Crash!

So my computer crashed the day before leaving on my annual Grand Tour of Michigan...so no posts until I return!

Goin' crazy...

My friend and her architect husband are rehabbing a gorgeous old house in an area west of downtown punctuated with turn-of-the-century mansions like this (and no, that's not it):

It's a beautiful street that was probably one of the more fashionable places to live in Chicago in its day. It saw a decline for quite some time through the sixties and seventies, but in recent years has seen many of the properties like the one above returned to their former glory. When they found their house, my friend's husband saw an opportunity to create his own architectural showcase; as it takes shape, she's seizing the opportunity to decorate.

She asked if I'd work with her on the window treatments. She'd like to preserve some of the Victorian charm of the house, but with a modern twist. She loves crazy quilts. And purple. She knows she wants roman shades on the wall next to the cantilevered staircase and drapes in the bays in the living room. We've begun the process of looking at books, and magazines, and drawing lots of pictures. And choosing fabrics to see if they're workable.

I started playing last weekend with some silks, satin and brocade we'd picked out to do some samples. We had this (crazy) idea to applique some blocks or panels to velvet, see how that worked. Well, the silk shantung worked up beautifully, although it's a little messy (and I thought the homespuns shed -- hah!). I even took the Paintstiks to some of it to add some texture.

I was pretty jazzed about the progress I was making...until I got to the velvet part. To make a very long (two-day) story short, after much experimenting and swearing, the only way I could keep the #@*^!! velvet from stretching was to spray-baste a heavy tearaway stabilizer to the back, then use more heavy tearaway under the edges of the applique block on the front. While it actually looks quite nice, the result is a piece so stiff it could probably stand up by itself.

So I'm back to square one. I think I may try to piece the blocks and velvet instead, but still not sure how that would effect the draping. More experimentation, obviously, is in order.

Any ideas out there from the blogosphere would be appreciated!

Panic on the Yellow Brick Road...

This is one of last week's many finishes: leftovers from my first Yellow Brick Road project a few years ago. Due to time constraints, I fell back on my favorite funky-line quilting; I've done this on a few pieces over the past year and I love the look it produces -- even if it does appear as if I've been chugging tequila at my sewing machine.

It is the second of two quilts destined for a twin baby shower last Sunday afternoon, and I was on schedule to finish it with time to spare. And by "time to spare," I mean thirty or forty minutes. An hour, max -- enough to get a shower in, do the hair up nice and stop for gas on the way.

I've been time challenged all my life, and I've learned to accept it. It's just the way I roll.

I was just adding the binding at about 7:30 that morning when:

Pfffft! Grrrrrrrrrrrzt! Gzzzzzzzzzt!

Darkness.

Silence.

I know onomatopoeia is subject to interpretation, but to me, that's the sound of the power going out. And not just in my place (because there was a brief moment there where I questioned whether I'd forgotten to pay the electric bill) -- it was out for blocks in all directions. A call to the power company revealed that yes, they were aware of the outage, and estimated power wouldn't be back up until eleven.

What came out of my mouth next was a string of expletives that I'll leave to your imagination. I only had about two feet of binding attached, and nobody with power close enough that I could pack up and go finish it somewhere else.

This is not the first time I have wished for Ed Begley's bike generator -- while he uses his to make toast every morning, I have a dream of using one to power my sewing machine and laptop, at the same time returning my butt to its pre-desk jockey shape. It's the greatest motivator I can think of: unless I pedal, I wouldn't be able to sew...or blog.

So I took a shower. In the dark. Because when the power goes out, so does the electronic ignition on the hot water heater, and it was a very good bet that most of my young neighbors were still sleeping off the previous night's revelry, oblivious to the fact that the early risers in the building were in the process of emptying the tank. Heh, heh.

And as the day inched painfully slowly toward eleven and I had cleaned myself, and cleaned up all my fabric scraps and sorted through some piles and watered the plants and played a few little ditties on the piano and did anything else I could think of that didn't require electricity, I determined that there was NO WAY IN HELL I could finish sewing on the binding and then stitch it down by the time I had to leave at 12:30.

Admitting defeat, I placed a sheepish call to the shower's hostess to tell her I'd be arriving a little later than anticipated.

"Oh!" She replied. "Didn'tyougetmye-mail?" She's a really fast talker.

Um, no. I have no power. (and, I might add, a really sucky battery in my computer)

"Theywenttothehospitalatthreeo'clockthismorningthinkingshewasinlaborbutshe'snot." (deep breath)
"Whichisgoodbecausefourweeksistooearlyandanywaythey'rekeepingherthere."
(The showeree is over 40, considered high risk)
"Sowe'llhavetoreschedule...noshowertoday!"

She hung up with a breezy "Haveagreatday!" and as my hair began to grow back from the spots where I'd torn it out and my blood pressure returned to normal, the refrigerator brrr-urped to life, the next door neighbor's air conditioner lurched into its familiar annoying hum, and all was right again with my little world.

Revisiting the Raggedy Rag...

Some of you may wonder whatever happened to the Raggedy Rag quilt. Well, after being sucked briefly into a black hole because I ran out of batting scraps, it has made a comeback...and is now done.

I can say with 100% confidence that this is the messiest quilt I've ever worked with. Ever.

I don't think I'll rid my house of all the tiny bits of thread this baby shed any time soon. Between the ragged edges of the homespuns (which are scraggly to begin with) and the clipped seam allowances, geez Louise! I washed it inside a pillowcase, but my poor dryer was having fits. And have you ever tried to Swiffer with an 11-lb. cat attached to the handle? It's a challenge.

The quilt's not very big (10" blocks), but it's a perfect baby/car quilt -- very lightweight, and incredibly soft and cuddly. I ended up binding it because I couldn't stand how sloppy all the fringe was around the edges. At least this way it's all contained, so to speak.

It was really fast because the ragged edge blocks on top were sewn down as I quilted it. Had I not run out of batting halfway through, this probably could have been done this in an afternoon.

I may actually do another one of these, I really like the look of the plaids. Next time though, I'll be better prepared to deal with the mess.


So knock another one off the UFO list and add it to the pile of the past week's finishes! I've been busy!

Ready to go...

My basting process: taping the backing onto the kitchen floor, wrinkle-free but not too taut, pulling the cat out from under it and retaping; getting the batting square with no lumps, watching the cat charge into it and push it all into the corner by the refrigerator, then putting it back; laying down the finished top, getting it just right, body-blocking the cat from coming near it a third time.

After finally exiling him to the spare bedroom I spray baste both layers, then turn on the stereo and get to the pins. I do both to keep the sandwich from shifting -- too many puckers and too much time spent picking my work apart over the years have taught me I can't just use one or the other method.

Basting + frisky cat = getting absolutely nothing done

This morning, I turned on NPR, but even they were spending a little too much time on the Michael Jackson memorial recap (I admit I cried when Jermaine sang "Smile," and Paris' closing statement put me over the edge, but there're only so many times you can hear it, come on), so I switched to my 1975 playlist on my iPod and hit the floor. Nothing like a good dose of The Doobie Brothers, Average White Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd to get me moving.

I'm not a stippler, so spending time pinning also gives me time to think about how I'm going to quilt it. Usually by the time I'm done I have a pretty good approach in mind; today, I ran through two or three ideas before making a decision.

Messing up my stuff can be exhausting!

I'm in production mode this week, due to a baby boom among my circle of friends: this top pinned and ready to go, another halfway done, three baby tops completed over the weekend (pics coming soon, promise), and one awaiting binding. It's cool and rainy today -- good quilting weather. If the drizzle (and my momentum) stays like this, I'll get this baby completed before the weekend, and not end up being late to the shower because I'm still sewing on binding!

Not that that's ever happened before.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Even though she probably won't see this, I'll just put it out there. Mom turns 87 today.

Me and Tiny, 1965. Maybe this explains my attraction to red cats?

So Happy Birthday to her, and Happy Independence Day to the rest of you!

Blown off tack again...

I have been blown in so many different directions in the past couple weeks, I think I'm sailing in circles. Or perhaps I'm stuck in my very own Bermuda Triangle?

This is not the idea I woke up with the other morning and began to crank out. This top wasn't even on my radar until this morning, when I got a phone call about a returned invitation to a baby shower next weekend...for twins.

I have this quilt for a boy, but a girly baby-ish quilt? Nothing in the inventory at the moment.

They look so much better with the light coming through them!

Fortunately, I had been scrounging for scraps recently and found leftovers from a very old Yellow Brick Road project. There were some completed blocks, and the rest of the pieces had been cut already. Talk about a no-brainer!

What it looks like from the front.

This has been pieced over about six years on three different machines, all with different ideas of a consistent quarter-inch seam allowance. As a result there are pinches, and puckers, and mismatched seams -- nothing that a little strategic quilting won't hide. This is not my best work.

But it is some of my fastest, and that's all that matters at this point.