Log Cabin Quilt

My Grandmother passed away a couple of years ago now and I inherited several unfinished quilt tops from her. I am not really much of a quilter so I've been a bit afraid to do anything with the quilts. I don't want to ruin them. But having them sitting around taking up space in my craft room isn't a good use of them either, so in November I got up the gumption to actually work on one of them.

I started with my least favorite (although I still like it) of the tops, it a log cabin style made from truly awful double knit polyester. The fabric just screams 70s, but I do really like the colors. I felt like the quilt was busy enough on it's own that I didn't want to distract from it with quilting, so I decided to do a tied quilt instead.

I've never actually made a tied quilt before though so I enlisted my mother-in-law to help me out.

On our last visit to her house I brought the backing, some poly batting and the top and laid is all out and pinned it on her dining room table.

She has awesome curved safety pins that made the whole process much easier. 

And then we started tying it all together. The poly batting that I chose required tying or quilting every 5 inches and naturally I had 6 inches in between the center of each square so I decided to tie in the center of each little red square as well as the corners between each block. 

Although it didn't take anywhere near as long as quilting it would have, it was still a fairly time consuming process. But I got it done. I bound the edge using white bias binding left over from my last quilt. 

Ta-Da! It's a twin size quilt so it doesn't really fit on my bed. As I get more of these tops quilted I would like to display them on a quilt ladder or something like that. Most of them are twin sized and thus not going to work on my queen size bed, but I don't mind. It's a nice way for me to stay close to my grandmother.

Pillows

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote anything. I've been super busy but not getting a lot of sewing done recently. I just finished moving and I am very happy to say that I now have an entire room for my crafting supplies. Living the dream y'all! Tomorrow I will be reveling in that craft room sewing curtains for the house. In the mean time the only thing that I have sewed in the last two months that I haven't written about yet was new pillows for the bed to go with the beautiful headboard that my husband made for us.

Isn't it a great headboard? My husband is just the most wonderfully talented person on the planet!!!

But I was going to talk about the pillows. I'm pretty happy with them. The fabric came out of my stash. I already had the pillow forms but the old cases on them did not look good with our new quilt. The white fabric came from my grandmother originally and has a wonderful white on white check pattern. I like the nice subtle visual interest. The longer middle pillow is a blue and white check that one of my knitting friends gave me when they moved. And the small pillow is the same floral cotton left over from my self drafted a-line skirt. It is also in a couple of the triangles in the quilt. I feel like it all ties together pretty nicely.

So, one of my personal preferences for pillows is that they not have visible seams. For these I did French seams on two long and one short side (because even though they will never be visible I wanted them to be neat and tidy seams). For the remaining side I hand-stitched the pillow shut using what I think is most often called a ladder stitch. 

I like it because you work from the outside but it is invisible. 

I was going to post a little photo tutorial about how I did it, but apparently my phone doesn't feel like cooperating because I can't get the photos to load. Oh well. They were not good pictures anyway. It's really hard to take a picture while also using both hands to sew. One of these days I might have to invest in a tri-pod and a video camera instead. 

Achievement Unlocked: Bras!

When I started on this journey of a me-made wardrobe I wanted to get to the point where I made every stitch of clothing that I had on at any given point. The two things that made that seem difficult were pants and bras. Well I have a couple of pants patterns ready and waiting for me and I just finished making my second bra!

It turns out that, although intimidating, bras are actually fairly easy. It took me a long time to work my way up to actually making one though.

First I bought the pattern and a couple of kits. Then I let those sit for a couple months while I caught up on other projects. Finally at Thankgiving I bought the Craftsy class on bra making. I am really glad I bought the class (and even happier I waited for it to be on sale). Following along with the class made it really easy to figure out otherwise difficult steps.

And ta-da! My first bra:

I should probably have put it against a dark background so the picture popped a little more. Oh well. The fit on my very first attempt was good enough to wear, but not perfect. Fortunately the Crafsty class goes through how to fix fit issues, although this one I could have figured out on my own. 

This biggest issue was that I had extra fabric in the power bar, so I just cut the pattern and overlapped it about 1/4" and that solved that problem. The band also felt a little snug so I lengthened it 1/2" my new one feels just a little loose so I think on my third I will only lengthen the back by 1/4"

I think that might be the most intimidating issue of bra making, that something as little as 1/8" or 1/4" inch can totally change the fit. 

Here is my second bra:

I am so in love with the colors on this one! 

It's even fun on the inside!

So, in addition to the changes for fit I also got bolder with the lace. On the first bra I put the lace exactly where the pattern said to put lace. (By the way it's the Shelly bra pattern by Pin-up Girls in case I haven't mentioned that yet). For the second bra I sewed the cups and basically draped lace on them to figure out how I wanted to arrange it. I'm pretty happy with the result and it allowed me to use the cute neckline trim that came with my kit. I didn't use the neckline trim on the first bra because it had lace on the neckline edge of the cups, but I was just so enjoying that fuchsia I had to use it on the second bra.

It isn't quite the "butterfly lace" pattern that Beveryly Johnson recommends in the Craftsy class but I think it came out really pretty.

One word of caution: Check the heat on your iron before pressing. I sew almost entirely with natural fibers so I tend to crank the heat pretty high on my iron. Bra fabrics are mostly nylon and polyester though. I thought I had turned the heat down low enough on my iron but clearly I didn't because I managed to melt the power net for my back band. Oops!

Fortunately the kits from Bra Maker's Supply and really generous with the fabrics. I think I have enough fabric for two more bras, I just need mor underwire and elastics. So I was able to cut out a new back band piece and away I went but it was still a pout worthy moment.

All's well that ends well though and I have two pretty me-made bras! I am so happy with this newly acquired skill. I cannot wait to make more!

Quilted Skirt

Two posts in two days, it's a miracle! Actually it's just that my husband got me a new computer for my birthday so I'm trying to get (and maybe even stay) caught up. Blogging is so much easier when you have a computer that actually works.

And speaking of birthdays, my wonderful mother-in-law got me Gertie Sews Vintage Casual. I think my love affair with Gertie's designs is pretty well established at this point. The book has a lot of really cute patterns in it. I am really looking forward to trying out the pants pattern. It doesn't have a fly front so it's a bit less intimidating then making jeans, but will give me the chance to practice fitting pants. 

But before I takle the pants pattern I made one of the skirts.

This is the Quilted Skirt from the book. Gertie's suggested using flannel for the inside layer, but being a true Pacific Northwest girl I put the flannel on the outside! The plaid pattern also made quilting it a total breeze, I just threw on my walking foot and bisected the squares on the plaid. Here is a close up of the quilting:

Having squares already there to follow made it super easy and saved me all of the time of marking the quilting lines. Otherwise this skirt would have taken hours longer to make.

I totally love the finished skirt. I think the drape in wonderful and it's super warm and cozy. I think I'm just going to live in this skirt for the rest of the winter. I might even make more in other colors.

Salvedged Skirt

I love Halloween more than any other holiday of the year. I was really excited this year to dress up as a "Mad Housewife" like the image on one of my favorite wines. I picked out a cute 50's vintage pattern from McCall's and some inexpensive dark purple cotton. I borrowed Mom's purls and made those cute lace gloves from this post.

And it all went downhill from there.

It ended up not really mattering because I had a migraine on Halloween and didn't dress up or go out, but man was my dress just one problem after another.

First Jo-Ann's shorted me a yard of fabric. We all know that cotton shrinks, which is why it is important to pre-wash garment fabric, but even the store admitted that I wouldn't have lost more than a yard to shrinkage, but they also wouldn't do anything about it because I had already washed the fabric. I was a bit miffed to say the least.

So I bought two more yards of fabric to be able to lay out the remaining pieces. The new piece wasn't from the same dye lot, so even though I doubt anyone else would have noticed I was very aware that the front bodice and sleeves were a different shade than the back bodice and skirt. Grrrr.

So I get to the sewing the dress together part and it has a side zipper so I did a French seam on all but the left side seam, where I did a clean seam. Or at least that's what I was planning on doing. Somewhere I got turned around and ended up with a clean seam on the left side of my bodice and a French seam of the left side of my skirt, so I couldn't install the zipper on either side without undoing at least one French seam.

But that turned out not to matter because the dress was so big that I didn't even need the zipper to get it on and off.

So I put in the back of my sewing chair in time out while I tried to figure out how to salvage it.

At the end of the day I decided that I wasn't over fond of the neckline either, so I chopped off the entire bodice. There was just to much fabric used to not try and get something out of it.

I think the skirt came out pretty darn cute. To solve the issue of it being too big, and the zipper being on the wrong side I cut up the center of the skirt and added a button band. By folding over 1/4" and then another inch on each side I got rid of the 2.5" extra inches, it didn't pull the side seams to noticeably far forward and I think the buttons are really pretty. Then I just added a waistband, hemmed it and called it good.

Here is a close up on the buttons. I added 12 of them, going all the way down the front of the skirt.

I wore the skirt for thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws house and I felt very pretty! So all is well that ends well, even if it was sort of a pain in the patootie.

Wristlet Tutorial

Welp, I had planned a great how-to blog post about this wristlet that I recently made, but I seem to have lost all of the photos that I took of the process. Oops. Here is a photo of the finished object.

It perfectly fits my phone, keys, debit card and ID, and a tube of Chapstick. It used one fat quarter, a 7" zipper and some stiff fusible interfacing. Maybe someday I will make one Ina fiddler the color and actually keep the photos.

Lace Gloves

So, I had a really cute Halloween costume idea, but I ended up with a migraine, so I didn't do anything for Halloween this year. Just as well because the dress I made for my costume was several sizes too big and I still haven't decided if it is worth the effort to fix. But before I knew all that I made myself a pair of gloves to go with my costume.

The pattern is called Ladylike Gloves. It is free on Ravelry. I've actually been eyeballing the pattern for a while but never had a good enough reason to make the gloves. Sorry, the picture isn't so great, it's really hard to take a photo of your own hand. 

The yarn is Rowan Fine Lace that I had left over from a shawl. The yarn is absolutely delightful, one of the most stunningly soft yarns I've ever had the pleasure of knitting with, but I have to say knitting these gloves was a nightmare. They are done on size three needles and when I started the only size 3s that I had were exceptionally slick metal. My needles kept slipping out of my work as I was knitting. 

I had to set the gloves aside while I hunted for a pair of size 3 double points in wood. Fortunately using wood did solve the slipping problem or I would never have finished these. 

Although I'm happy enough with the finished object I'm not really sure they were worth the effort. I've worn them to work once, and I do like that because of the lace pattern over the fingers I can use my touchscreen and not have to take my gloves off, which is cool, they just were not fun to knit.