My turn to get choked up...

This is too lovely not to share, although I'll use pseudonyms since it's a public journal...

Dearest Fionn and DH

First of all my belated holiday wishes to you both.

Fionn, thank you so much for the beautiful quilt which you made for me and grandpa. I put it on him and showed the 2 nurses (1 day nurse and 1 night nurse). They both haven't seen anything so beautifully sewed. Including myself. Soo beautiful. I thanked your mother-in-law [hee hee, this is her daughter] for the pictures she supplied you. I thank both of you soo very much.

Whenever somebody comes to visit papa and me I take it out the quilt to show them. I am soo proud of you, DH, J., and S. I shall cherish it with love from you guys. Thank you. I love you all.

Mahalo!
Grandma and Grandpa

P.S Thank you and go out to kau-kau (eat) [referring to a check she enclosed]

The monkeys made me do it!

I know I wasn't supposed to start anything new... but when I was in my studio, my eye fell upon the yard and a half of cute simian fabric, and before I knew it, I was monkeying around matching fabrics. (Oh well!)

EDITED: Potential layouts removed; view the final monkey quilt here!

Save stress: sacrifice a sock

If you have been tracking my progress on the To Do lists below, you may have noticed that one of the lists grew before it was completed. This is the story of how and why.

I pre-wash all of my fabric. In certain cases, a single cycle through the washer on Hot may not lift out all the unbonded dye particles. To cover such cases, I try to send a test sock or other white item (ahem) through with the fabric to check for colorfastness. This isn't always a popular move around here, particularly when the nearest white item may not be my own! So if I've recently been caught redhanded trying to pass off the color of some rather pink, er, manties as "a trick of the light," I may find it more prudent to omit this step.

That must have been the case with the border fabric for the little star quilt. Since I've run into issues with dark hand-dyed fabric before, I made sure to verify that all of the yellow stars on the front had remained that color before the quilt went into the dryer. And they were, all well and good. But, alas, I neglected to check what was going on on the back...!

With that heavyhanded foreshadowing, I am sure it is no stretch to imagine what happened when, after ironing the front of the quilt, I turned it over to sew on the label.

Banishing fleeting thoughts of "Maybe I can claim the fabric was always like that," I returned to the laundry room... where, to my disappointment, I discovered a deplorable dearth of Synthrapol.

It may have a name fit for an old-time intelligence agency, but Synthrapol is actually a detergent. (No doubt I have sung its praises here before.) A deeply colored piece of fabric may be so saturated with dye that there may be excess particles that have not bonded with the cotton fibers. When this fabric hits water, these particles are equally happy to go sit on other fabric. That's where Synthrapol comes in: it lifts and separates the unbonded dye particles from the dyed fabric and keeps them in suspension in the wash.

But there was none on the premises and, at 8:45 at night, our options were limited.

After calling around, we found a promising store 29 minutes away. It would be open for another 30 minutes. But, DH cautioned, he had heard the clarion call of "Shoppers, it is now 9 PM" when we were on hold at 8:55, so we would have to adjust accordingly.

Never let it be said that a Prius has no zoom. We made it there in 20. I think the clerks, learning where we had come from, were a little stunned.

But all's well that ends well. My Synthra-stash was restocked; the drive back was uneventful; a few cycles through the wash removed every stray trace of indigo dye. And the quilt finally found its way off the To Do list.

(But surely it would have been worth a lavender sock or two to avoid the whole thing, don't you think?)

One snow angel, no whiplash

It's been warm, and nearly all of the old grey ice lumps melted over the last week. Overnight we had about 8" of flakes. So today, after I dug out the walkway, I lay down on the front lawn and treated myself to making another snow angel.

This time, in the fluffy, pristine snow, it was perfect.

Digging out

I have a number of unfinished projects waiting patiently for me to get back to them. I go in thinking I should make progress on the current stack of projects, and then my imagination is spirited away by the idea of doing kaleidoscopic hexagon blocks! Or I see a quilt using Japanese indigos and think of how I could make inroads on using my own indigos! And lo, another project is born.

But enough. I hereby make the modest resolution to finish at least two of my current projects before I allow myself to do any more than think of anything new.

TARGETS:
1) Quilt with yellow friendship stars: DONE!
- choose fabric for backing from stash
- sew together backing fabrics
- piece batting
- make binding
- lay out and pin together layers
- tie quilt
- baste and trim
- sew binding on front
- sew binding on back
- make mad dash to get new bottle of Synthrapol to fix bleeding dye
- wash and iron
- sew on Linus label

2) Aqua lotus quilt:
- make binding
- finish hand quilting in hoop
- re-do some hand quilting near edges of quilt (stretched out of whack in hoop)
- pin/baste and trim edges
- machine bind front
- hand bind back

I welcome pointed comments and reminders about these tasks if I don't seem to be making any progress! :)

And delivered!

We shipped via FedEx, for no particularly good reason. One positive thing about FedEx (other than the knowledge that, after handing over your box, your wallet will no longer be cluttered with pesky dollar bills :-P ) is that they have an excellent online tracking system. I did relish having access to that information this weekend, to see the quilt make its way across the country; but I especially loved knowing, within 9 minutes of the actual delivery, that it had been delivered straight into Grandma's hands.

When I saw this, I IM'ed DH and he called his parents to give them a heads up. Not long after, his mother called me and relayed the following:

She had called Grandma within 19 minutes of the delivery, thinking that this would surely be enough time for her to open the package, read the note, unwrap the quilt, etc. (Even accounting for my overzealous application of packing tape, this sounded like sufficient time to me as well.)

But after she had signed for the box, she had gone to see to Grandpa. And so, when MIL had called, she had only just gotten out the quilt - and was crying with joy when she came to the phone.

Aw, I think she liked it! :) (What better reaction could you ask for? :))

Really done

Done, note written, everything packed up with foam and packing peanuts and due to be mailed tomorrow. Yay!

The diagonal quilting isn't all that obvious, but if you are curious, I mocked it up (the pale yellow lines) here. The ditch stitching (=quilting in the seam line) isn't supposed to be visible, so the fact that it isn't is a good thing ;)

You know, it's funny... going in, I was kind of dreading doing the ditch stitching, as even little inaccuracies are so obvious. But with all of the ditch stitching I needed to do on this quilt (around each of the photos, between the body of the quilt and the first border, between the grey and brown borders), I started to get fairly comfortable with it. So I am now kind of looking forward to the idea of doing more going forward!

Not quite...

About an inch of one of the quilting threads broke. I saw this suspicious spot when I was doing the binding; and, indeed, that's exactly where it is. It's easy to fix: I can pick out a few inches of stitches in either direction and just stitch that one line. (I'm glad it popped now rather than later as I'm quilting with variegated thread and that'd be hard to reproduce.)

Since I'm already messing with it, I may want to stitch around the photos a bit to stabilize things a bit more. I'll assess in the daylight...

Done?

Current location of grandparents' quilt:



There is no reason this should be a disaster, as I've washed all the fabrics (and even the batting) several times. But please keep your fingers crossed anyway!