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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basic pattern design

I completed my first pattern design on patternjam.com this morning. Really basic. I am very fond of pinwheels, and think that this design would come together really quickly, and be great for baby quilts or charity quilts, with just enough interest that you have fun doing it.

The gray fabric has zombies on it and I like the contrast with the white. I kept a pattern and a solid for the pinwheels as well, and think there's good contrast there too.

Honestly, this took about 3 minutes to do. It's not tricky and it's not time-consuming. Maybe this design isn't your cup of tea, but maybe it makes you want to do better. You probably can.

If you follow this link, you can sign up too, and maybe I'll get some free fabric one day:

https://patternjam.com?ref=yUvHgtYC

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about those photos

FINAL UPDATE:

I don't think there's a way for me to stop my pictures from going to server 2. I will try deleting and re-adding when I notice that that's where they are, but I don't expect that to be successful.

This seems like the rambling of a crazy-person now. If you don't have a firewall that protects you from the dangers of 2.bp.blogspot.com, you have no idea what I'm going on about.

We'll get back to the quilting and/or knitting very soon. Peace out.
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UPDATE:

NOPE! I have discovered more. Apparently the 2.bp.blogspot.com server that some of my photos (that I took with my own camera) are being hosted on is the culprit. The ones on the 1, 3 and 4 servers are just fine and they display properly.

I'll do more digging and see if I can find a way to stop the pictures from going to number 2. We all know what number 2 is, right?
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I got annoyed today. I went to look at my last post on my computer and found that the picture wouldn't load. I checked on my phone to see if it was knocked out there as well. It wasn't. I then tried 20,000 things on my computer with the html and couldn't get the picture to display.

Then I got smart. I put the url for the photo into the browser's address bar (Chrome, so you figure it would get along with Google, right?) and tried to load just the photo. The network, the browser, or maybe the computer beasties wouldn't allow it. I think that's the problem. It's not that Blogger is killing my photos randomly. It's some sort of restriction.

The problem isn't solved, but it's not one that I am able to solve. I can continue to look at pesky blogs that cause that issue with my phone, though. Mine isn't the only one - but so far I'm just seeing this behaviour on Blogger blogs ... which are also friendly with Picasa albums. I don't know which is the culprit, but I've searched every way from Sunday and haven't been able to find a solution that works for me. Maybe it's just me. If I'm spending all this time on something that's my issue alone, and doesn't impact my three readers at all, that's just ... grrr.

ANYWAY, I have spent several days working on the design for the knitting holder. Somehow it turned into a purse. I'm going to have to split this current design work into two different projects - one that is a purse and one that is a knitting notion holder. That shouldn't be too hard.

I'm going to rework the pattern notes tonight and hopefully then I'll be able to cut out the pieces soon. I'm really hoping to be able to sew up the sample on Saturday. Then I can show you!

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