Finished!

I cast off my gradient Multnomah shawl week before last.  Then we moved, and last weekend we were settled in enough to wash and block it (on our new guest bed in our new guest bedroom!).  It turned out beautifully.  I love the color shifts, and I think it's a good size (although to be honest I haven't tried it on).  Here's a picture of it all pinned out.  Please ignore the drying socks:

And here's a detail of the feather and fan lace:

Pattern: enlarged Multnomah shawl by Kate Ray
yarn: Freia Handpaints Ombre Lace in color 710 Pixie
needles: US size 6
modifications: enlarged it to use the whole skein
Started January 2015, finished March 2015

Quiltcon!

I went to Quiltcon two weeks ago!  I had an awesome time!  The quilt show was really beautiful and inspiring.  Many of these are the kinds of quilts that I like and aspire to make (and feel like I could realistically maybe someday make quilts like them).  There are a lot of really amazing quilts at quilt festival, too, but so many of them are art quilts, using techniques I can't ever see myself learning, or are very traditional or otherwise not really my style.  I took lots and lots of pictures of my favorite quilts in the show.  I also enjoyed the vendor hall - I found some really great fabric for a baby quilt I'm going to start soon.  And there was a really generous swag bag!  There were several fabric samples, and patterns and magazines, and little gadgets.  The tote bag itself is really high quality, too.

But my favorite part of Quiltcon was the classes I took.  The blocks up there are from Lee Heinrich's Advanced Piecing Crash Course on Friday night.  I learned paper piecing and partial seams!  Paper piecing is something I've wanted to do for a long time, but I was afraid of it.  Now I'm confident!  Lee walked us through the two blocks and gave us a bunch of tips to make the pieces fit together and place each new piece.  The only downside was the sewing machines ... I'll probably never buy a BabyLock.  The machines in the class were BabyLock Rachels, and they were advertising a special show price that I don't remember, but I think it was in the neighborhood of $500 plus or minus 100.  The machine was about the same size as my little Brother machine (which has a tiny harp space and cost about $100) but didn't sew anywhere near as well.  Several of us, including me, had seemingly unsolvable tension problems.  It was computerized (which my machine is not) and had a needle down feature, which was nice but not worth the other problems it had.

The other class I took was Elizabeth Dackson's Find Your Go-To Fill.  It was great!  We used wonderful HandiQuilter Sweet16 mid-arm machines and did a lot of sketching and practice of five or so different filler patterns.  In contrast to the BabyLock experience in the other class, if I had a spare $5000 and a permanent space to set it up, I would definitely consider buying one of these machines.  They quilted so smoothly and were really easy to use!  I came home inspired to do more free motion quilting!

CMS/Colloquium knitting

After I cast off my Gradient Multnomah last week, I didn't have a single knitting project on the needles to take with me to CMS and Colloquium!  It is really rare and a little weird for me to not have ANY knitting to work on ... so I cast on something new.  This is the beginning of the hemmed cuff for the first sleeve of Lofoten.  The bottom black part (up to the purl ridge just below the colorwork) will be folded under.

I'm making a few modifications:  I'm knitting the 40" size (this sweater is intended to be worn with 4" of positive ease), but I think I'm going to want to lengthen the sleeves (and possibly also the body), so I started the sleeves and the bracelet pattern with the chart for the 36-38" sizes.  I expect to just make the increase section longer, to end with the right number of stitches for the 40" size at the top of the sleeve.  The instructions say to just knit even at the top of the sleeve increases for extra length, but I don't think I want the extra bagginess at the top of the sleeves.  I'd rather have them a bit narrower for the length of the sleeve.  I hope this works out!

Now I need to get working on finishing a few of my UFOs - I'm up to 7 (EEK)!

Quilting & Binding

I quilted my modern HST quilt ... two, maybe three weeks ago.  Then I attached the binding, sat down to sew it down to the back, got almost to the first corner, and saw this:

There was no way that corner was going to work.  I unpicked the crooked stitches, but I haven't gotten around to getting the machine back out to re-sew them, so this project is kind of stalled.  What with moving this weekend, it's not going to happen until we're settled in the new apartment (but in a dedicated sewing space!  Yay!!).

Notwithstanding the fact that it's almost done and I haven't motivated myself to actually finish it, I really, really love this quilt.  It's my favorite one that I've done so far (my niece's lone star baby quilt is a close second).  I love the fabric and I love the solid negative space.  I think I managed to capture the "modern quilt" aesthetic that I admire so much.

I had a great time at Quiltcon last weekend, and took a few pictures.  I also bound off my gradient Multnomah shawl last night.  I'll be so excited to post reports on both of those after we get moved!

Getting ready for Quiltcon!

I cut the pieces for the paper-piecing workshop I'm taking! (#717 Crash course in precision piecing with Lee Heinrich.)  I'm so excited!

I still need to assemble the practice quilt sandwiches for my FMQ workshop and gather all my little supplies.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I keep working away at my Gradient Multnomah, and I'm getting close to the end!  I did almost two repeats of the lace in my two hours of seminars this past Thursday (last week I did just over two).  I added two more repeats on each side of the shawl, so the rows are taking longer.  I now have more repeats than the pattern calls for, but I'm going to keep going until I run out of yarn.

Last night I was reading an Interweave Knits magazine, and drooling over all the lovely patterns.  I can't wait to finish at least one of my embroidered pillowcase projects so I can start knitting a sweater!

Two weeks of CMS/Colloquium knitting

This picture is from last week, but I didn't manage to get one between my seminars on Thursday afternoon and church this morning.  It looks pretty much the same, just with three-ish more repeats of the feather and fan lace.  I'm getting to the next color change!  I'm really happy with how it's turning out, and from now I'm just chugging along until I run out of yarn.