The Leftovers

With the Blue Quilt and Rainbow Cat quilt in limbo it seemed a good time to assess the remaining flannelette strips. I didn’t want a quilt with fire engines, monkeys, frogs, princesses and other themes for children, so I removed those. I put aside some black and red skull themed strips to make a lap blanket with because I like them. The remaining strip stash was made up of solid colours, strips of multicolour striped fabric, quite a bit of purple, and leftovers from the Blue Quilt.

I’d had an idea for a quilt that looked like a watercolour paint box, but multicolour fabric wouldn’t work for that and I didn’t have enough variety of single colour fabric in green, yellow and orange fabric. The fact that the fabric I had was limiting my creativity was a good thing: it meant the quantity of strips had reduced significantly. If I wasn’t going to buy more fabric I had to work with what I had. So what could I make?

Idea 1: a purple quilt

Idea 2: another blue quilt (but using an easier technique)

Idea 3: a graduated solid colour quilt – perhaps with alternating white stripes

Idea 4: a quilt from all the leftover striped fabric

Idea 5: a skull-themed lap quilt

So not so plenty to keep me entertained for a while. However, this was supposed to be the Summer of Quilts, not the Summer and Autumn of Quilts. I wanted to be finished and done with flannelette strips by the end of February so I could go back to sewing clothing in March, even if it meant tossing the remainder into the recycling.

If I couldn’t get all the quilts made by then, what should I aim to complete?

The answer was this: as many tops as possible. My aim was to use as many of the strips as possible. I didn’t need the topstitching part done to achieve that. The Rainbow Cat Quilt, Blue Quilt and anything else I made could be quilted another time.

Could I get the above five quilt tops made in less than a month? Perhaps, if I worked fast and smart. No fancy block designs. No paper piecing of blocks that changed shape after the blocks were sewn together. Just strip quilts, like the aqua quilt, or very basic blocks.

The tail end of the Summer of Quilts was going to me a race against the calendar.

Making it Easier – January

In my summary of craft for 2023 I noted that I seemed to get into a culling frame of mind after getting Covid, but when I think back, I reckon the urge was already simmering in the background. It started after Mum went into care, but not in a ‘you can’t take it when you go’ sort of way. Instead it was in reaction to seeing how bad Dad’s hoarding was getting. I know when he passes away I’m going to have a lot of stuff to get rid of, but I’ll want to keep some things too so I feel the need to ‘make room’ at home to make those decisions easier.

So I tried again to pass on the Passap, and this time was successful thanks to a very helpful person at the Machine Knitters Association. Honestly, I was almost as excited to find it a good home as I was when I bought it, ten years ago. Our ironing board now occupies the space. Not particularly exciting, but I am sewing more often now and it’s been set up in one room or another, always in the way, for most of the last few months. Now it has a permanent home, and that makes one small part of domestic life easier. It even led to Paul ironing the button bands of his shirts!

In non-crafty areas of the house… well, this is the tenth year we’ve been here and our usage of the house has changed quite a bit. When we first moved in we had big parties. Our friends had young kids, and people often stayed over. Now our friends are exhausted from wrangling teens and ageing parents simultaneously, and for the first time nobody stayed over on NYE. So in the days after, I culled a lot of things related to entertaining that are too much trouble, we don’t use now or we are just tired of.

More recently, we watched The Gentle Art of Death Cleaning on tv, then I read the book, which were fun and enlightening. The tv show takes the concept much further than the book, especially in regard to my new favourite term “reverse robbery”. Since I don’t have kids or nieces/nephews, if I die it’s going to fall to friends or even a stranger to sort out my possessions and I’d rather they didn’t have a huge mess to clean up. And since we do plan to downsize eventually, it’d be less of a shock if we don’t have to cut back our possessions all at once.

Well, that’s what I tell myself anyway.

I hesitated to add ‘January’ to this blog post title. It makes it feel like I’m setting myself a challenge to do at least one thing to make life easier each month, which actually makes life harder. My intention is just to remind myself of this year’s motto at the end of each month, and note any new ideas I’ve implemented.

The Rainbow Cat Quilt – Part One

At last I got to the quilt that had inspired me to return to making quilts. As with the previous two, I started by ironing the strips then laying them on my cutting board to see if they were straight and the correct width. Unfortunately, the answer was pretty much ‘no’ to both. I think by the time I cut them, during lockdown back in 2020, I was well tired of making strips. Or maybe the cutting machine was getting blunt. Either way, they were very wonky.

So when I saw a video showing how to sew strips on a 45 degree angle onto squares of paper, I realised it was the perfect method for this quilt. With this technique it doesn’t matter if the strips are of different widths or are a bit crooked. You just sew each strip down and fold it flat, and the wonkiness gets hidden in the seams.

However, I essentially had only two fabrics. One was the stripe, cut in two directions, and the other was the cat faces. What I needed was another fabric so I could vary the order of the fabrics. Preferably purple since there wasn’t any of that colour in the stripe fabric (and you don’t have a full rainbow without purple!). Even better if it had cats on it. And if I was going to buy fabric I may as well make it the backing fabric, too.

So I went shopping. No luck getting purple cats. I could get plain purple at Spotlight, but there wasn’t enough left for backing. I found a nice purply-blue fabric with multicolour ovals on it at a patchwork shop, but there wasn’t enough of that either. Hunting on the internet when I got home, I found another Spotlight store had white fabric with multicoloured dots on it and decided to go get it the next day to use as the backing fabric – and if it wouldn’t work on the front I’d get a little bit of plain purple to use for that.

The next morning I remembered that box of leftover strips from projects I’d woven and sewn, so I decided to have a dig around to see if there were any purple strips in it. And what did I find?

Purple fabric with cats on it.

Seriously.

The Snakes & Ladders Quilt

The second and larger batch of wiggly stripe fabric was a mix of red, blue, black and green, and had been cut both vertically and horizontally. I also had a good sized piece of uncut fabric to play with. I took inspiration from a video showing ways to use striped fabric in blocks to find a design that looked good. Though I tried a few plain colours mixed in with the fabric, in the end I decided I liked it all made from the same fabric.

I started as I had with the Cat Quilt, pairing up the already cut strips – one vertical, one horizontal. Then I considered what length to cut them to use most of the fabric. This time I had two lengths that worked, so I embraced that and made columns of alternating widths. The columns were separated with one long strip.

I like how the design I settled on looks like ladders. It was a pity, I thought, that I’d already used serpentine stitch for the top stitching of the last quilt. When I looked at the next stitch in the list, it was also very snake-like:

So that’s what inspired the name of the quilt.

For the backing and binding I used the fabric I’d set aside for the Aqua Quilt leftovers. It turned out to have a small rip in it, but I was able to use it for this quilt instead.

The Snakes & Ladders quilt is a bit small for a couch blanket and too big for a cat quilt, but makes a generous lap rug. By the time I’d finished it, I had already done a test block for the next quilt – the Rainbow Cat Quilt. Now that one is going to be fun!

The Cat Lap Quilt

With the Blue Quilt and Aqua Quilt leftovers packed away until I figured out what I wanted to do with them, I was free to go back to sewing clothing. So what did I do?

Given some time, I came to the conclusion that while I hadn’t liked the quilt making as much fun as I’d hoped, I did like the result. Having a mental picture of what the finished piece might be like could be the motivation I needed. Perhaps if I kept the projects small and manageable the process would be more pleasant, too.

I got to thinking about the other batches of flannelette strips, and started watching videos of sewers making things from fabric “crumbs and threads”. Some of these had potential, and there was one particular batch of strips cut from a rainbow fabric that might make something the daughter of a friend would like. I dragged out the box and laid out the strips according to fabric.

The rainbow fabric had been cut both lengthwise and widthwise. Another fabric of cat faces went well with it. This would make a bigger piece – maybe a couch blanket.

There were two batches of colourful wiggly stripes on a white background that didn’t go well with the rainbow – but I had uncut pieces of the same fabric to work with. If I added fabric to it, the smaller batch was about the right size for a small lap rug for protecting my clothing when the cat sits in my lap of an evening – what I call a “cat quilt”. The larger batch of wiggly stripes would be something bigger but I wasn’t sure what yet.

The rest of the strips went in the box of leftovers from other projects.

I decided to work on the cat quilt first, and to test some of the things I’d learned in the videos, and some methods I hadn’t yet worked out how to do on my machine, like using a walking foot and some decorative stitches I could select. For the additional fabric I chose to use up some of the backing fabric trimmings of the Aqua Quilt. Instead of sewing strips end to end, I matched them up by length and sewed them together lengthwise. Then I worked out what length to cut everything to use up the most fabric. I made three long columns of strips, then sewed those together.

The part where I learned the most was during the quilting. Firstly, I worked out how to select the serpentine stitch on my machine.

I noticed that the curves might start going in the same direction, but they ended differently. So to prevent one side always being the same, I turned the work around every four or five rows. What I should have done was sew every other row then turn it around and sew the rest, because the drag of the machine foot from different directions made the seam of the three columns distort into a wave. I used the normal foot, so I decided I’d try the walking foot next time.

Fortunately, I like the wavy seam. It kinda goes with the topstitching. I used the rest of the wiggly stripe fabric for the backing and bias binding. Once finished, I was still keen to keep making quilts, and got stuck into the one using the other striped fabric.

Aqua Quilt Leftovers

Having realised I had as much fabric left over for the Aqua Quilt as what I started with, I decided to use up as much of that fabric as possible before sewing anything else. I had:

  1. A short bit from the end of the Aqua Quilt top, cut off because the batting was 254cm but the top was around 300.
  2. A 1.5ish metre length of the aqua flannelette I’d intended to make into bias binding.
  3. A bundle of remaining original strips.
  4. The remaining strips from Mum’s pyjamas
  5. Offcuts of the aqua flannelette backing.

I decided to make a lap blanket. The first thing I did was cut the offcut of the top in half. The new width was just right for a lap blanket… and once sewn together it would be a good length for one too. That wasn’t going to use up much leftover fabric, so I decided to make two lap blankets, using the same method as for the quilt.

I cut up most of the offcuts of plain aqua backing fabric to use as the alternating strip against the mixed, paler fabrics. Once they were all sewn together and added to the offcuts from the quilt top, I had this.

This would make a lot more than two lap blankets.

This presented a dilemma that I haven’t yet solved.

The Blue Quilt – Part One

So the blue quilt needed to be more interesting than the aqua quilt. I had an idea how to achieve that: a design that echoed the log cabin structure in weaving. For that I needed the same amount of dark blue fabric as light blue, and while I had a piece of dark blue floral fabric I’d found in an op shop that would work, I didn’t have enough of it to make the queen sized quilt I had in mind. I also had a small piece of navy flannelette I’d bought to add variety to the mix, which I decided to buy more of.

The navy worked best with patterned fabrics, the dark blue floral with plain. Lots of sewing later, I had one set of four blocks sewn together…

… and about 22 more blocks. I did some math and drew a plan, and realised I needed 99 blocks.

It was at this point I put everything aside so I could finish the Aqua Quilt by the end of the year. With that time to think, I came to the realisation that I wasn’t enjoying the process of making the Blue Quilt. And maybe even making quilts at all. I didn’t hate it, but I wasn’t having fun.

Life’s too short for crafts you don’t enjoy.

This dissatisfaction was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t reduced my flannelette fabric stash at all when making the Aqua Quilt. The offcuts of the backing fabric were about equal to the strips I started with. Thinking about all the fabric I had bought fabric in order to make the Blue Quilt work, I felt a sinking feeling.

I don’t wanting to waste the fabric or the work I’ve already put in, so I’ve been considering my options. I haven’t cut all of the dark floral and navy flannelette into strips yet, and I have some small batches of untouched plain light blue. I could…

  1. Use the blocks I’ve already made to construct a small piece, like a lap rug
  2. Then make a pair of pyjamas with the uncut fabric, assuming there is enough
  3. Then make another strip quilt or a few small ones with the remaining strips
  4. Or try making fabric-wrapped rope baskets
  5. Or save the strips to use as stuffing
  6. Or send all the strips to fabric recycling

Whatever I do, I need to stick to my new rule of only making things I want, not just to use up stash. Trouble is, I don’t need more pyjamas, or a fabric-wrapped rope basket. But I could do with more cat quilts (small blankets for protecting my clothes and legs from claws).

Quilting the Quilt

I’ve only quilted a larger quilt once before, and it must have been quite a while ago because I’d forgotten what it was like. Which is like wrestling a big, fuzzy, floppy mattress. I had to put my sewing machine in the middle of the cutting table to have enough room to handle it. I’m certain my stitching would have been far neater if I hadn’t been constantly pulling, pushing and manipulating it.

The plan was to use ‘serpentine’ stitch, which sews a wavy line, but when I selected the number for the wavy line shown in my machine’s manual I got a completely different stitch. The manual had no other info – just a chart – so I gave up and did the ‘stitch in the ditch’ method instead. Though this does make it look a bit like a puffer jacket (which I loathe) the bamboo batting makes it feel appealingly cushy rather than full of air.

Even though this is possibly the plainest quilting topstitch patten, it still ate up four and a half reels of thread. I had two in the right colour already, and I’d already bought more, but it turns out the number on the edge of the Gütermann thread reel is the same on all reels, and the actual colour number is the ends of the reels. So I made a fourth trip to Spotty in as many weeks only to find that every colour in that thread was in stock except the one I needed. I asked a staff member and they said the shelf had been restocked the previous day.

Fortunately, there was a thread in the same colour in another brand.

I wanted to bind it with the same fabric as the backing, but flannelette probably doesn’t make the most robust of fabrics. Unfortunately, the quilting cotton was nearly twice as expensive and the only colour that came close to matching was too dark. Then I remembered a friend’s method of finishing: just turn over the edge of the backing to the front. This wouldn’t be any less robust than making bias binding out of the backing, and it’s much faster. So that’s what I did.

I like it. The colour lifts my mood.

However, when I looked at the leftover fabric a hard truth settled over me: I did not succeed in reducing my stash. I started with three of these bundles:

And now I have probably more mass of fabric left:

I did add Mum’s pyjamas to the initial bundles, but that just means I’ve ended up with as much unused fabric as I started with.

At least one piece isn’t cut into strips – the piece I was going to make bias binding out of. The options for using that are much broader.

One Cull Leads to Another

During my fabric, pattern and habby cull, I got to thinking about how different my attitude to fabric stash is to yarn stash. With sewing, I have a limited time I can spend on the machine before my back complains, so I don’t waste it on making items I don’t want or aren’t fun to make.My fabric collection isn’t overly large. It fits in four plastic filing boxes and one tub.

With weaving, I often make things I don’t particularly want to keep in order to use up stash or learn something new. The weaving yarn stash is seven or eight times larger than the fabric stash. Which is sobering, but not unexpected. It’s been my main hobby for quite a few years now, and until recently I was on quite a learning drive.

I’d like to weave with the same attitude as sewing, so having a weaving yarn stash as practical as the sewing stash appeals. However, to get to that point I’d have to cull quite a bit of yarn. The thought was rather intimidating, but on a free day recently, I girded my loins and got stuck in. What I found surprised me.

Since it was a large task, I broke it into smaller ones. My cones of yarn are stored separately to the skein, ball and hanks, and I left them for another time.

Out: a few cones I knew I’d never weave.

The balls, skeins and hanks of yarn made up about half the yarn. I was surprised to find they were mostly knitting and crochet yarn. Not that I don’t weave knitting yarn, just not as often these day. Some is intended for machine knitting projects, so it turns out this is also a machine knitting stash. And possibly hand knitting and crocheting, but I’ll get to that later.

Out: a bag of yarn I wasn’t keen on.

Below the knitting yarns were eight tubs of fabric for rag rugs. Am I going to weave more rag rugs? Probably not. While I like rag rugs, the oldest ones I have I made 13 years ago, and I plan to replace them with the flannelette ones I have in storage.

Out: ALL of the fabric for weaving.

When I’d estimated the amount of weaving yarn I had, I was waaaay out, because I forgot the wool rug stash.

Yikes.

Out: about half of it.

Having decided that this was also a machine knitting stash, I moved the circular knitting machines in from the craft room. In order to do that I had to move the embroidery and macramé yarn stash. You know what happened next.

Out: er, nothing. I meant to get rid of most of it, but there’s now plenty of room on the yarn stash shelves and I have a few ideas I’d like to try. At least removing it from the same cupboard as the sewing supplies gives me a some room for all that ex-fabric-for-weaving, which may become quilts and chair covers.

I’ve come up with a couple of crochet projects for the knitting yarn, too. All things I want and will be fun to make. Next time I have the urge to downsize, the cone yarns will be in the firing line. Hopefully before the next Guild bazaar.

Feat of Clay

For the first few weeks after having Covid I didn’t feel any urge to paint. Instead I either tidied up or organised my art supplies. And then I had two of those dives into a craft I only occasionally dabble in. The first was jewellery-making, which led to ideas for making brooches, which led to me unearthing my small supply of air-dry clay.

Well, it’s been a long time. It turned out that the terracotta version I’d used to make some macrame beads years ago was now too solid and crumbly to use. After consulting the internet, I crumbled it up into a container, added water to soak in overnight, then spent an afternoon pushing it through a sieve then spreading the resulting paste out to dry on the shiny side of the glass slab I use to grind up pigments for ink.

That was going to take a few days, so I opened a pack of white clay and started to play. Even though it had to be over ten years old, it was still in good condition. The first pieces I made were simple flat shapes to paint later, so I could get a feel for how the clay worked. Then I made circles, a square and a heart with an edge, with the intention to make little mosaics.

I haven’t yet made anything from the flat shapes, but I had fun painting the ‘frames’ and filling them with tiles. They have brooch pins glued to the backs.

Having opened a pack of clay, I was worried it would dry out in the years that were likely to pass until I got the inclination again. I hadn’t used up much clay, so I tried making something bigger: a brush holder, which isn’t the most attractive thing I’ve ever knocked together but works.

Then I went even bigger and made a mug-sized candle lamp. Not something I’d normally use, but I thought I might be able to hang earrings on it. The mistake I made was to not let the side panel dry a bit before attaching it to the base. The holes reduced the integrity of the clay, too. The side slumped in on itself and the holes started closing up. Fortunately, the plastic cup I was using for water was exactly the same size as the vessel, so I wrapped it in baking paper and inserted it inside the piece, then turned everything upside down. Now gravity was in my favour, stretching it out again – though I still had to re-cut the holes. The next day the vessel was dry enough to remove the cup. When it was dry I painted it black on the outside and silver inside. The sides are too thick to get earring hooks into, so I guess it’s going to have to be a candle lamp after all.

In the meantime I’d had more brooch ideas, I made a paint tube and paint box…

… and a pair of abstract shapes with round hollows in them. I filled one with glitter and the other with scraps of wire and beads.

I also made some mushrooms and abstract flowers that were painted with some of the terracotta clay paste thinned a bit to make a slip. The stems are florist wire. No idea what I’m going to do with them.

When the terracotta paste had finally dried to the consistency of clay, I gave it a good knead. By then I didn’t have many ideas left to try, so I decided to use it up all in one project. To do this I made a a flat leaf shape and pressed that into a bowl covered in cling wrap. When it had dried enough to hold its shape I took it out of the bow. It took aaaages to dry.

This whole clay adventure took a lot longer than I had expected. Much longer than my enthusiasm lasted, unfortunately. On the day I sanded the white clay items I was really over the whole clay thing, but it got more interesting once I began painting things and glueing in mosaic tiles, glitter and jewellery scraps.

But I’m done. I’ve put the unused flat shapes in among my jewellery making supplies until I know what I want to do with them, and both clay and jewellery-making supplies have been put away. Now, with the craft table cleared, I’m free to dive into the next thing.