that you are out touring both during sunrise…

And sunset…

Perfect! Only one problem. Fabric. While regular readers might have noticed a wine, red, purple theme in the knitting, there’s more a blue, green, purple theme going on with my fabric. No problem, Ally Pally was very nicely timed. I took my ipad along and Charlotte helped me pick out some fabrics to match the sunrise pic from the Village Haberdashery stand where she was spending the day. Then I picked up some more fabric as I was going around. For both sunrise and sunset. ‘Cause I could

Mmm, me likes. I decided to pick sunrise for my EPP block. First step cutting the paper templates. A lot of them.

Then the sewing. I have to confess that I didn’t enjoy this as much as I thought I would. I do my patchwork by hand, much prefer it to a machine even though, yes, it is slower. But EPP is sooooo much slower again. And not as accurate or as tidy as when I hand sew without little pieces of paper. This is as far as I got with the EPP.

Then I decided to finish it off with just handsewing, but I think I need to unpick some of the EPP to get them lining up better, so I haven’t finished it yet.

Though I am liking the colours and fabrics together.

Since I wanted to show you that complicated shapes don’t need to be done with EPP, I decided to use the sunset pic to make a mariners compass the regular way.

Ahhh, much better! (the points are all good, it’s just not ironed yet)

I took a bundle of photos as I was going, so I could show you how to make one. But this post is already of epic proportions, so I’ll save that for tomorrow.

Edited to add almost completed sunrise block.

I still can’t show you what I’ve been sewing, come back on the 28th for my stop on the Travelling Pic-Stitch Bloghop. So I thought I’d share with you a quilt I’ve designed and plan to start next month once I’ve got the fabric.

This quilt is going to be a LONG term project. It’ll be made completely of 0.5″ squares (finished size). This size also means that I’ll be using four times the fabric than the quilt dimensions. Yikes! I’ve done the math and I need 20m of background fabric. Yes, you read correctly. I’m currently getting quotes, seeing what sort of discount I can get for buying two bolts of fabric.

So, ready for the design pic? Here you go.

I’ll be sticking to solids, so just 7 colours to pick out in addition to the background.

Oh, and did I forget to mention, there are 36,864 pieces. See, long term

I don’t have anything that I can show you right now. My sewing is secret until my stop on the bloghop. I am madly knitting a shawl ready to wear to a work ball in three weeks, but it’s knit in the round so you can’t see what it should look like, and won’t unitl it’s cast off.

So instead of sharing my work with you, I thought I’d give you more info about that amazing hexagon quilt I linked to in my last post. Grit is sharing the pattern, breaking it up in parts. The third part has just been released. So if you’d like to make your own version, you can join in. Each of her blog posts for these pattern parts are in both german and english. She looks to be making the quilt using EPP, but you can sew hexagons together by hand without the tedious job of tacking the fabric to paper.

She releases each part every 4 – 6 weeks, but with xmas coming up, and part three being quite big, the next one won’t be released until the end of Jan. The pattern will be available for two weeks after the last round.

Part one can be found here. It gives you an idea of the size of this project. And also tells you how you can save the pattern.

And here are pics of part one stitched up by some of those joining in. Beautiful!

Part two instructions are here.

Part three, the big one so far, is here.

Are you tempted to join in? I know I am