Elise's Quilt finished!

I finished Elise's quilt Wednesday night, photographed it at the university on Thursday (outside like all the cool quilt bloggers do), and put it in the mail yesterday.

I'm very happy with the result, and I hope she'll like it, too. After I finished it, I gave it a trip through the washer and dryer, and just like I've heard, washing it makes it a little crinkly and hides a multitude of quilting sins. Here's a close-up of one of the (better) stars:

CMS/Colloquium knitting

The socks are really coming along! I think they'll be long enough, and in response to my mom's question, I am planning a green cuff at the top, but probably not a very tall one.

No CMS/Colloquium next week ... It's spring break, and we'll be backpacking!

CMS/Colloquium knitting

Here's the sock I worked on in CMS and Colloquium last Thursday. It started out with just the heel finished. I'm starting to feel like there isn't that much yarn left. I hope that I can make the legs at least twice as tall as they are now. We'll see.

FNSI Results

I almost forgot to post this ... Last night I worked on a quilt I am making for Elise, a woman in my church family. I'm not sure how old she is, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 90, and she is warm, sweet, and wise. I've been thinking about her a lot lately, and I'm making this quilt for her. It is very simple - I'll show more pictures when I'm done with it.

I'm almost done with the quilting - this is my first free motion quilted quilt, and the first quilt I've quilted on my own machine. I'm done with the sashing and borders and half the squares, so yesterday I decided to take a break from the quilting and do binding. I attached the binding and started sewing it down on the back.

Two weeks of CMS/Colloquium knitting

Here is the picture from week before last: the feet and heels of both socks were done. Unfortunately, that night I got a migraine and the next week I was sick, so I never got around to posting it ... here's last week's photo:
I'm working my way up the legs. I think I'm going to alternate weeks on each sock. Last week I worked on sock #2 with the heart stitch marker, so this week I'll work on sock #1, which has a butterfly stitch marker.

I'm looking forward to Friday Night Sew-In this weekend. I'm working on a quilt!

Jake & Jamie's pillowcases

Our friend (and Robert's officemate) Jake got married to the lovely Jamie on New Year's Eve. I embroidered these pillowcases for them as a wedding gift. Since I couldn't be at the wedding, I was hoping to finish them in time to send them to the wedding with Robert, but that didn't happen, so we gave them to Jake and Jamie when they came over for dinner the other night.

I cross-stitched the edge using waste canvas to see where to put the stitches. I had never used waste canvas before, but it wasn't too bad. I think it would be better suited to a smaller design, since it was kind of difficult to pull the threads out after I was done stitching. It would have been a real problem if this design didn't have so much negative space.
Overall, I'm happy with how they turned out. The only issue is that the holes from the brown basting stitches didn't close all the way up when I washed the pillowcases at the very end ... but I'm hoping that they will with time.

Placemat finished!

I finished binding my placemat last week (or the week before? I'm not sure). The only problem is, there's only one, and I don't know if I have enough of the same fabrics to make more and have them look like a coherent set. But I do want to make some more, to practice piecing with my new 1/4 inch piecing foot, which I haven't tried out yet.

Here's a corner of the binding. I like this brown polka dot remnant, but I was surprised how much of it I used just on this one placemat (It started out at 1 1/4 yards):