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!
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.
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:
A short bit from the end of the Aqua Quilt top, cut off because the batting was 254cm but the top was around 300.
A 1.5ish metre length of the aqua flannelette I’d intended to make into bias binding.
A bundle of remaining original strips.
The remaining strips from Mum’s pyjamas
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.
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…
Use the blocks I’ve already made to construct a small piece, like a lap rug
Then make a pair of pyjamas with the uncut fabric, assuming there is enough
Then make another strip quilt or a few small ones with the remaining strips
Or try making fabric-wrapped rope baskets
Or save the strips to use as stuffing
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).
This year I’ve been all over the place creatively and, well, so has life in general. I didn’t seem to get much done at times, but when I look closer that was because I tackled single projects that took up a lot of time. I did a bit of sewing, a bit of weaving, delved into some occasional crafts like jewellery-making and air-dry clay, finished some long-term WIPs and culled several kinds of hobby supplies. It feels like my mind began to jump from hobby to hobby in the latter months of the year, new shiny things taking my attention before I’d finished with whatever had last attracted me, as if Covid 19 gave me some king of creative ADHD.
January & February:
The Print & Paint With Natural Dyes workshop took up all of my creative energy at the beginning of the year, partly because so much else were going on, including having Dad and his very naughty cat staying with us.
March:
Using the knowledge I’d gained in the workshop, I painted/dyed three tops and a scarf. I also sewed a shirt out of a sarong.
April:
I didn’t include the Ink-Making workshop in my 2022 summary, but I think I should have. Six months after, I made some more inks as some sources dependant on season became available.
May:
A bit more sewing happened, first when I turned Motto Skirt into a top…
… and made a Chambray Dress.
And I returned to the loom to finish the Bouclé Chains Scarf.
June:
I finished a coiling fabric basket, made while visiting Mum.
More exploration of Deflected Doubleweave with bouclé yarn happened with the Baroque Scarf.
I also culled my mosaic supplies and did an illustration commission.
July:
And another DDW project finally using a design I drafted a few years ago: the Electricity Scarf.
August:
We went to Lord Howe Island, and I did some sketches.
September:
The fourth and favourite DDW bouclé scarf: Copper Roses.
I tried making watercolour paint, and felt a bit ‘meh’ about it.
October:
A bout of finishitis set in. I lengthened Slinky Ribs and made it all rib:
We went to Norfolk Island on an artist holiday.
A bout of Covid 19 somehow led to me culling things. First my jewellery collection, which led to jewellery-making.
November:
I finally, at long last, finished the Pin Loom Blanket.
I wove a Honeycomb Scarf and Tapestry Beret.
The jewellery-making also included a dive into air dry clay.
I finally, at long last, finished the dishcloths that had been on the Jane loom for a year.
December:
Watching Project Runway and The Great British Sewing Bee had me itching to sew. After culling my sewing materials, I made Paul a bucket hat and me some shorts.
And then got the itch to crochet. This Granny Beret seemed a good warm up to something bigger.
A big yarn cull moved the flannelette strips meant for rag rugs into the fabric stash intended for quilts. I sewed a single bed sized quilt.
Also:
This year was also the year of the artist subscription box. I tried one Paletteful Pack but decided against signing up because the postage was too expensive, then gave SketchBox a go and stuck with it. They proved to be a very entertaining and interesting monthly treat. It allowed me to try some art supplies I’ve never encountered before. It’s likely after a year I’ll stop the subscription because there are only so many kinds of art supply so the rewards will eventually diminish, but it has been fun and I suspect I’ll miss it if I do.
I also did a lot of oil painting, mostly in the plein air group but also lots of still life both at the art society and at home. I decided to stop posting pictures of my art, however, until it was clearer how plagiarism software (AI) was going to affect everything.
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.
Back when I had Covid 19 I watched a season or so of Project Runway, then later I caught the most recent season of The Great British Sewing Bee. I also watch a few crafty YouTubers. All of these seemed to be telling me that crochet is back in fashion.
So when I needed to replace the collar on the grey jacket, I immediately thought of crochet. I had been planning to knit it, but not that my Denise set is kaput it meant going out and buying a long circular needle. So I dug out the yarn and my hooks, and got to work. I like the result. It occurred to me then that for crochet you just need a set of hooks, not multiple sizes of different kinds of needles. Handy. And economical.
I also found an hour of crochet a day was doable without much hand or back pain. You can get a lot done in and hour a day. Maybe even an entire granny square blanket. Or a jumper. Maybe a granny square jumper. I went looking for patterns on Ravelry. Turns out I hadn’t updated my projects in a year or so. After I did that, I browsed crochet patterns to get a feel for what I might make next. I was determined not to buy any new yarn. Second hand was ok, but only to add to an existing project. So what I made had to come mostly from the stash.
Start small, I thought, so I picked a granny square beret pattern.
One of the things I’ve always loved about crochet is how adaptable it is. The pattern called for aran yarn and the yarns I picked are thinnish 8ply/dk alpaca, but it doesn’t matter! It’s a circle, so I just have to add more rounds until it’s the right size. Of course, working out how to increase without the circle warping was a bit trickier than it seemed, but once again the internet came to the rescue.
Being mostly alpaca (turns out the green yarn is 50% wool) it’s more slouchy than the beret in the pattern photo, but I prefer my berets slouchy.
Yes. Quilting. I know. Where is the real Creative Fidget and who is this imposter?
Well, I had to do something with all the flannelette strips I culled from the weaving yarn stash. I could have just tossed it all into the fabric recycling box, but I decided to give strip quilting a try. There are batches of aqua, light blue, red, purple, rainbow and a rather large accumulation of leftover strips from the spectrum rugs.
Fortunately, not many of the strips had edges turned in and ironed, so it wasn’t much work to iron them flat again. The red batch is the only one still to be cut into strips, so it may become a non-strip type of quilt. I chose the light blue batch to begin with, and soon hit at snag.
When weaving fabric into rugs not a lot of the pattern shows, just a general impression of colour. You can mix up prints of monkeys with prints of flowers and nobody would know. It also isn’t immediately apparent when the same fabric is sewn to itself. But when quilting, both of these things are obvious. A large proportion of the blue batch was the same pale, Japanese inspired print of fans along with a subtle gingham print, a few flower patterns and a single plain blue… with the occasional glaring length of cartoony characters or bold stripes. Once I cut out the latter, I had very little variation in fabric. That meant a trip to the fabric store to buy more flannelette and, well, we were having the sort of weather that didn’t make shopping trips appealing so I didn’t want to do that yet.
I did consider mixing the aqua batch in with the blue, but the combo didn’t excite me and I really wanted to have a aqua-only quilt because I had a pair of pjs of my Mum’s I wanted to include. Nope. Until I had more fabric, the blue quilt would have to be put aside.
So I switched to the aqua quilt. That batch of fabric didn’t have any unharmonious prints to remove and it was already sewn into three long strips alternating between two prints. Trouble was, even after I cut up and spliced in the fabric from Mum’s pjs, having only three different prints meant there was no way they could align without too much of the same print lying next to itself.
The simplest solution I could think of was to do every second strip in a single, new fabric. So gave in and I headed to the fabric store, where bought three meters of plain aqua fabric.
This worked beautifully.
It took me four days to sew the strips together, working a few hours each day in the hope my back wouldn’t seize up in protest. I didn’t love the endless sewing together of strips. I didn’t hate it either.
But I did decide that sewing the blue quilt needed to be a little bit more interesting.
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.
The urge to cull and create fell upon the fabric stash, haberdashery and patterns last week. Culling was mostly for the same reasons I remove and refashion clothes: they feel dated, are not natural fibres, aren’t practical for my ageing bod, or I find myself thinking “why the heck did I buy THAT?”.
Then I spent one morning making two t-shirts patterns and an evening going through all my knits to work out if the leftovers from old projects were large enough to make anything. I matched up fabric and patterns, adding two new skirts to my to-do list, and at the end of the week I bought some fabric for the one of them.
I was looking forward to a weekend of sewing. On the Saturday, after a bit of mending to warm up, I tackled a bucket hat for Paul from an old shirt and pair of jeans.
Then I moved on to another familiar pattern: lounge shorts. The fabric was a leftover piece of a charcoal grey tablecloth I’d made into a pair of pants. Hopping around the internet for ideas the night before, I’d noted that Bermuda-length shorts were supposed to be in fashion this summer, so I decided to add as much length to the legs as the leftover allowed. That turned out to be a bit more than I really needed, but I just turned up the hems, pressed and slip stitched them in place
That filled the Saturday. On the Sunday I woke with a frozen shoulder and painful neck, so didn’t do much more than long to be well enough to tackle those skirts.
