Practice, practice, practice

When my mother was out visiting, she and her friend got me started on hand quilting. She gave me a special thimble and an embroidery hoop with a little lap stand, too, so now I am all set to start a hand quilting project using proper hand quilting - once I can truly figure out what it is I'm doing.

(Proper hand quilting isn't exactly intuitive. Take a look at the stitch here Confused yet?)

I've done enough to realize that it'll take a lot of practice before I'm confident enough to do it on a real project. So I have a hoop set up with some scrap fabric and batting so I can try to get a few stitches on a needle at a time without having my stitches be an inch long. And in the meantime, I'll go back to "cheating" and finish up an in-progress project using my nice old familiar stab-stitching method. Only another quilter would be able to tell ;)

Value judgments

DH has given me a little input on the sorts of colors and values I should be using in the photo quilt for the grandparents-in-law. This is group of potential fabrics we're considering - blues, browns, and neutrals that are generally medium to light in value. (I think he would rather that I not include the two darks on the right end at all, but I should be able to convince him with the ruby beholder.)

The photos scanned and printed on fabric will for the most part also be medium to light in value. That means you have a very low contrast quilt, so you need to look for a pattern where the blocks can be similar in value, rather than one that only works if there is significant value contrast. Like the snowball pattern. (uh oh)

Look at the examples here. In the ones with high contrast, where the snowball is significantly lighter or significantly darker than the surrounding squares, it stands out nicely and gives a nice crisp look. In the ones with low contrast, the pattern becomes a big muddle of slush.

I think this means we go back to the drawing board on the pattern here. :-S

Painting's a pain

Since we were getting someone to paint the outside of the house this summer, and because we have some water damage in a few rooms indoors, we decided to go ahead and get the same company to fix up a few spots inside too. Picking a color for the kitchen walls has been a major pain.

Here is how it looks now with the original white walls. The granite is new as of this summer; we changed up the knobs (originally brass) to coordinate better with the counters.

The paint guru at the hardware store was enthusiastic, for some reason, about a sort of drab greyish pink color which was about as attractive as that description sounds. We ruled out that color - and nearly everything else for various other reasons - and ultimately arrived at gray.

But even when you narrow it down to gray, you have to pick exactly which shade and value you want (one for above the chair rail, one for below), and Benjamin Moore has so many that a person can get a little lost.

Over a few visits to the hardware store, we picked up a bouquet of paint chips in just about every shade of gray they had. We've finally played with them enough over the past few days to narrow down the combinations to two:

1) Bunny Gray above the chair rail; Pike's Peak Gray below.

2) Sterling above the chair rail; Adagio below

(You can view them here)

DH has gone to get some quarts so we can see how these really work together in real life on our real life walls. Eep. The moment of truth!

First group project

The first group quilting project took place not long after I first learned to quilt. Our quilting teacher was getting married - what better gift than something quilt related?

My partner in crime concocted some relatively plausible excuse to procure the entire guest list, with addresses. (I'm still not sure what she said, but it worked!) Then we sat down and wrote a note explaining the project, asking each person to sign an enclosed muslin square and return them to us before the date of the wedding. We would embroider all of the signatures and present all of the squares to the couple on their wedding day. (We didn't have a lot of time, so we were aiming just to have all the squares ready; they could be assembled into a quilt after the big day).

Incredibly, we had full participation. Everyone sent signed squares. More than that, even, because the bride's best friend found an old letter from the bride's father (who had passed away), and copied that onto a square too. (They had been very close, she wrote to us, and she knew that the wedding quilt wouldn't be right without him.)

This is a shot of some of the ones I worked on first. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of the finished set, but I hope it'll give you a taste of the project.



On the wedding day, we arrived at the reception just a few minutes before the bride and groom, but it was enough time to lay out all of the squares in a row. We'd divided the blocks in half and had each tackled the embroidery on our half individually, so we were seeing the whole batch together for the first time. It was pretty exciting!

But our excitement was nothing compared to that of the bride and groom. They went down the line (accumulating quite a following of guests behind them) and read each and every message. And then we pulled out the pièce de résistance - the square from her father, and there was not a dry eye in the house.

Timing...

I was talking to a friend about our project, and mentioned that we were discussing the schedule for the project.

I mentioned that I thought setting a date too far out would be risky because people would be likely to forget… but setting a date that came up too soon would annoy people because they would feel like they didn’t have enough time.

The response? "If [Sandie] doesn’t expect that she’ll even have the baby with her for a few more years, why would you guys even need to start thinking about this yet?"

(I think the real answer to this is "Because we’re excited!!!!!" right?)

So how much time would you want/need to shop for the fabric for your wish square?