A pretty picnic blanket

Last weekend I made a quilted picnic blanket. My last project, this baby quilt, reminded me how much I enjoy the process of designing a quilt. Its tiny size, however, made me forget how much more time-consuming making larger quilts can be. Even this project, which is relatively small at about 62 inches by 62 inches and is relatively simple in design, was a lot of work! Of course, as is usually the case, I started out with a somewhat simpler plan and decided to get a little more elaborate as I went along. I worked most of the kinks out this time though, and I’m sure it will go much faster next time I make one of these.

You know you have a substantial fabric stash when you’re able to put together a quilt like this one with coordinating fabrics without going to the store! Most of these fabrics were left over from old projects, and a couple were fabrics I bought without knowing what I’d do with them (which I’m trying to stop doing, now that the cabinet I keep my stash in is full, but that’s another story.)

Here’s the plan I drew up:

I made the center out of small squares, about 8 inches, in a 4 by 4 pattern. Then I did a border of the larger squares, which were 16 inches.

If you want to attempt this pattern, I recommend cutting the small squares a bit larger, say 8.5 or 9 inches, sewing four of them together to form a larger square, and then cutting the large square to 16 inches. Then everything will line up better. I learned this (as usual) the hard way. The problem arises because four 8-inch squares sewn together are not exactly 16 by 16… they are somewhat smaller because of the seam allowance! I tried to fix the problem by using double the seam allowance when I sewed the larger squares together. What I would do next time is make a 16 inch cardboard square and cut a circular hole directly in the center of it. Then I would use that hole to center my large square (made from four small squares) and then cut it to exactly 16 inches. Then the large squares and the small squares would line up perfectly.

For the back, I trimmed the selvedges off of a piece of fabric that was 45 inches wide. I needed to add about 20 inches of width so I cut 8 squares using a legal-size FedEx envelope, which was 10 inches by 16 inches, as a template. (Shhh, don’t tell FedEx I misappropriated one of their envelopes, they get rather upset about this kind of thing.)

I added triangular corner pockets to the back side of the quilt, to put rocks into for holding the blanket down. I got the idea from this tutorial, which was my starting point in designing this quilt. (Of course, I had to make things more complicated.) I recommend checking out that tutorial for much more detailed instructions than I have written here, and very helpful photos.

I thought about adding ribbon ties to the center of one side so that the blanket could be folded into thirds, rolled up, and tied together neatly for travel. I would probably make the ties from double-fold bias strips from a coordinating fabric, or possibly from twill tape. I didn’t add them though, because I thought they might be bothersome when the blanket was being used for other things, like cuddling up on the couch on a chilly night. (Did you ever use a sleeping bag as a comforter and wake up with those darn ties stuck to your face, or is it just me?) I’d love some input on this idea, and maybe I’ll try it next time.

At the last minute, I decided to quilt the layers together, rather than hand-tie them. I really love that quilted look, although even when quilting by machine it is time-consuming to make sure all the layers are laying flat as you sew them. I think I need to buy a walking foot. Maybe that will make this part of the process easier. Or maybe I will just hand-tie next time. Does anyone have an opinion on whether either method is preferable for a picnic blanket?

Forgive the blanket for looking a bit rumpled in the photos. That’s what happens when you roll around on a pretty picnic blanket with your puppy.

Nature’s Bounty

Our garden has been yielding mountains of zucchini and summer squash every day. To put them all to good use, I set out find a simple recipe for a big pot of soup. The fewer ingredients that weren’t growing outside my door, the better. A quick internet search later, I found this recipe.

Creamy Zucchini Soup

Ingredients (serves 4)

• 1 tablespoon oil
• 1 onion, coarsely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 4 large zucchini, chopped
• 2 large potatoes, peeled, chopped
• 1L chicken stock
• 3/4 cup cream
• salt and cracked black pepper

Method

1. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add 1 coarsely chopped onion, 1 crushed garlic clove, 4 large chopped zucchini and 2 large peeled, chopped potatoes. Cook for 5 minutes, making sure vegetables don’t brown.
2. Add 1L chicken stock and 1 cup water. Bring soup to the boil, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes or until potatoes are soft. Remove from heat and cool for 5 minutes.
3. Blend with a hand-held blender until smooth. Return soup to the heat and add 3/4 cup cream, salt and cracked black pepper.

I doubled the recipe (at least) because I used a couple of zucchinis that were starting to resemble baseball bats. I also replaced some zucchini with summer squash. I didn’t bother peeling the potatoes (the picture above reveals my laziness.) I used vegetable stock instead of chicken. I substituted half and half for the cream, and even used a bit less than the recipe called for. Before using the immsersion blender, I added a few fresh basil leaves. Delicious!

And now my mountain of vegetables is more like a hill.

A sweet quilt

With a stolen hour or two here and there over the last two weeks, I made a baby quilt for a friend who is having a baby soon. I used this adorable fabric as my starting point. I decided to keep it very simple– I like a simple look these days, plus I didn’t have the time to do a lot of detailed piecing. The fabrics I found are so cute that the quilt didn’t need a lot of embellishment anyway. I used a colorful, delicate plaid fabric as a thick border on all four sides, and a dainty pastel alphabet fabric that I happened upon at Marden’s in Lewiston last month as the back.

I quilted the layers together by machine, so all in all this quilt took only a few hours to make. I’m very happy with the way it turned out, and I’ll definitely use this method again when I need to whip up a baby quilt quickly.

Inspiration

For my birthday, my mother gave me (among other goodies) a couple of craft magazines, and I found lots of inspiration within their pages.

The two photos below are of fabric collages that captured my imagination. These could be created around any theme for any room in the house. Wouldn’t they look cool matted and framed?

Below is a picture of adinkra, a stamping technique used on cloth that originated in Ghana. This caught my attention because I have been thinking about the possibility of silk-screening or freezer-paper stenciling fabric. Adinkra cloth is made up of panels which are hand-stamped and then embellished with stitching. The symbols in the picture below are traditional, but I think their simplicity gives them a modern feel.

You know that lumpy, stringy stuff you cut off the ends of your new fabric after you’ve washed and dried it? Can you believe it can be turned into a beautiful landscape quilt? This one reminds me of Van Gogh. Maybe it’s the swirly quilting lines in the sky.

Check out the magazines for detailed instructions. The fabric collages are from the May/June 2008 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors, and the adinkra and landscape quilt are from the June/ July 2008 issue of Quilting Arts. Let your imagination run wild!

Penny the Wonder Pup

I haven’t written much here lately because I’ve been busy chasing a puppy around. We adopted our new puppy, Penny, three weeks ago today from the Northeast Animal Shelter, and at this stage she’s more into chewing monitor cords than blogging. Even though I didn’t post much this month, I had more hits than ever thanks to this post at Tipnut.com, which included one of my aprons in a round-up of internet tutorials. Check out Tipnut if you haven’t, it’s full of handy information.

Penny is something of a mystery mutt, but we think she’s part beagle and maybe some other type of hound, maybe with some pointer mixed in for good measure. Whatever she is, she’s darling. Three weeks in and at about four months of age, she’s well on her way to being house-trained, she’s sleeping the night in her crate without barking or crying (for the most part), and she has learned to sit, stay, and lie down (and she’ll perform each of them on command if she’s not distracted by something exciting or delicious.)

I wanted a picture of her to add to this post, so I attempted Penny’s first photo shoot. The best photo is cute, but the outtakes tell the real story.

Here’s the money shot:

And here are the outtakes, accompanied by my anthropomorphic commentary:

You think I’m just gonna sit here while you’re holding that tasty Milk Bone in the air?

Not a chance, chump.

This is so lame.

None of my friends even read your stupid blog anyway.

Okay, okay, I’m ready for my close-up.

Enough already! I don’t know about you, but this puppy is pooped.

…Zzzzzzzzzzz……

Play with your food.

Speaking of my affinity for all things cute, I received a book called Face Food as a gift from my brother. It’s filled with photos of charaben– Japanese character bento boxes. The time and effort that went into creating these edible works of art is awe-inspiring. Here are a few of my favorites:

Wouldn’t you like to see Piglet doing a jig for you when you opened your lunch?

Mr. Strawberry looks rather distinguished, no?

When traveling around Japan to take photographs for his book, Christopher D. Salyers spoke with the creators of the charaben (mostly mothers of young children.) Most of these women told Salyers that their charaben were not meant to be art. Rather, the charaben were created to encourage their children to eat well, to help them to become more popular, and for the enjoyment the characters would bring to them at lunchtime.

The three little pigs appear to have eyes made of poppy seeds. Imagine the time and patience it took to perfectly place each eye, each ear, each snout. Ah, the things we do in pursuit of cute.

The New Cute

Thanks to One Red Robin for drawing my attention to this article about “new cute” aesthetic: check it out here.

I’ve always been drawn to cute things. In college, I carried around what little money I had in a plastic Keroppi wallet. I was in my early twenties then, and I probably figured that it was something I would, or should, grow out of.

While living in Japan in my mid-twenties, I was introduced to a culture in which it is very common and completely acceptable for grown adults to revel in a level of cuteness previously reserved for the toddler set. In Japan, cuteness is absolutely everywhere you look. A sign on a subway train may inform you that you are in a non-smoking car, but chances are it will be a gentle reminder coming from a cartoon cat. Check out the mascot for the Tokyo Metropolitan Police:

“Obey the laws, or I’ll wink at you and giggle!”

In the picture below I am posing with the Onibaba, an evil witch rumored to inhabit the mountains in the town where I lived.  When she gets hungry, she lures children into caves and eats them alive. If you can look past the horns and the sharp teeth, she’s pretty cute, don’t you think? That’s how she gets you.

Cute is definitely in, and it’s not just for the Japanese any more! The article above discusses the trend in Australia, but I certainly see it here in the US as well, and I’m all for it. The next time I blog, I’ll show you what happens when the new cute makes its way into your lunchbox. Come hungry.

Must Love Dots

A couple of weeks ago, I was thrilled to find some very cool sheet sets(green with white polka dots!) at a very cool price. Yes, I get excited about sheets. What can I say– I’m a textile geek. I snapped up two sets– we need four pillowcases anyway, and it’s nice to have an extra fitted sheet. With the two flat sheets, I made a duvet cover for our down comforter. Nothing complicated about it, but I thought I’d share the process in case it helps to get someone else’s wheels turning.

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(1) Since all the seams on the sheets are already finished, a top-stitch around the perimeter should be sturdy enough to hold the duvet cover together– so no need to sew the whole thing together inside out and turn. Just pin the two sheets together, right sides OUT. I used what had been the tops of the sheets as the bottom of my duvet. [Here's why: at the top of these particular sheets, like many sheets, about six inches of the fabric was turned over at the top and sewn down when it was manufactured. At the bottom and on the sides, there is only about half an inch of fabric turned over. Since the bottom of my duvet cover is going to have an opening (although it will be closed with velcro, buttons, or snaps), a little bit of the inside of the duvet cover will sometimes be visible and I don't want the wrong side of the fabric to show.]

(2) Begin sewing (using a pretty small machine stitch for strength) about four inches from the center of what will be the bottom of the duvet. I chose a seam allowance that felt right when I lowered the foot (remember you’re dealing with sheets that already have seams around the edges, so you do have to work around them.) When you begin, you want to start with at least four or five backward stitches, and then start going right over them again as you begin sewing forward. Do the same thing when you reach the end of the seam– this will strengthen the places you’re going to be yanking on when you pull your duvet in and out of the cover for washing. Sew all the way around the outside (yawn) and stop about four inches from the other side of the bottom of the duvet, leaving about an eight inch gap. The easiest way to close the gap is with iron-on velcro. Buttons would be great if your machine makes buttonhole.

(3) If you get annoyed with the duvet sliding around and bunching up inside the cover, try this trick: sew ribbon ties onto each cover of your duvet, and a ribbon loop into each corner of the duvet. Then when you put the cover on, you can just tie the corners into place, and no more slipping around! When I lived in Japan, I noticed that many duvets and duvet covers came this way when you purchased them– genius! I haven’t gotten around to doing this yet because I was eager to get my new duvet onto my bed, but I plan to.

I hit one unexpected snag– it turned out the sheets were not exactly the same size. Yes, they were both full-sized sheets, the exact same brand, style, and color, but one of them was a full two inches longer than the other. So my plan for this to be a super simple project didn’t quite work out. I had to trim the excess off of the longer sheet and hem it, and then topstitch the two sheets together. Grrrrr.

If you don’t have two matching flat sheets, you could use two coordinating sheets. This would be a great use for vintage thrift store finds. You could simply use one as the front of the cover and one as the back, or if you really wanted to make things interesting, you could cut the sheets up and piece them back together so that you had part of each sheet on both the front and the back. You could do this in a very simple manner by cutting one strip out across the width of each sheet and then sewing it into the other. Maybe I’ll try that next time.

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Oh, and P.S.– no comments about my shoddy bed-making! I come from the toss-your-duvet-on-the-bed-and-be-done-with-it school of thought, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A (Bed)Room with a View

Let me start by apologizing for neglecting this blog of late. I moved three weeks ago, so of course the move and everything that goes along with it has been keeping me very busy. Feathering a new nest does bring up lots of crafty challenges but I haven’t had the time to do much yet, nor have I had the patience to snap pictures, hence the lack of postings lately.

I’m having trouble taking still photos of objects that look good enough to post. I’m agog (love that word, but it makes me think of the giant spider in Harry Potter) at all the sumptuous photography at so many of the blogs I read, but I’m just not satisfied with most of the stills that I take.

Light is the biggest challenge. Unless I take a picture at high noon (like this), it comes out way too dark (like this.) If it’s dark enough to need the flash, the flash just washes everything out anyway. My new place definitely has some sunny spots, so hopefully that will help. I found some very helpful general advice here, and I used this tutorial to build a light box, but I’m not satisfied with any of the pictures I took using it. They’re still not bright enough, and the colors are off. I think I might need to get some fancy schmancy light bulbs. Sigh. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Today I’ll share a photo of the view from my bedroom window. I’m clueless about plants, so I haven’t a clue how long this tree (which I am told is a lilac, ha!) will be in bloom, but I am enjoying it while I can!

A new sofa for a new home…

I love my new sofa! It’s going to look so great in our new place. This shade of green is just perfect. Only at IKEA can you buy a sofa in pieces and fit it comfortably in the backseat of a tiny Kia Sportage!

The icing on the cake is that the people who will be moving into our old apartment (which is kind of surreal to think about) are very happy to be inheriting our old couch. We won’t have to move it (which is a big deal because it’s pretty huge) and I won’t have to feel guilty about it going into a landfill, so it’s a win-win situation!

Let the sewing of throw pillows begin.