Without a Care

Kyle is out of town this week visiting his sister in Oregon (hi, Sarah!), which means I am left to fend for myself and try not to become too feral while he is away. This also means that I have taken the opportunity to commandeer the dining room table and turn it into a quilting station. Not to finish the winter quilt I showed you last year, but to start a brand new one because it is impossible to have too many works in progress.

This time around, I got to skip the tedious and labor-intensive process of cutting out all of the pattern pieces myself and opted to purchase a kit from Quilt Addicts on Etsy complete with all of the pieces pre-cut. This meant that I could dive right in and start piecing everything together, which we all know is the fun part. So far, I’ve pieced together 164 small squares and now it’s time to piece these together into 41 larger blocks.

I love this option of a pre-cut quilt not just for the convenience, but also because of the variety of fabric that goes into it. I don’t even know how many different batik fabrics went into this kit, but even in the photo above you can see that all nine of the colorful triangles shown are different. If I had to purchase each of these individually, there’s no way I would be able to amass such a wide assortment of colors and patterns. The kit also means that I had no idea what the fabric patterns would be before I started working on the quilt. I love the turtle fabric in the upper left, but I have to say that this is my favorite find so far:

Was I expecting a (pregnant?) mermaid to show up in the stack of fabric? No I was not. Am I upset by it? Absolutely not! This piece is definitely going to have pride of place in the center of the quilt for all to see. It is so random and hilarious to me. I’m excited to keep working on this quilt today to see it all come together.

While on the topic of quilts, yesterday I attended a class at the Spring Creek Community Center to learn how to paint a barn quilt. Kyle was bummed he was going to miss the class and asked me to sign up to make one while he is out of town.

Leaving it up to the colorblind person to choose from hundreds of paint colors is dangerous, but I thought it was a safe option to default to some of our favorite colors – gray and black.

The class was four hours long and I still hadn’t finished by the time it was over, but the teacher graciously sent me home with a few mini cups of paint so I could continue working on it. Taping off each shape so the colors wouldn’t bleed was the most time-consuming part, but I think it’s evident at this point how much I love this kind of attention to detail.

I finished the white and red in class, leaving gray and black for me to finish at home. The gray in the photo above is just the primer on the board itself. I wanted to give a subtle nod to our Minnesota roots, so I borrowed colors from a pattern frequently associated with Paul Bunyan – buffalo plaid.

It’s a loose interpretation, but I knew the colors would work well together. I have to run out to get some sealant before I can hang this on our chicken coop, but I think it will look mighty fine once it’s in place, and I hope Kyle is happy with what I came up with! I’ll show you what it looks like when it’s all hung up and on display.

On the knitting front, I finally sat down to figure out the pattern for the top of a vest I had shared a while back.

I had knit the 18″ of plain stockinette I needed for the body and just needed to figure out the armhole/neck hole shaping so I could continue with the colorwork up to the shoulders. I am using the schematics from a different vest pattern I have previously knit, and by a stroke of pure coincidence my stitch count on this project is identical to that previous pattern. However, when I started doing the math for the shaping, it just wasn’t working out. It seemed like I didn’t have as much width for the front and back as I should have after setting stitches aside at the underarm. So I studied my knitting, recounted stitches, looked at the pattern I was using as a guide, and that’s when it hit me… I should have increased about 30 stitches after knitting the ribbing. The ribbing that I finished knitting 16 inches ago. Several balls of yarn ago. Countless hours ago. Those 30 stitches aren’t something I’d just be able to fudge or ignore, either. That’s a good 4″ of circumference that’s missing. I know the answer here, and you do too, so naturally I shoved this project back in its bag and haven’t looked at it since.

Having set my knitting aside, I wound the warp for my next weaving project and got it set up on my loom. This is a very narrow linen warp (2.5 inches), so I thought it would be a good opportunity to use my smaller floor loom.

While it does seem a little comical to weave something only 2.5″ wide on the larger 40″ loom, I must have done something odd when beaming the warp on the small loom because I’m only about 8″ into my weaving project and I am already noticing some pretty severe tension issues with the warp. Linen is already trickier than other fibers to begin with because it has absolutely no stretch and is entirely unforgiving, but I can tell this is going to become unmanageable fairly quickly. I’m considering cutting off what I’ve woven and transferring this warp from one loom to the other in an attempt to fix the tension at the same time for a better weaving experience. Once again, a project that has gone wrong and is therefore in time out, which is why you’ll find me sitting at the dining room table sewing a quilt without a care in the world.