New Favorite Fabric

I knew I was going to love this one from La Petite Ecole (it's the one I asked them to look up when we were at Quiltworks, mom) but I love it even more than I thought I would. Good thing I bought a whole yard (ha!) rather than my usual "minimum they will allow me to purchase". My favorite of the little motifs is that Enfant there in the front. I hadn't seen him in any online previews.

No idea about what I'll use this for (unusual for me to buy fabric (especially this much fabric) without any purpose for it) or how I'll ever find a project special enough to make me cut into it but, for now, I'm enjoying just looking at it.

Back from Yarn Land

And into my pile of dishes (and apples). But at least the dishes are kind of quiet and don't involve walking miles and miles of NYC. Don't get me wrong, the Yarn Crawl was super-fun (and where I spent my entire weekend). My feet just don't feel terribly happy about it. I have a ton more photos over on flickr but here are a few, just as a representation of my holiday weekend.

And the loot. Hmm. That doesn't look like very much yarn for a yarn crawl. Oh well. I guess it just goes to show that the quilting bug is still in full effect!

My Vastly Improved (but Still Unpainted) Sewing Room

After spending most of last Friday better organizing the shelving in my craft room / sunporch, I decided that the time had finally come to post a few photos over here.

First, here is the room as we saw it when we looked at the house last summer. It was being used as a kind of breakfast room. Off of what was set up as a dining room (now the tv room). Off of the kitchen, most of which was taken up with a dining table. Hmm.

As you can see, my sewing machine is right underneath where that light fixture dangled (and, conveniently, looking out onto the chicken tractor!). I whacked my head on that thing about 1,000 times. Luckily, I have a husband who doesn't mind being daring with harmless little things like electricity, so he replaced the fixture with this milk glass one that we picked up at a junk shop for practically nothing. It lacked "guts" but he just put in the wiring from the old fixture. I didn't even have to paint it (it's kind of copper-patina-green)!

You might also recognize the curtains made for me by my mother and grandmother. These are pretty much two of my favorite things in the house right now!

Beeker likes to watch the chickens just as much as I do.

The fabric and books are all in there (with tons of miscellaneous other things). Obsessively organized, with red, brown, and grey fabric in the cabinet on the left, and blue, yellow, and green fabric in the cabinet on the right. That porcupine-y thingy next to the window, on the left, is my knitting needle holder. Being guarded by a monster I made in a silly craft workshop with my friend, Aryn.

I actually managed a decent shot of the yarn tower Patrick built for me from cedar (to keep the pesky moths away a bit). The room is so small, it's really tough to get a shot of it but here it is! (And this is all after not buying yarn for almost a full year!)

On the other end of the room, not as much is going on. I'm hoping to eventually be able to get my daybed which I've had since I was 10 years old shipped or brought up to New York. It will go down here with the quilt on it. In the meantime, at least it no longer contains a toaster oven and a television and I've been able to hang a few of my favorite bits on the walls. (The first photo is (hopefully obviously) a before photo.)

In the foreground is the cat-proof door that Patrick put up for me. It's one of the best things about moving from the bay window in our apartment to the sunporch in our house.

On the wall are (clockwise from top left) a funny clay head which Patrick made in high school, a very very cool fabric collage that I found at an antique store on Cape Cod, a shadow box I put together with a postcard from Paris, an antique crochet hook, a lace doily, some antique buttons, and my small vegetable ivory collection, one of Stephanie's pinecones, and an antique picture postcard of 3 baby bears in Maine.

The only (major) thing left to do is to paint the panelling. I don't know when it will happen as I have made it my goal to paint the living room, finish painting the kitchen cabinets, and paint our bedroom before Sheep and Wool (when I am having a party at my house). Some day, the panelling will hopefully be similar to what's in the adjacent tv room, only pale green rather than white.

I Love the Mail Today!

I couldn't even wait to get somewhere to sit down to open my DQS9 package! Patrick had to hold the box while we walked down Main Street and I pulled out my wonderful presents, one by one. As we were passing one of the shops, I'd just pulled out the beautiful Amy Butler fabric and the shopkeeper stopped me to say that I should make her something with it because it is so pretty. I agree with her about how pretty it is, that's for sure!

Also in my swap package from Valerie were some very cool stamps, mother of pearl buttons (which are perfect for the cowl that I made yesterday -- see below), a Canada tshirt which magically fits me perfectly, and a super-cute little notecard. And, of course, the most lovely quilt!

Lucky

Most of the reason I was so busy over the last week was because I had a visit from my grandparents and aunt. Which was very fun, of course, but busy as well. So the blog languished. But the house did not!

I am super-lucky to have a mother and a grandmother who not only are able but also willing to make roman shades for my very own craft room (I can't tell you how excited I am to have a craft room after my craft bay window for the past 4 years in Brooklyn). And this is no ordinary room. It is a sun porch so it has 5 windows. And I wanted to use in the curtains some lovely vintage French fabric I'd had on my ebay watch list for approximately 2 years. And I have a grandfather willing to help me string the said curtains and hang them in the windows. Now my craft room is infinitely brighter and nicer looking. As you can see from the "before" photo below.

All that's left to do is to paint the panelling!

Before

After (this is the window on the right in the photo above)

Quilt Update

I've been going full steam ahead on the quilt. Even though the bed it will be for is still in Oklahoma. I calculated that I will need about 32 squares and I'm up to 27 (I've done a few more since I took these photos). It needs ironing but you can still get the idea of the colors and layout. No point in ironing it before I'm ready to piece the blocks together. The cats will just get on them again anyway.

Because it's important to note things like this, I have to say that the lowest block on the right in the first photo is my favorite.

Also, because I'm absolutely super-lucky, my mother and grandmother are working on roman shades for me for the room the quilt will go in. They're going to have a panel of this (which I've had my eye on for years) down the center. I can't wait to show them here!

Guest Room Redone

You may remember back in March when I was discussing my plans for the then lemon-yellow guestroom. Well, a mere 2 months later, just in time for "the season" (we live in a tourist town and our friends & relations are behaving accordingly -- great excuse for us to be tourists too), the plans have been (mostly) executed!

All of the furniture was either left behind in the house or repurposed/found old furniture of ours so I only had to buy paint and fabric -- my kind of a redo! I still don't approve of that ceiling fan and have plans (and fabric) for a red-and-white-triangles quilt (of my own design, hence no links to patterns -- sorry!) but this is the most-liveable room in the house, thus far.

It has a nice view of the One Big Tree and the window box of impatens.

Checked fabric for pillow shams (which were meant to go with the planned red and white quilt, not this one) from Brooklyn General. There's still a little bit of random stuff piled near the door but this room is mostly organized.

The curtains are of a combo of my favorite fabric ever (sorry, can't find a direct link at the moment) from purl and some checked linen from mood (that linen was a bear to sew!), lined with cut-up sheet. I wanted to leave the tie back in the middle of the curtain so that the gingko pattern would still show. Here's a detail on flickr.

Our new (or semi-new -- she's been with us for 2-1/2 weeks now) kitten, Beeker, approves. Especially since she can easily see out the window from the bed.

Giving My Scissors a Workout

I'm finally making a log cabin quilt! I've always been fascinated by log cabin quilts (my parents even have one made by my great-grandmother) but never quite had the right inspiration / spot for one. But now I'm going full-steam ahead! The color-scheme is based on this stained glass window which we saw in Paris last fall (I know, terribly silly to look at Tiffany glass in Paris when there is far more of it to be found in NYC but it was still fun to see even though it was a tiny exhibit). The internet photo doesn't really show the colors off to full advantage but you can use your imagination to see that the glass is actually golden yellow and peachy pink.

It's all going to be cut into strips soon (except for the neutrals in the middle which will be the center sqares for the cabins) and I'll have to have my scissors sharpened.

The quilt will eventually be for my daybed (my 10th birthday gift) which is currently at my parents' house in Oklahoma. How I will get it to Upstate New York is yet to be determined but I figure that the quilt will take some time so maybe I'll have time to come up with a plan.

Alabama Studio Style Part 2

The Alabama Studio workshop with Natalie Chanin last Sunday was wonderful. That's about all that I can say about it. Spacecraft was wonderful. Natalie is lovely. The techniques were even more fun and easy than I could have imagined. The other participants were friendly and helpful.

And now I am addicted. I've already, in the course of 1 week, picked out 11 yards of cotton jersey from the Alabama Chanin Store, not to mention the 7,215 beads and 12 spools of thread. I'm going to make a dress, a skirt, and a top. And pillows. And placemats. And finish my bandana (pictured above). Yeah. I think I need to take a breath. But it's all just too much fun! I can't seem to stop. And I don't want to.

An Actual Needlecraft Project

I finally took a quilting class in February at Purl Patchwork. This is still surprising to me because I have never been much of one to actually sew items. Knitting, yes, but finishing, always put off. But Purl just has such great fabrics and fun projects on their blog that I couldn't help myself. All of the years of my wonderful Grandmother doing all of my projects for me while I "helped" (watched and chatted) and of my husband's Grandmother giving me quilting books which sat, unused, on my crafting shelf, were now a thing of the past. I decided to DO it.

Not that I hadn't tried...

I have one quilt that I started with my Grandmother at least 6 years ago. I picked the fabrics and the pattern, based on a quilt that I saw at anthropologie which was too expensive for my college student budget and she sewed it all together for me. Then I started to quilt. I had an elaborate plan of a flowery pattern in between the printed patterns on the fabric (I'll post about this quilt more specifically later) of which I did one repetition and then never worked on the quilt again.

Last year I saw a quilt in Joelle Hoverson's (Purl again! You'd think I'm obsessed. . . ) apartment in an article in my beloved Blueprint which inspired another quilt in me (I'll also post on this one later). Which also had lovely fabric picked for it and was pieced (this time by me) and then I started to quilt. But I put it down and never went back. Now I realize that what was happening was that I didn't know what I was doing and was afraid of ruining these quilts that were, up until the quilting, turning out exactly as I'd envisioned. Which so rarely happens with handmade things.

And so now I've taken a class and I do feel like I actually know what I'm doing (thanks Cassandra!) and that I'm not ruining the project. And what have I done? I've started yet another quilt. . .

But that's just me. So this one is for my husband. I have a vision of his one day having a nice, big study, where he can write and where there will be a sleeper-sofa for our frequent houseguests (who currently have to sleep on an air matress in the dining room -- I guess that's the price for free lodging in the NYC area). And this quilt is to be a throw on that sofa / an extra blanket for the guests.

He likes muted colors. I tend to some that are a bit brighter but I think that this one looks like him. This fabric on the back (which is a repro 1800's fabric which happens to look very art deco) especially looks like his decorating taste to me. And I'm having a LOT of fun with this quilt the print idea. I don't have to make up a quilting pattern or even follow piecing lines! I just go along the pattern already printed there for me. This has the added benefit of making the print look more dimensional.

And I think it looks pretty appropriate from the front as well. I'm just glad that my camera isn't good enough for you to see the uneven stitches. But it's handmade, right?