Pattern Jam wants to give me free fabric

I don't want to stand in the way of patternjam.com, so if you:

• are interested in using a computer to design quilts really quickly 
• envision yourself one day sharing your patterns with friends 
• want to sell quilt patterns to strangers

... then please go have a look!

https://patternjam.com?ref=yUvHgtYC 

As a bonus, if 5 people follow that link and sign up on the site, I get the credit, and Pattern Jam will send me fabric. Awesome

Three of you lovely people have already signed up, so I only need two more. How easy could that be? We'll see......

Thank you in advance if you choose to sign up on their website. It's free and you can totally cancel it later if you don't like it. 

https://patternjam.com?ref=yUvHgtYC

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knitting controlled by sewing

I finished my new knitting-notion bag and it's now chock-full of stuff.

Remember this mess?

Yup, I'm happy. That poor felted messenger bag (which I knitted and then felted a few years ago) really wasn't made for so much stuff.

I'm going to get a few opinions and maybe a tester or two, and then I may just publish the pattern. It really is neat-o.

PS - I'm sorry if you can't see the second picture. It's on server #2 and I don't have the source to re-upload it. Darned server 2! You're only affected if you're looking at this from behind a well-secured firewall, though, so get back to work!


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the quilt I've been sharing my time with

This is the beast.

So named because it covers a queen-sized bed with overhang. The squares are all 12" finished and it's 7x8 squares. 

Here, below, is Carol's favourite way to take quilt photos - with 'church' in the frame. Carol took all the photos on this post. She's pretty awesome, especially since she did all the editing in record time. I cropped the photos a little bit when I used SnagIt to grab them from a Flickr page, so hopefully you'll blame me (and SnagIt) if the quality isn't as good as you'd expect from Carol.

See all the neat-o fabrics? Ninjas, zombies, jeeps, Rocky & Bullwinkle, sharks, flames, etc? Hubby bought pretty well all of them. I get him to go into fabric shops with me, and if he finds something manly that makes him smile, I encourage him to go to the cutting counter and ask for .2 or .3 in Canada and 1/4 in the US. After a while, he started going into fabric shops on his own when he was travelling. In this quilt, we have fabric from our home area, plus Washington state, Oregon and Utah. And the backing fabric is also one he picked out in Oregon, and that's the only American purchase I think I was present for. The binding he chose from my Nanna-fed stash and I decided on all the border colours.

It was really random - I started with black, white and the gray patterns for borders, and then incorporated solid gray when I got bored. After a while, I thought I should have orange. I only had a fat quarter, so that ran out pretty quickly. I had added yellow by that point, and red followed shortly. I really got lucky with the way it all worked out because I had little pops of colour that didn't get in the way of each other, and just the right amount of everything.

Another (cropped) photo by Carol:

At the quilting bee, we had a Block Lotto. That means you make a block and bring it to the meeting. You get one ticket for every block you bring. Then there's a draw and the winner gets all the blocks. My Mum ended up winning all 15 from her 2-block entry and she's going to put it together with the teenaged granddaughter. That's pretty cool.

Off to guild #2 tonight, and I'll show the beast again ... just 'cause. There's no overlap, so it's not like I'm annoying anyone with a repeater.

(I had a look at my html view before I posted this and I caught one photo on the bp2 server. I uploaded the picture again and it got onto a different server, so I was able to fix the broken link that you may have experienced before you experienced it.)


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getting ready for the bee

You've seen bits and pieces of the man-quilt and now it's almost done. I will take it to my quilt guilds (yes, I joined two) over the next couple weeks so I won't post a spoiler here. That would ruin the surprise for my MIL. Actually, I don't know if she knows that I have a blog. But just in case.

So here's me hand-stitching the binding. Hubby picked the backing fabric and the very red binding fabric. Also, all the fussy-cut pieces on the front and anything with a pattern - he picked those too. I picked all the solids.

The binding is Jinny Beyer fabric and I got it from my Nan's stash. My Nan rocks.

We shuffled some things around and now I have a sewing nook. A whole desk on wheels that is dedicated to sewing, and a cabinet just for fabric and growlers and paper towels and light bulbs.

The cupboard doors close to keep the dust out. (I don't have much of a stash, but it certainly needs some organization. I think my best bet will be to sew more things.) I've started wrapping my 1+ yard pieces on a bit of cardboard (from the IKEA packaging) and it, obviously, made my stash take up even more room. That was dumb but I can see it all better. There's a positive and a negative for you.

I'm less than halfway finished the quilted bag for my knitting notions. I got stalled at the sew-in by a failure to take enough fabric, and by not taking stock of my zippers ... and being short two zippers. I was still sewing all day, so it wasn't the end of the world. I'll get on that once I finish this hand-sewing.

That's probably it for now.


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