Some of you might know that I live in southern Alberta, in Calgary, which is one of several areas in the province that has been hit by some pretty bad, very damaging flooding. We’re expecting rain for several more days, so it’s possible it might still get worse before it gets better. I live in the ‘hood in Calgary and this might be the one time people will wish they lived in the North-East because none of the damage has affected us (beyond people panic shopping and clearing out the grocery stores of water and fresh food items). They’ve had to evacuate some 75,000+ people from parts of the city (and more from surrounding towns); they had to evacuate animals from the zoo. The Saddledome (the arena where the Calgary Flames play hockey) is apparently flooded to the 10th row of seating. It’s pretty crazy, and if anyone has any money to spare, the Canadian Red Cross is accepting donations (though their website is currently running very, very slowly) towards recovery.
I haven’t seen any blog updates from any of my southern Alberta friends who might be in the path of all of this, but I’ll be thinking of you and hoping for the best for you and yours. (And if there are any of you in the area that are in need of some help, let me know! I don’t have a car, so I’m pretty useless in a lot of respects, but I’d be happy to help out any way I could.)
I’m already annoyed by BlogLovin’ and I haven’t even used it yet. Why on EARTH should I have to “claim” my blog?
Is there are hormone that makes you unreasonably angry? I think I have too much of that right now.
Yesterday I was trying to copy a pattern out of a new quilting/sewing book that I recently bought – Patchwork Please (just a link, not a way to get a half a cent if someone buys it, or however that works…) – and no matter how much I mashed that book flat onto my scanner, I just could NOT get it to scan the entire pattern without it being on an angle or cutting off a bit or casting a shadow over half the pattern. So I ripped it out of the book. No lie.
Too much anger.
I guess it’s a good thing there wasn’t anything important on the other side of the page (it was a facing page to another section, so just a picture, not even a picture of another project), but now I’m going to have that one loose page for ever and ever until I inevitably lose it a few months before wanting to make the pattern again. Anyway, I promptly changed my mind and didn’t actually make the project in question anyway. But if I ever want to… at least I’ll be able to scan it without problems. (Blowing it up 143%? That’ll be a whole other problem. I really despise books that tell me to blow things up to ridiculous sizes because my stupid printer doesn’t have options that allow me to specify 143% – I can barely make it scan and print something at the size it started from, never mind changing the size entirely.)
I spent most of my morning in a haze of anger because my boss called in sick today (not angry about that) and I had to do all his work and all my work and all the work that was left from the weekend, but oh by the way, can you do this? and can you do that “just for a few minutes”? and the cleaner is going to get and stay in your way, by the way, even though he’s not actually cleaning anything, and he’s going to have a very, very loud conversation on the phone while he’s not cleaning and… just ugh. So not impressed with the day.
But really, I should stop thinking about it or I’m going to start getting angry about the fact that it’s snowing again, and it’s cold and windy as all get out and I’m cold and my hair is windblown… everything just magnifies, when you’re already in a mood, doesn’t it?
I’ve been mentioning working on something that I couldn’t talk about, and finally I can because it’s been properly announced!
Fandom in Stitches, which is owned and operated by the very lovely Jennifer of Sewhooked, is running a Doctor Who Stitch-a-long beginning May 15 and running through July 31. Fandom in Stitches has primarily focussed on paper-piecing patterns, but this will be an all-embroidery stitch-a-long, which also offers instructions for turning the 12 stitched patterns into a quilt. You can read more about the stitch-a-long here on Fandom in Stitches, but in short, it will feature 12 Doctor Who patterns celebrating the 50th anniversary of the only doctor I’d like to visit, including two created by me! I don’t typically dip my toe too far into the pattern-creation waters, but it was a lot of fun to work on, and right now I’m hard at work stitching up my patterns to make sure everything is just the way I want it to be.
But since I can’t show those patterns to you just yet, how about I give you a little peek into the fangirl part of my life instead! I tend not to have a lot of fandom-related things in my house, but I do have a few and the vast majority of them show off my Whovian side. They’ve all been made for me by various people I know online, except for one that was made by my sister.
1. TARDIS basket
You’ve seen this here several times already, and it’s the thing I most recently received. I have so much love for this basket, made by Deanna of Little D and Me, but I might stop showing it every other post here… if I have to. I guess.
2. TARDIS painted card
This card was made for me by Aalia of Joy of Stitches. Aalia is also designing three patterns for the DWSAL. She’s a really fantastic designer, both of embroidery patterns and paper-pieced patterns. (She also made me this incredible hand-stitched bag, which is another fannish thing of mine, though you might not recognize the fandom in it! (The green plant with the red beads is a Mimbulus Mimbletonia from Harry Potter.))
3. Adipose Baby stuffy
This adipose baby, with the ever-so-clever name Addy, was made for me by Jordan/dozmuffinxc, who as far as I know doesn’t have a blog (other than her LJ). This is a little fat baby from an episode in.. the third season of the new Who. No wait, not the third season. It must have been the 4th season. Anyway, I think these little fat babies were the cutest “villians” they’ve had on Doctor Who. They might inadvertently kill you, but they’re just so adorable!
4. Dalek Propaganda Poster cross-stitch
My sister stitched this for me using a pattern created by Shaebay, based on the poster in… hmmm… one of the Eleventh Doctor episodes, from his first season. I tried stitching one of these, but cross-stitch makes my brain melt, so I gave up. (I still have it in a bag somewhere with the threads and pattern.)
So that’s a little look at my fannish crafts, so far. By summer, though, one more! And finally one made by me!
[Gah! Where have my pictures gone? In the meantime, feel free to click through to flickr, but I’m going to try to fix it. Fixed, I hope.]
& Stitches blog is running a little contest where people can write a post about their embroidery toolkits and get entered to win a pretty awesome prize. I think I’ll probably be too late uploading this – I cared less about the opportunity to win than about my opportunity to sleep after work this morning (still tired – why’d I have to wake up at all?) – but it’s an interesting enough idea that I’m going to post about my embroidery stuff anyway. Maybe I’ll get it done in time, maybe I won’t (the clock is tick tick ticking), but it’s all good either way!
One of my greatest irritations in life is just how very different I am at home from how I am at work. At work I’m a hyper-organized, oft-accused of being OCD neatnik and everything has a place and if it’s not in its place, I get fiercely, intensely, anger-inducingly annoyed. I work with someone who is a bit of a don’t-give-a-crap slob. There is a small mountain in the corner of our office where if he wants to store something, he stores in on top of everything else he’s already storing. It seems to grow every week. If he ever gets transferred, 90% of it will go in the recycling or the garbage, but he’s my boss, so I can’t do it so long as he’s in charge! He teases me that if I annoy him, he’ll turn half my channel locks (bits of plastic with notches sticking out one side) the opposite direction from the rest in the stack. (That WILL stop me in my tracks and make me stand around sorting them back out so that they’re all facing the same direction.) There is a running joke that I will punch in the throat whoever doesn’t return my department’s handheld computer TO MY DESK, INSIDE THE COMPARTMENT, TOP RIGHT CORNER before I ever have need of it again. I’ve been having a running “conversation” with one of my co-workers, via notes in red pen, about how her not having enough time to write me a note rather than leave a box of plants, dirt containing plants, ON MY DESK (DIRT!) is kind of bullshit because I don’t have time to clean dirt off my desk either, but I still did it anyway, because it’s courteous not to leave piles of dirt on people’s desk. I’ve framed coffee-spills people have left on my desk with cut out cardboard and put notes about modern art displays on it until the a-hole who did it finally had the sense to clean it up. (Seriously, who spills coffee on someone else’s desk and walks away?)
Anyway… I like knowing where things are. It makes everything easier. I get things done faster because I don’t have to go searching for anything. It’s just right there. In the top right corner of the upper compartment of my desk. For random example.
But when I’m at home… somehow all of that disappears. It’s like I walk out the door of the building and my boss’s general don’t-give-a-crap slobbishness descends on me like a heavy fog that just won’t lift. In theory, I have three drawers in a rolling cart devoted to embroidery supplies. Everything SHOULD be in there, but should and is are two very different things.
These are the three drawers:
In practise, they seem to contain Stuff I’m Not Currently Using And Have Probably Not Ever Used, though one should be the thread drawer, one the cloth and tools drawer, and the other the patterns drawer.
This first drawer, the thread drawer, does in fact contain a fair bit of thread, mostly crewel wool, but it’s also got a project (Taliaferro pattern, with thread pack), a Wool and Hoop project pack containing thread, fabric, pattern, and probably needles. There are thread packs from Sublime Stitching. Under the heap of crewel wool is a bag containing some crewel wool I bought online, which turned out to have an odour and which I haven’t decided what to do about (in the photo above, it’s the green threads – super musty smelling). The Singer needles really belong with my general sewing stuff, since few of them are special needles for embroidery. The folded up bit of paper is an iron-on embroidery pattern for a table cloth I’d like to make, but probably never will. (I was looking for that, two months ago, and couldn’t find it! Why ever would I have thought to look in a drawer full of embroidery stuff, as clearly I did not!)
The second drawer contains a pack of zippers which should be with my general sewing stuff. (Anyone need 24 zipper pulls with octopuses on them? Apparently I did!) My original pack of stuff from Sublime Stitching, still with the project inside (a tea towel, if I recall) and probably my iron-ons and I think the only thing I took out of the bag was the first bit of thread they sent out and my scissors, which move from place to place and are never where I want them to be. (They were on the floor in my bedroom, with a second pair of embroidery scissors, Fiscars ones, that my Grandma gave me when she saw something I was working on. You’ll see those somewhere below, along with all the stuff that’s “stored” in my bedroom.) There are iron-on patterns from Wool and Hoop, a pile of needles from Wool and Hoop (on loose cards in the middle of the photo), chenille needles (what? I don’t even know what you use those for), thread and needles and fabric for sashiko, as well as a quilted sashiko project my mom bought me in Hawaii. Gold thread. Scroll frame knobs for a scroll frame I don’t use. (I should put them in the box of scroll frames, which is downstairs. My sister does use them for cross-stitch projects, but we didn’t have enough knobs for two people to use the frames – we have multiple sets and various sizes – at the same time, so I bought them and then realized I despise scroll frames.) And tacks, which I use with my Evertite frames, which I do love. Also, a set of Needle ID cards, which are very useful if you’ve got loose needles and no idea what type of needle they are.
The third drawer actually does contain fabric:
A yard of rather nice linen, and some assorted bits and bobs of thread, which were sent to me by someone online.
So that’s all the stuff I don’t actually seem to use much. If at all. The rest of it is mixed in with in-progress projects, most of which aren’t currently being worked on, but which were stashed in four different places – the heap of crap on my floor of my bedroom, the heap of crap on my bedroom desk, a plastic bin in my sewing room, and the sewing table in my sewing room.
This is most of it:
(Oh god, why didn’t I at least smooth the wrinkles out of the sheet on my bed before I took this photo?)
The only currently on-the-go project in that mess is a Super Secret Project, which is part of the only just announced Doctor Who Stitch-Along. I’m doing two different patterns for the project, and that’s all you’re going to see of it until… sometime in the future.
Why yes, everything IS strategically placed so as to hide the relevant bits. Okay, pattern on the far left. Black with shiny threads was my first two practise runs with one of the patterns, including multiple attempts at one particular part of it. I’m not going to be using the shiny rayon thread, so the Essex linen is what I’m GOING to be stitching on. Underneath it is a gorgeous Hardwicke Manor hoop, which I so love working with. So smooth and nice to touch! The tic-tac container gets filled with the little bits of threads I trim off while I’m stitching, so they don’t migrate around the house on my clothing. I don’t tend to use a needle threader, but I had to when I was working with the rayon thread, so it’s attached to the fabric along with my needle.
I was slightly appalled by my fabric scissors sitting on top of the pile like that, which is exactly where it was in my bedroom when I gathered everything up. That’s just a snip-in-the-middle-of-a-project waiting to happen. Normally I use my little pink handled scissors from Sublime Stitching, but I couldn’t find them and had been using the fabric scissors instead. Now that I know where the pink ones are, I better swap them out. Those at least I keep in the sheathe when they’re not in use!
It’s not particularly visible, but in there is the Sewline chalk pencil I use to transfer patterns. (I do sometimes use a water-soluble pen, but I tend to default more often to the chalk pencil. I also sometimes use a very fine-tipped Micron pen for pattern transfer, but my current one is out of ink, so.) And oh, yes, the painter’s tape. This is not my usual solution for keeping fraying threads in check, but I’d used the window as a light box and all that tape was already on all four sides, so I just turned it over and sealed off the edges. Most of that will get trimmed away before it gets sewn into its final quilt, so I’m not too worried about it leaving residue. (Though maybe I’ll un-lazy myself soon and stitch a proper edge on that instead.)
There is so much more to show, but I wound up posting this so that I could squeak it into the & Stitches Show and Tell, and this is as far as I got! I think it is the most relevant bits, since it includes the thing I’m actually working on with the tools I’m actually using, everything else below this will be added after-the-fact.
You’ll notice that I tend to keep everything (except scissors) for each project all clumped together. Each project has a needle woven through it somewhere (the needle for this is inside the pack of threads, woven through one of the plastic bags inside the main plastic bag). And everything has its own hoop – this one a cheapie plastic one.
This is my Nearly Done alphabet sampler. You’ll note the needle woven through the fabric, also the hoop underneath. This is another Hardwicke Manor hoop, but I think it’s a 4-in one. (The one with the Doctor Who stuff is 8-inch.) I was skimming other people’s posts earlier and noticed that some people put twill tape around the outside ring of the hoop, but I’ve always done the inside hoop. I don’t know why, it just seemed like the way to go when I did it, but nobody ever told me which to do, just that it should be done. Now I’m questioning my very existence! Or not, but I am curious if it matters which gets twill taped? Why the inside one or why the outside one? Does it actually matter?
The tulip slip project wasn’t shown with a zip bag, but everything gets stored in zip bags by the project, I just kept the bag out of the photo that time. (Everything’s back inside it now though!) They don’t photograph well, though, with all that light bouncing off of them.
The one project I have that’s not stored in a zip bag is this future-project, which has many, many specialty tools (needles, anyway…):
This project is being stored in a box that contained pre-wrapped chocolates. It was the right size and had a see-through lid, which was convenient while I was collecting threads and wanted everything where I could see it so that I could order needles from place A, threads from places B and C, and the pre-printed fabric (silk!) and beads direct from Hazel Blomkamp, who is the author of that book. Which, if you’re at all interested in Jacobean patterns, or crewel embroidery, or adding beads to your embroidery projects… definitely check it out. Everything in that book is beyond gorgeous, though some of it feels very beyond me (I think of the stitches that make a lace-like fill). Hazel does everything with embroidery threads, rather than crewel wool, so if you don’t like working with wool, it could be a good fit for you. Even if you don’t like Jacobean design (which I do), I think it’s a gorgeous book to look through and there’s a lot to be absorbed, even if you don’t love the patterns themselves.
Anyway, I haven’t started this project yet because I don’t want to start it until I finish the ABC Sampler, so it’s just sitting around waiting, waiting, waiting. Anyway, I include this because… can you tell I really love Bohin needles? I started out with some of their needles for crewel embroidery and every time I’ve needed a different needle type since, I’ve gone on the hunt for a Bohin version of it. The Crewel Twists project will need several needle types (because it includes beading, etc), so I had to source four different needle types – I think the furthest flung ones came from Florida – but they’re such high quality needles that I don’t regret it at all. LOVE the Bohin needles. (In fact, all the needles threaded through all my projects are Bohin needles. Once I found them, I never went back to anything else. They just feel good in your fingers.)
I should skip these because they’re not tool-related at all, but they got gathered up in the Great Embroidery Tool Treasure Hunt of April 2013:
A couple more future projects from my bedroom floor. On the left is a kit I recently picked up. It’s this very pretty, kind of intense looking little sampler using stitches I’ve never used before and some hand-dyed threads. On the right are two projects I never quite got around to – the Edward Gorey picture I wanted to stitch (someday, someday!) and a fandom pattern I was creating for a challenge that finished in January. If you don’t recognize it, that’s Maurice Moss from The IT Crowd, with a quote of his from one of the episodes. Love Moss! I never quite figured out how to integrate the words with the picture.
And finally, after all of that (and, oh, I forgot all my needlebooks, I used to have none and now I have three!), there’s just one more heap of crap to go through.
All of this was in a plastic bin in my sewing room, under various heaps of fabric, also unsorted, and some unfinished quilting projects. The Wool and Hoop stuff, top left, is actually a finished project – well, the project is long gone in the mail – and just the thread scraps left from that. I should really get rid of all of it (except for the threads – I might use them someday). Below that is a collection of threads I bought for a project I haven’t quite got around to yet, which comes from New Crewel: The Motif Collection by Katherine Shaughnessy. (Seriously! So many projects! I SWORE I wasn’t going to collected so many Works-in-progress with stitching as I’ve got with quilting!) All the stuff on the right belongs to the same project, a needlebook with birds on it that I’ve never finished. I was doing the class at Mary Corbet’s Needle ‘N Thread, but crapped out when I had problems with the second bird.
You can’t really see it, but the stitch is on one of my sets of Evertite frames, which are FANTASTIC. The yellow t-bar tool on top of the stitch is what you use to tighten the frame (and create the tension). There is a needle threaded through the project at the very bottom right corner of the stitch, but all the rest of the needles for the project are in some luscious, lovely wool felt inside the bag on the right.
I should really make a plan to finish all these projects, maybe work on consolidating some of these tools into just one place…
I think the big lesson here is that 1. I talk too much – what a ridiculously long entry!
1. I don’t really have a tool-kit, so much as a tool-dumping ground and a tool–or-three-for-every project
My god, how do I generate so many unfinished projects? How do I generate so many piles of crap? Why can’t I bring my super-organized work-self home with me? It’s ridiculous! Maybe I need to be on the clock to ‘waste’ time on organizing. Maybe I should charge myself $25 an hour to organize and donate the money to charity, so that the longer it takes to get things in order, the more it’ll cost me. (Of course, I’d need someone to make me be accountable…) Hmm, thoughts…
It’s been half an age since I’ve been here again, and I wish I had something to show for the time past, but I really don’t. Things have been a little crazy at work (and don’t look to be getting any better any time soon), so it’s really cut into my crafting time. As much as I enjoy crafting, I keep coming home from work and just collapsing in a pile in front of a tv or in a bathtub with a book so I can try to relax.
Yesterday though I got a package in the mail with some fabric I need for a project I’ve got in the works (that would be the Super Secret Fandom in Stitches embroidery project, which will be announced…. at the end of this month? I forget! Anyway, time is ticking and I needed to get working on it, but I was waiting for fabric. I needed to wash it because I’m using a linen-cotton blend, which I have heard can sometimes shrink quite a bit. Since I was doing that, I decided it was well and truly time for me to finish washing and pressing the last batch of smelly fabric I own. (Smelly because I used to store my fabric in closed plastic bins – over time my fabric got a kind of musty odour, so a lot of my older fabric had to be washed to get rid of the smell.) The fabric for the project and all that unwashed fabric was in the same colour range – white to off-white to beige to kind of dark tan. It made a big old pile of blah.
That’s about a third of it before I got started pressing it. It looks like so much less once it was all neatened up and stacked to go in my fabric shelves:
A lot of these are (for me) very old fabrics – as much as ten years old, I suppose, and a lot of them don’t really suit my current tastes. I still keep them though because I’m sure they’ll be useful somewhere. There is a part of me that kind of wants to chop them all up and turn them into charm squares or something and then use them for wonky star backgrounds or to make some kind of intensely low low-volume quilt. Anyway, it’s good to have that job done.
Now I just need to cut up my cotton-linen and get to work on that super-secret project. (Probably tomorrow. There is pattern transfering to be done and I’ll be using the good old window-as-a-light box method.)
Also on my to-do list:
– a quilt block for my Simply Solids group (due in April – I’ve chosen colours, but haven’t gotten started on it)
– a quilt block for my Birthday Blocks group (not due till mid-May, but still…)
– a super-secret prize for my 111th entry giveaway (the stuff I needed for it arrived along with the aforementioned cotton-linen fabric)
I’ve kind of disappeared off into the ether the last little while, which wasn’t really intentional, but… life. I seem to be having a hard time this year with balancing everything, I’m just doing bits of everything in fits and starts and not really accomplishing much at all. Hopefully once it really hits spring I’ll settle down a little bit and get my equilibrium back.
Anyway, last night I sat down to watch The Hunger Games movie and spent my time sorting through all my fabric pulling out all my batiks.
I think a lot of people go through a stage of loving batiks and some people never come out the other side, but I did. So all these fabrics have just been sitting around getting by-passed every time I need a fabric for anything (because they’re harder to blend into a block, you almost need to go all or nothing on the batiks) and I decided it was silly to have them sitting around but to do nothing with them. So I dragged my mind all the way back to the beginning of the year when everyone and his or her dog in the quilting blogosphere was making Scrappy Trip Around the World blocks. I found it interesting at the time, but was determined not to pick up another new project. But… I guess I’ve got a bug up my butt about making use of these fabrics. So I also pressed everything and sorted all the pieces that are too small into my TARDIS bucket and made a nice big pile of fabric to start cutting.
I’ve borrowed a season of Robin Hood from the library (I’ve never seen it before and picked it up on a whim, I bet it’s going to be TERRIBLE), so maybe today I’ll watch that and start in on cutting all my strips.
I’ve never quite learned how to make mosaics (I’ve done them with picasa, but not the sort that link back to where the photos come from), so… no mosaic from me in the Flickr community. I’ve been trying to be more diligent about adding things to my favourites that I like (but I really only had one burst of that thought before forgetting about it again).
That said, I’m pretty easy when it comes to things I like. I love funny or quirky things (see: most of the embroidery in my favourites list) but have ZERO expectation of getting anything like that from a swap – so time-consuming! Maybe the idea translates to some of the quirkier fabrics out there, like balloon animals or weird coloured dachshund prints (both of which are things I have, just saying…). I’m a great big fan of Doctor Who (esp. the 9th and 10th doctors – David Tennant *swoon*) and love references to the show. I often like unusual colour combinations. I don’t love neon or pink, but I could go either way with something bright and bold or soft and subdued. I like blending linen or “natural” looking fabrics with cottons. All print or all solid or some combination of both. I love flowers, but don’t love floral. There are no children in my life, but I kind of dig Sarah Jane fabrics and Aneela Hooey and older Heather Ross stuff, but in small doses.
Did I mention I’m easy? Really, I’ll probably like whatever you make me because… holy crap, someone made something for me! And that’s pretty amazing. I know it can be hard when you’re dealing with someone as wishy-washy as me. Just think of a thought, take a deep breath, and make it whether you’re certain it’ll appeal to me or not, it really and truly probably will.
(More later. It was bed time almost two hours ago. Someone is shovelling their sidewalk right now, though, and I can’t fall asleep. SO LOUD! I work nights all weekend, so it might be Sunday before I have a chance to write a proper entry. And hopefully take a proper picture.)
Does this chucked on a chair shot look the same as the one I’ve been flashing the last few weeks worth of work-in-progress Wednesday posts?
If it does, you should look a little closer!
Now with 100% more binding!
I haven’t really shown too many full-on shots of this quilt, though I guess there was the one with it draped down the stairs in my kitchen, but if you know very much about this line of fabric – Bonnie & Camille’s Vintage Modern – you may know there isn’t a stripe. (Well, there is, but it’s a very wide stripe with dots in both colours of the stripe.) (In fact, here’s a link to the Moda info sheet on Vintage Modern.) This stripe that I’ve used actually comes from Bonnie & Camille’s newer line of fabric, Marmalade, which is in a very similar colour palette, but also adds orange and yellow to the mix. The reds are the same in both lines, so it worked perfectly!
I think everyone loves a good striped binding, I certainly do, but I do have some slight reservations about this one. I think I maybe should have gone with my original plan and used a red with white dot. Oh well, too late, not changing it now!
I’ve stitched down one short side plus a couple more feet, and am crossing fingers and toes that I’ll manage to get the rest done tonight and tomorrow. I REALLY want this to be a January finish! But January is so very nearly over! I guess I should get back to it – there are certainly worse things I could do with my time on a cold, cold, cold winter’s day than to cuddle up under a flannel-backed quilt while watching tv and stitching.
