KnottyKnits

In February, I have:

Sent quilts two friends who had three babies between them. (For the math challenged, that included a set of twins). These were SUPAH SEECRET projects, so I didn’t blog about them at the time of creation. Mommies would have known (one mommy is nursery theming with mushrooms, and the other, well, two quilts for twins kinda gives it away as to who they were for).

Knit a looooong scarf, out of two skeins of Manos that I had sitting in the stash:

Started work on a One Block Wonder quilt. This has been a lot more fiddly than I thought it would be, but then again, I’m a super simple quilter; I like straight lines and quilt tops that go together in a single day. This ain’t that kinda party, y’all. It’s pretty, and I’m looking forward to it being done, but I’m not sure I’ll be making another one.

And, I RAN. I ran in the mornings, I ran in the evenings, and on Valentine’s Day, I got up at 4:30 in the morning and drove to downtown Austin, where I stood around for TWO HOURS before the races started (my sister ran the half marathon, remember) and then I ran a 5K in a very shameful amount of time. But the point here? Is that I did it. Proof positive (I’m the one WITHOUT a medal, because they don’t give those to 5k runners. We were lucky to get a banana and a bagel at the end of our race):

And that I plan on doing it again in April. And in May. And maaaaaybe next February, when I’ve committed to running a half marathon. 13.1 miles. Which is further than my DRIVE TO WORK. Seriously. But I’m going to do it; I’m still excited about running, which is a positive thing I think. Of course, after watching my sister limp around after her race, I’m not sure that I”m ready for what I’m getting in to, but she’s going to run the FULL marathon next year, so she will still be in more pain (and have more bragging rights) than me.

February is on its way out, and I’m hoping to finish up another baby quilt, and knock out sleeves for Cassidy. I’m stranded on Sleeve Island, y’all, and I’m struggling to find the motivation to haul myself out of there and finish that damn sweater. It will be done just in time for the heat to return to Texas, so my timing is (as ususal) fantastic. Now, if I had finished it LAST week, it would have been perfect for this:

That would be snow. In Austin. This happens every few years, and it doesn’t stick around all that long, but we get all excited and freaked out while it’s here. Schools close, people stock up on essentials, and anyone that has lived anywhere north of Lubbock starts eyeballing us like we’re crazy. The small amount of snow we got would not cause them to bat an eye, but to us? It’s a juicy disaster waiting to happen. However, throw a tornado our way and we’re out on our front lawns starting up at it, slack jawed, and narrating the whole thing to our camera phone for later uploading to YouTube.

So. There’s a serious explosion of babies lately; so many that I’m not really sure what they are putting in the water, but HOO-BOY am I glad that the ol’ tubes are tied. Whatever it is that is causing all of y’all go get frisky, it’s powerful stuff. This doesn’t impact me directly, except that there is a flood of new babies to hold and snuggle and hand back at the first sign of a dirty diaper or fussy time, but it does require me to sew, quilt, and knit my buns off in an effort to provide handmade lovies for all of these folks.

Unfortunately, while everyone EXPECTS something, I’m all about SURPRISE, HERE IS YOUR QUILT/SWEATER/WHATEVER, so I like to keep it on the d-l. Hence, I cannot show you pictures of said quilts until they are sent out to the mommies. (Let’s face it – the daddies generally don’t care.) But I do happen to have something I can show you, in the form of  a finished quilt top:

That would be a half-squares quilt, with Moda Tranquility for the pattern and some Kona cotton for the solid. I FREAKIN’ LOVE IT. Who knew that two triangles could make something so fantastic?!  I haven’t gotten anything to back it with as of yet, but I think that I’m going to leave this downstairs as Mommy’s Blanket (No, You May Not Play Superman With It, Go Find Your Own Blanket). I have to have a blanket on me when I’m chillin’ on the couch, and this one looks to be mine.

Also, I made baby shoes. Considering that 99% of the babies that are popping out these days are boys, you would think that I’d make them in some boy appropriate fabric so that I could give them to someone.

They are decidedly pink, and also decidedly for a baby, which my two-year old was rather unhappy about as she tried to squeeze her fat little foot into one of them. I couldn’t find anything heavy to give them more padding on the bottom, so I made something up:

THAT’S RIGHT. I quilted baby slippers. Lord knows what else I could have been doing with my time, but I got the bug out of my system and they can sit until Sarah realizes that they will fit her Cabbage Patch. After that, I’m not sure I want them back.

We’re getting so close to the purchase of this house that I can taste it. Literally. I’m licking the house as I’m typing this – THAT IS HOW CLOSE WE ARE.

This is my new porn.

So many things are going on – trying to get the apartment repacked to move, although that starts next week; trying to get movers scheduled, closings scheduled, childcare scheduled, painters, furniture, it’s like I’m going a mile a minute and it doesn’t feel like there is an end but I know there is because HELLO GIANT EMPTY HOUSE WAITING FOR ME. I’m driving my kids crazy. And my husband. And probably a million other people that want me to just shut my face up about the house. I will, I promise, in about 11 days.

In the meantime, I’m keeping myself busy with this:

Funny what a ton of triangles can look like when sewn together.

And this:

All sewn by hand, y'all!

And I’ve even dabbled in a bit of this:

The craftiness is about to be boxed up, though, and shifted about two miles west to the new digs.  This is one move that I’m not dreading one little bit.

Every night, I tell myself that I'm going to knit, or sew on a different quilt, but every night I find myself adding on to this thing.

I love it. I love it so much, my husband is considering accusations of adultery.And we're Catholic, so I might be put in stocks on the front lawn or something. I have to work on it a little bit every single night or I feel…jittery. An intervention might be in order, but c'mon, who can resist such a lovely quilt? I've also been working on my free motion quilting, although I'm still not happy with it. I keep slapping together two cheap fat quarters and working on the motion, meaning that the little one in my house has plenty of blankets to keep her creepy ass baby dolls in blankets for years.

Finally, believe it or not, I have been knitting a bit here and there. I picked up the needles after months of not touching them. My Madli shawl is 99% done, and once I get the nuts to finally start grafting it (I actually made an attempt the other night, but I stopped in the sheer terror of 120+ laceweight stitches dropping and the entire thing ending up in the trash because there is no frakkin' way I would EVER recover from that mess, so help me) it will be gorgeous. For right now, she's residing in the basket right next to the couch, reminding me that the only thing that stands between me and a fab shawl is a couple of scary hours of The Kitchener Stitch. My butt is clenching just thinking about it.

I think that I'm going to have to dig around in the storage unit tomorrow, though, because Cassidy is calling my name, and she's a siren. That sweater would be smokin' hot in red, and I happen to have the perfect yarn in a bright red stashed. Somewhere. In the storage unit from hell. 

With the completion of the Mod Sampler quilt, I needed another project ASAP. What makes more sense than starting a hand peiced hexagon quilt?

At what point do I just admit it? I'm insane. A queen sized quilt, pieced by hand,is the utmost in crazy making. And also, it may be making my hands hurt. It won't stop me, though. I'm dedicated to my insanity. On top of that, I've had a number of baby blankets that I've been working on, because people keep getting knocked up and popping out kids. The first one is for a little boy that was born a while back; I haven't wanted to rush them and demand that they hand over their baby immediately for sniffing (I love the way a baby smells. I can't help it.), so we haven't met him yet. However, their lives are returning to some idea of normal, so I knocked this little gem out as a "Welcome to the World" present. 

And the next one is a gift for the guy who sold us our house. I know, right? It's like I'm looking for any excuse to fire up the sewing machine and stitch two available pieces of fabric together. But the truth is that while he was a nice sales guy, my husband has been playing a lot of online Call Of Duty with him, and he's a genuinely nice person. This is their fifth child (HOLY CRAP, GET SOME CABLE, PEOPLE), and I firmly believe that every baby needs a hand sewn baby quilt. It's a basic right, folks – air, water, and baby blanket upon popping out of the womb. 

I haven't even started on the blankets for the babies that are in progress; every couple of weeks, someone else announces that they are pregnant, I swear to Heaven above. All of these recession babies are keeping me and my sewing machine busy. It's a damn good thing that all of my yarn is buried in the depths of our storage unit, because I couldn't knit even if I damn well wanted to. 

I may have also attempted sewing a top for myself, but we're going to pretend that didn't actually happen, mmmkay?

And finally, The Husband's quilt is in progress. Strips are being cut out, and I've convinced him that a simple pattern is required, as opposed to some busy nightmare that would never get quilting because BEJEEZUS, there is no way I want to do something fancy with a quilt that large. I just tried my first free motion quilting last week on two fat quarters from my stash, and it looked like a rabbid ferret on a coke bender decided to make sweet, sweet love to my quilting stash. In other words, IT SUCKED. So I quickly slapped a binding on it and handed it off to my daughter as a doll quilt, because hey, she's two; she doesn't give a happy damn if my quilting stitches were uneven and crossed over each other. She's just excited to have a tiny blanket to cover up the world's ugliest doll (I am NOT KIDDING on this, she loves it and takes it everywhere and even got mustard on it when she was trying to feed it). I totally pawned off my quilting mistakes as a special gift for my daughter; do you see how I did that? Lemonade from lemons, baby. That's me.

I finally bound the edges and moved it through the washer and dryer; I was totally caught up in other projects, though. I blame Flickr; I was browsing through projects in some of the groups that I joined, and I saw these adorable hexagon quilts that folks were creating using the English Paper Piecing method. Next thing I knew, I had 500 die-cut paper hexagons and an order of fabric sitting on my lap to make my own. 

And then, I had the fight of my life with the sundress pattern that I mentioned in the last post. I purchased the elastic thread, dutifully wound it up by hand into my bobbin, and….nothing. I could NOT get the fabric to gather up the way it was supposed to. I jacked with the tension, I fiddled with the stitch length, and I hauled out my manual to see if there was something I could find that would help. Online forums, blog stalking…nothing was giving me any clue as to what I was doing wrong. 

Then I decided that it was my fault for buying a machine that was focused solely on quilting. Since it is all computerized, it adjusts the tension automatically; I can override it on the top tension, but the problem was with the bottom tension – as in, there wasn't any. I finally stopped by a Husqvarna dealer and asked the shop owner what I was doing wrong. I would love to tell you that she was friendly and helpful and took the time to work with me, but I'd be totally lying and then lightening might strike me and I'm not sure my insurance covers that kind of crap. She acted like helping me was KILLING HER INSIDE; she was much more focused on getting her quilt on the frame in the store than she was with helping stupid me (who didn't even buy the machine from her shop! OMeffin'G!).  The cherry on the top is that she asked me what kind of machine I had and how much I paid for it, and when I answered her, she *sneered*. SNEERED. AT ME. And my awesome machine.  I think she was annoyed that I brought my children into the shop with me, and they WERE being rambunctious, but Mike snatched them up and took them outside within five minutes of us getting there. It sucks, because that shop had a great selection of feet and accessories for my machine, but she can suck my ass, because I sure won't go back in there. 

What was I talking about? Elastic! Anyway, she might have been snotty, but she fixed my issue without knowing it – she reminded me that I needed to pull the thread back through the bobbin to a certain point so that it sits in the groove. Once I did that, I was off and flying with the top of that dress. I am now looking for all sorts of uses for the elastic thread, because that stuff IS AWESOME. Here's proof:

It is adorable. No, no arguments, it is ADORABLE. Admit it. I want to make another one, but I'm wondering how it would work with a knit fabric, and maybe really wide straps that could almost be considered sleeves.
Quilting is just the gateway drug to full on sewing. Be aware.

I TOTALLY CALLED IT. I knew that talking about my sewing machine in public would anger it. After I wrote that post, I sat down to put together some blocks for a new baby blanket. Sure enough, the tensioning is all jacked up AGAIN, and I spent an hour trying to get it to work AGAIN. This is the bajillionth time I've had this exact same problem with it; it would hum along fine as long as I was sewing on cotton fabrics exclusively with standard cotton threads, but the second I deviated from that formula, BLERG and BLARG and PHBOOOT. It would break down and I'd have to send it into the shop, where they would repair it for $80 until the next time it decided to go all wonky. I lived in fear of changing materials, changing threads, changing the tension on my own; any of those three would throw that machine off.

This time was the last time, though. The Singer pissed me off enough that I pitched her to the side (figuratively; pitching a sewing machine would cause a lot of damage to walls, methinks) and purchased something new. Uh, make that new to ME.

Meet my new baby. A Husqvarna Viking Quilt Designer, which was a trade in that someone brought in at the local Joann's (our Joann's hosts a Husqvarna dealer inside of it). I was headed in there to find something cheap and quick to get me through the next six months, but when I saw her, I just HAD to have her. Look at the size of that throat! (Heh.) The quilting table! The fancy pantsness! I'm just getting used to using her, but man, it's like a whole different world using this thing. You get so used to your own machine's quirks and weirdnesses that when you are presented with a machine that works like it is supposed to, every time, it kinda throws you off. I keep expecting the presser foot to not engage all the way, but on this machine it automatically lowers the presser foot when you start sewing. I never have to worry about that tangled mess of thread you get because, DUH, you didn't make sure it was all the way down. The bobbin literally THREADS ITSELF through the machine. It came with all the feet I could need, and the two that I really, really needed for quilting were either thrown in for free (a darning foot) or included at 50% off (a walking foot). I'm adjusting to the little beeps and bloops this thing emits when I'm sewing, and I have to remind myself that there is no presser foot latch on the back of the machine, like my Singer had; those two columns of buttons right over the needle control the foot, the needle down, and I'm sure a host of other things that I'm not using properly as of yet.

My first official project on this machine is a 9 patch baby blanket, with sashing between the blocks.

But my first true test of this thing will include this:

and this:

and a certain dress pattern that is burning up the net.

What brand and model do you have?

I have a Singer 2638, which looks like this:

How long have you had it?

I have had this machine for well over five years; I've only started really using it recently, though. If I had known how much I was going to love sewing, I would have set it up YEARS ago.

How much does that machine cost (approximately)?

When I bought it, I believe I paid around $250. It was refurbished, so it cost more than that new.

What types of things do you sew (i.e. quilting, clothing, handbags, home dec projects, etc.

Right now, I primarily quilt with it, but I have done curtains in the past. And I'm going to venture out into clothing in the very near future. 

How much do you sew? How much wear and tear does the machine get?

I sew a little every night lately. It gets light use mostly; I tend to sew in batches, when the bug bites me.

Do you like/love/hate your machine? Are you ambivalent? Passionate? Does she have a name?

I don't love it, but I don't hate it. I do understand why it was sent back to the factory to be refurbished. In the time that I've had it, I've had to send the machine in three times to be repaired. If I were using this machine more that number would probably be much, much higher.

What features does your machine have that work well for you?

The basics all work well; this is really just a standard, run-of-the-mill sort of machine without any bells and whistles. I've purchased some additional feet for it (a walking foot and a darning foot) that have greatly expanded the usefulness of it.

Is there anything that drives you nuts about your machine?

I'd say the random breaking down drives me nuts. Always in the middle of a big project, WHAMMO. I think I'm temping fate by talking about it publicly.

Do you have a great story to share about your machine (i.e., Found it under the Christmas tree? Dropped it on the kitchen floor? Sewed your fingernail to your zipper?, Got it from your Great Grandma?, etc.!)? We want to hear it!

My first sewing machine was this cheapo Brother that I bought from WalMart for around $90. I didn't want to get an expensive one, because I wasn't sure how much I was going to sew; I think I made two bags on it before it broke on me. Apparently, trying to send fifteen layers of fabric and batting was a little too much for that machine to handle. Whatever. So, there I was, moping that my new toy was broken and it was going to cost more to fix it than I paid for it, when my husband surprised me with this one. He found it online and bought it because he could see how much I really wanted to sew.

Would you recommend the machine to others? Why?

This one? Not at this point, because they don't make them brand new any more. My experience with a refurbished machine has not been fantastic. I mean, for the most part, it works great and I've knocked out a couple of quilts on it, but there is always the fear that changing the stitch type is going to piss it off and send it into a tantrum. 

What factors do you think are important to consider when looking for a new machine?

Having done a few more projects, I would look for some of the more advanced features. Ease of threading is a huge one, and I would really recommend finding something that comes with all of the accessory feet if you can find it.  My machine's light over the work space is a little dim, so I would want something brighter in that area.  

Do you have a dream machine?

My dream machine is something that can do light embroidery and sewing/quilting; I want an all in one machine. I haven't found a specifc one that I'm drooling over yet, but hopefully in the next year I'll narrow down my search and buy a new one. The Singer will stick around for backup usage.

ETA: Right after posting this (and I mean, seriously, the next day) the damn thing broke. The tension was seven kinds of screwed, and if you know anything, that's bad.  So I hauled my cookies to the nearest Joann's to stalk machines, and I ended up with a super cool new (to me) machine.  That I love. So I'm going to have to say that I totally DO NOT recommend the machine above.

And as quickly as the blocks went together, so went the quilt top.

Of course I had to include an art shot!

For the quilting, I'm not following the free motion plan that was laid out originally. I've done all of the straight up and down lines, and I'll be launching into the diagonals as soon as I get home tonight. I saw a great tip from Carolyn on one of Carrie's pictures to use painter's tape to keep things straight. I picked some up at my local Wal Mart and will be applying it liberally to the quilt in an effort to sew a semi-straight line. Let's be honest, folks, my lines wander all over the place. I like to call it "quilting character". I did manage to find a darning foot to fit my sewing machine over the weekend ($11 on eBay! SCORE!), so I'll be trying that out once I finish this thing. Possibly on a matching pillow for the quilt.

My sewing setup these days is looking like this:

Note the toddler chair at the end of the table. I have to scrub the entire table every night before I set up the sewing machine, because that kid eats like a rabid kangaroo. The table is a little high for sewing to be totally comfortable. I'm missing my sewing table like crazy, with all of the drawers and extra space to cut and press seams, but this is doable for the next while. If I do anything larger than this quilt, though, I'll be pinning it goether in the parking lot because we have no free space in the apartment. Do you think the apartment complex would think me crazy if I used the entry to their rental offices to pin out my quilt?