Finished!

My dear Mom just left.
We spent the last 2 hours assembling my craft space and I am so excited about it!

I made the decision to store my fabric and yarn in the closet, so organizing that is the next thing on the list.

Here is a reminder of the space as it had been.

I took out the largest piece of furniture and I also took out 4 other pieces.
The room is so light and open now.
I can not wait to start sewing again!

Here's to actually finishing something!

Jess

From lemons...

I had to pull out an entire sleeve on Thursday.

I had misremembered the number of cast-on stitches.

I am a doofus.

On the bright side, when I was taking a mental health break from that sweater I got a ton of work done on my Color Wheel Quilt.

I started this post on Sunday.

I finished the quilt last night!

I am not totally happy with it.

The center of the wheel got really stretched out from the high concentration of stitching so it pokes up.

Also, I had it out of the dryer for about 15 minutes before there was a yogurt spill on it, as seen below the oranges.

White appears to be a bad idea at our house.

That said, I am thrilled to be finished!

The Hug-a-Bugs' favorite activity is to play ring-a-round the rosie on it.

They also like to pick out familiar fabrics.
That's my rocket-ship!
There's my hat!
There is Aunt Donna's frog!

So happy to have something in the FO column.

I started the failed sleeve again and I am about 2/3 the way through.

Another wonderful thing we discovered last night is playing Store with button currency.

The kids each had 3-5 buttons in their own boxes and they purchased toys and dolls from me in the shop for 1 or 2 buttons each.

It is so exciting that the younger Hug-a-Bug is old enough to play with smaller things without necessarily putting them in his mouth.

Happy Birthday to You, Dad!

Wishing a cozy Tuesday to you all,

Jess

wips & future wips

I recently have been introduced to Crazy Mom Quilts.
She makes some fantastic quilts and I looked at my WIP stack and felt a little overwhelmed.
Therefore I am hereby making a pledge to finish everything in my quilt WIP stack by the end of 2008.
I have here a sampling-
The United States and the Sky quilts are both hand-quilting which I rarely take the time to do.
I am quilting around each state and I think that I will do diagonal lines out across the rest of it.














The batting of the Sky quilt is a matress pad, from our own bed, that I am recycling. This doesn't need so much quilting so I traced out a bunch of airplane shapes and am about a 3rd of the way through them.

















The Color Wheel is machine quilting. I have a little less than half of that left.














The World Map panel is, I think, going to back an applique quilt of the back of our house and our garden. This quilt is in my head, and I have pattern pieces that I have cut out and the fabric chosen, but it isn't assembled yet.














The rockets I just think are wonderful.
These may end up as snuggle pillows in the toy room, I haven't decided yet.














As I have said before, I work at a fabric store and the main aim when I got hired seems to be that I would leave each time having spent more than I earned.

They do have to keep ordering panel prints. I am a sucker for panel prints.













Also, I am a sucker for anything with maps, moons, stars, suns, rockets or robots.

I started the Sky quilt because I just kept buying a yard or 2 or 3 of anything that had rockets or clouds or airplanes or stars or moons and I had such a big stack that I decided that I should make something or get rid of it all. That was two years ago that I assembled the quilt top. The time has come to finish these guys.


I hope the fact that spring really is still a month away doesn't get anyone down,

see you soon,

Jess.
Update-
I was asked which fabric store employs me.
I work at Treadle Yard Goods in Saint Paul.
They specialize in natural fiber fashion fabrics.
The silk selection is fantastic.
They also have hundreds of cotton prints.
And even though they are not natural fiber or fashion fabrics there is also a terrific selection of oilcloth and vinyl printed fabric.

Also, sorry for the shoddy photos.
The late afternoon sun was blaring, but apparantly only on half of the floor.

Procrastination

This will be the last post today, I promise.

I have only just now, in the last 15 minutes, after 31 years of procrastinating, realized that there is value in procrastination.

I have been very busy not sewing on my aprons for the craft boutique in December because I don't want to get out the iron and make my bias binding.

As a result the thing I have been busy on is my long-neglected Color-Wheel Quilt.

I am officially over half done! with the quilting.

There are 26 lines of quilting and I have just finished my 15th!!!

Woo Hoo. Sorry for the exuberance, it must be late...

Now comes the tricky part. When I am finished with the quilting, I have to make bias binding for the quilt. Which will I choose? Tune in to find out!

works in progress

Hi everyone.

So, my computer was down for a week or so, and I was unable to post pics.

I did get some work done in that time, and here is a recap:

I made cookies, they turned out well. Peanut butter with cocoa in the dough and chocolate chips. This was about a week before halloween, so we hadn't yet had our fill of shirockuate.

I work most nights, but, miraculously, was able on one night to work on the aprons that are my solo contribution to the craft club's craft fair. Didn't get any completed, but I did make some progress.

I have entered the custom-knitting season. I make christmas stockings and whatnots for folks.

Here is the latest, the third so far this year. It hasn't been blocked yet, I just finished hiding the ends. It also needs the name and date at the top.

I am thinking about working stockings from the bottom up from now on. I have been, though I flatter myself that I don't need them, a slave to the basic patterns for christmas stockings.

It has always bothered me that the stitches are upside down when you knit from the top, but I thought "What do you do? That's the way the pattern is written. Do I really want to do more work?"

Well phooey.

I am a college educated woman.

I can think critically.

I will make this change.

This photo shows another WIP in that the stocking is sitting on my color-wheel quilt which I have neglected. Maybe I can guilt myself into working on it...

Thanks for listening,

Jess

Quilting begun

Hi out there,


I have made a little progress on the quilt.


I pinned it out yesterday, and got a start on the quilting. There are 26 lines of stitching and I have completed 4.


The quilt is rumpled in the bottom picture because its appeal was inescapable for the resident 21 month-old and he needed a snuggle.

I have also made some headway on the sweater...

And here is a preview of my next project. The neighborhood ladies are having a table at a craft sale and more about that later.

first post

Hi.

This is my first post.

Fifth Lamp Down is my favorite spot on the Smith Bridge over the Mississippi River.

I have been a skeptic about blogs in the past. Who really wants to read about me?


However, I think this blog here will help me keep focused on the many projects I have going in either sewing or knitting at any given time.


I also don't like the word 'blog'. That said, I will think of this as my blorg.

Currently I am working on two main projects; a quilt for my brother's impending nuptials and a sweater for myself.















The sweater is from RY Rowan Classic book 23 AM to PM.
My husband is always calling me a narcissist, and it must be true because the sweater is called Jess.
I am knitting it in Galler Yarns Prime Alpaca. Loving it! The yarn is undyed and you can really feel the difference. So soft and lovely. Also, I love to imagine a little silver alpaca frolicking about the countryside in Peru.

The quilt is from Joelle Hoverson's fantastic new book 'Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts'
It is the Color Wheel Quilt.

I have the top finished and now the real work begins for me because I have to pin and quilt it.












Luckily for me the wedding date is not yet set, so I have plenty of time.



I look forward to speaking with all of you out in the world wide web again soon.

Thanks for listening,
Punky