Newborn Sweater

I made this tiny sweater for a friend's baby daughter, who was born in October.  I had every intention of knitting it quickly, but in the end finished it just before Christmas and finally managed to mail it out today. 

It's the smallest size of Baby Tea Leaves, knit in Ella Rae Lace Merino DK.

Rainbow Baby Quilt

 One of my friends from high school had a baby boy in July, and I made a quilt for him.  I used a pattern out of a book I borrowed from my mom.  It was reasonably fast and easy to make, and I used a lot of scraps - I did buy new fabric for the background and backing, but all of the colored fabrics were leftover from previous projects. 

The backing is a nice thick cloud-print flannel.  It should be very cosy this winter!

I tried a new basting technique with this quilt.  I thread-basted it instead of using basting spray, which has been my go-to basting method for many years.  The thread-basting was very time-consuming, but it held the layers together nicely and I really appreciate not having to buy basting spray or deal with its fumes.  I was satisfied, and after I finished this quilt I bought some curved needles to make thread-basting easier in the future.

I quilted the quilt using the suggestion in the book with the pattern.  I used my walking foot to quilt a curved "echo" around each colored diamond.  It was relatively fast and came out looking really nice.  It's not a very dense quilting pattern, which made the finished quilt nice and soft.  

All in all, I'm really happy with how this quilt turned out.  The only thing I'm not thrilled with is my failure to heat-set the ink I used to write the label on the binding - it smeared in the wash.  But I've learned my lesson and I won't make that mistake again!

Dinosaur baby quilt with scientific integrity

One of my best friends from college has a baby exactly 12 weeks older than mine.  While we were pregnant, I offered to make a quilt for her baby, and asked if she and her husband had any theme or color requests.  They asked for a dinosaur quilt with blues, greens, and yellows, but no purple. 

I immediately started searching the internet, and found these amazing paper-pieced dinosaur blocks.  Robert helped me choose three of the blocks, and I just bought those three patterns individually rather than the whole bundle.  All three of these dinosaurs - the pteranodon, velociraptor, and triceratops - are from the cretaceous era.  Since my friend is a scientist, we didn't want to send her baby a quilt that mixed dinosaurs from different eras (hence the scientific integrity).

I used some scraps from my stash and supplemented with some fabric from my local quilt shop.  It turns out the owner of the shop really likes dinosaur novelty fabric, so she had a great selection for me to choose from, and was very excited to hear about the dinosaur baby quilt!

The quilt is large for a baby quilt - if I'm remembering right, it finished at about 42" x 52".  The patchwork squares are 3" finished, and I had half a yard of the dino fossil fabric in the horizontal stripes.  I quilted a diagonal grid in the patchwork and dinosaur sections and parallel horizontal lines in the fossil stripes.  By the time I was done with the piecing, I wanted to quilt in a way that would be relatively easy and not detract from the dinos. 

I'm thrilled with how this quilt turned out, and my friend and her husband were, too! 

Modern Arizona Wedding Quilt

One of my best friends got married last June.  I wanted to make a quilt wedding gift, but what with my graduation last May, I didn't get it started until the beginning of June.  Of course, I didn't have time to finish it before their wedding (I think I got the top finished), and then we moved cross-country in July and then I started my new job, and I finally finished it in February.

I made up the quilt pattern based on a picture of a quilt I had seen online.  I like it because it looks sort of like a double-wedding ring, but without the crazy template piecing.  I used two jelly rolls of Arizona-themed fabric from connecting threads.  I picked this fabric because my friend and her now-husband met and still live in Arizona.  It was a happy coincidence that several of the fabrics are a kind of coral-ish orange color, since our bridesmaid dresses were coral/orange!

My favorite fabric is this adorable cactus print:

I quilted loops in each row of the quilt, and bound it with leftover jelly roll strips.

Here's my sketch of the quilt blocks.  It's a twin-sized quilt (I didn't measure it after I washed it, but the blocks finished at 30" by 30", and it's two blocks wide by three blocks long).

A Wedding Quilt

Natalie, who is a member of my church choir and who used to be the director of religious education before she retired, was married yesterday to Bill, another member of our church. My choir buddy Carolyn and I decided to make a quilt for them.The stars are 12" finished, and we decided to offset them for more visual interest, so the blocks finished at 15". The quilt is about 60" by 90", which is either twin-sized or a generously sized two-person couch quilt. We ordered this lovely extra-wide batik for the backing:

 This's print might be my favorite:

We spray-basted, used warm and natural batting, and each of us quilted in the ditch around half of the stars. Then I decided it needed a bit more quilting, so I free-motioned a wavy line between each row and column of stars and then switched back to my walking foot and used clear thread in the top to quilt a square in each star, with the corners at the inside point of each flying goose unit. Then Carolyn machine bound and washed and dried it and dropped it off for me to label yesterday afternoon. I used my embroidery machine to stitch out a fancy frame on white fabric using the same blue thread we had used for most of the quilting and wrote the information inside the frame with a Pigma Micron archival permanent pen, and then stitched it on a back corner of the quilt.

 I am really happy with the way this turned out, and it was super fun to team sew/quilt it with Carolyn! I hope Natalie and Bill enjoy it!

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.

Friday Night Sew-In Results

I went over to Taylor's yesterday afternoon for Friday Afternoon Sew-In, but I don't have any pictures of that - I was working on my super-secret embroidery project. It's getting to a point where I can believe that it might be done someday soon. Taylor (and her kitten, Scout) cut out the pieces of a purse she's going to give her mom for Christmas.

After dinner last night, I made the top for the first of my quilted placemats (in the picture above). I enjoyed myself, but I was also pretty frustrated and discouraged. I can't seem to sew a straight seam or get an accurate quarter-inch seam allowance. I thought my machine came with a quarter-inch foot, but it didn't, and the quarter-inch guide line marked on the machine bed doesn't line up with the needle AT ALL. So I tried to measure a quarter inch from the needle and tape a strip of paper on the bobbin cover at the correct distance, but it's still not quite right. The flying dutchman block in the center of the placemat (which I sewed together with the geese facing the wrong way, so it's not actually a flying dutchman) is supposed to be 12.5" square unfinished, but turned out 12" square. I think I made it worse by trimming the geese wrong. You can see it's pretty wonky.

Anyway, so I'm going to have to fiddle with the machine more to get better seams before I can do any real quilting. On the bright side, my machine did come with a darning foot and feed dog cover as well as a walking foot and "quilting guide" (for spacing straight quilting lines evenly) so I'm good to go to practice both straight-line and free-motion quilting!

CMS/Colloquium - Socks finished!

I finished Taylor's socks just at the end of colloquium on Thursday, but she had to run off right after and I didn't want to let her take them or post until I had a picture of her wearing them. So I gave them to her at our TV last night, and took this picture of her wearing them and one of my feet in my handknit Koigu socks. Lovely and cosy!

My next CMS/Colloquium project is going to be this tea cosy. I started it last summer and was thinking about it for quite a while before that, but I have so many other projects that it hasn't been worked on much. And it may not get worked on much now - I donated a pair of custom hand-knit socks to my church's auction again this year, so as soon as I find out who buys them (hopefully next week) I will probably have to start knitting like a maniac on them, since I promised in the listing that they could be done by Christmas.

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I finished the first sock today! Taylor tried it on the moment it was finished, and it fits and looks lovely on her. I immediately cast on the second sock. I'm estimating that it will take me 5 or 6 more weeks to finish the second sock: two for the leg, one for the heel, and two or three for the gusset, foot, and toe.
These are the first pictures I'm posting from my new camera. My old camera, aside from being very old (only 5 megapixels, compared to the new one's 16!), developed the nasty habit of not opening the lens cover fully when it powered on. This led to several blacked-out pictures on my summer vacation and a lot of annoyance at needing to poke the thing open with my fingernail every time I wanted to take a picture. But one thing I really loved about my old camera was the fact that it uses AA batteries. I know opinions are strongly divided on this subject, but being able to carry and acquire extra batteries easily is really important to me, especially when I'm traveling. When I started looking at new cameras online, I had a hard time finding many options that use AA batteries, so when I saw a few options on sale in my price range last week that used them, I got one. So far I'm very happy with it.

In other news, the baby recipient of the receiving blanket I made this summer was born this week! Her mom sent me two very sweet and adorable photos of her all swaddled up in her blanket. She is a beautiful baby!

Bread Machine!

Many things have happened since the last time I posted. I will make an attempt to post them in the order in which they were done, but no guarantees.

First up, We received a breadmaker as a housewarming/"thanks Robert for dogsitting" gift. We have been enjoying it a great deal. The first loaf of bread Robert made in it was a simple white bread:

This loaf of bread was very delicious, and lasted less than 24 hours. We try to have a "special" breakfast on Saturday mornings, and the day after the first loaf of bread happened to be a Saturday, so I made vegan french toast. We devoured it with margarine and maple syrup.

Vegan Donuts

As I mentioned in a previous post, Robert and I have now made donuts twice. We use the Pioneer Woman's recipe, and veganize it by subbing flax "eggs" for the two eggs. The recipe makes about two dozen. For Robert's birthday brunch, we doubled it. This was kind of a mistake, since it produced 52 donuts and 62 donut holes, which took up just about every flat surface in my apartment until our friends ate almost half of them.

That said, they are DELICIOUS! Here you can see one frying. I recommend using crisco for frying instead of canola oil. The canola oil makes you cry when it heats up and starts to break down, but with crisco you're okay until you get too much residue in the bottom of the pot. It took 3 batches of oil to fry all of the birthday donuts.
After they're fried, the recipe says to glaze them with a powdered-sugar glaze. We did that the first time, but the second time we dredged about half of them in cinnamon sugar and glazed the rest. Both options were delicious, but we preferred the cinnamon sugar ones. Here you can see Robert glazing a donut hole:
I heartily recommend this recipe. It is kind of a big production, but it is not difficult. Just make sure you have lots of friends coming over to help you enjoy them!

Birthday Craft Day

Last Saturday was my birthday, and I had a craft day party to celebrate. We had a great time, and I worked on a bunch of projects. My friend Carolyn and I started with felted soaps (which I forgot to photograph). It's a very easy, super fun project - and you get to play with soap suds!

My friend Qiongling wanted to learn to knit. She picked it up really quickly. Here she is with the first of TWO potholders she made:
I did some spinning. I finished spinning the blue roving into singles, and then I plied it together with the spindle-spun stuff I made before I got the wheel. The quantity of wheel-spun singles was significantly larger than the quantity of spindle-spun singles - you can see the rest on the bobbin in the lower right in this picture. Another issue was that the spindle-spun singles were more over-twisted than the wheel-spun singles. So mixing them was maybe not the best idea in the world. I'm still figuring out how I'm going to make the rest of the wheel-spun singles into two-ply yarn. I think I might run it through the machine again, put a bit more twist into it, and end up with two bobbins with a roughly equal amount of singles, and ply those together. I feel like I've learned a lot from this experiment. We'll see how the yarns turn out (and I'm looking forward to more fiber I've ordered arriving so I can put my new knowledge to use).
I also knitted a bit on my "colloquium socks." I was informed that this was cheating, and I needed to disclose that on the blog.
For some extra disclosure, Robert and I went backpacking over Spring break last week, and I did a good amount of knitting on our long drive there and back. I'm pretty close to being done (Hallelujah!)

CMS/Colloquium knitting

I made some good progress on the socks yesterday. Here they were before CMS yesterday:
This is where I was at the end of colloquium. It's hard to see in this picture, but I started the gusset!
Yesterday's colloquium was the best one I've been to so far! The talk was about which groups can and can't be knot groups for knots of various dimensions, which is in some cases an unsolvable problem. I can't say I understood the whole thing, but I was following the entire time (which is REALLY unusual). The speaker was funny, he told entertaining historical anecdotes, and he gave the talk using adorable handwritten PowerPoint slides. It was a winner!

I have been joined in my CMS (but not colloquium) knitting by my friend Aru. Maybe we'll spread the trend further! Aru is making a lovely scarf for her boyfriend. Here she is knitting in our office in after colloquium:

Vegan Dinner Party

Last night Robert and I made dinner for our friends Evelyn and Jon. Robert made homemade mushroom ravioli, and I made mock tomato sauce (from the Vegan Delights cookbook) and vegan banana-chocolate chip bread pudding (from Veganomicon) with caramel sauce. All of the food was delicious, and we had a lovely time.

Here's Robert making the ravioli:
Rolling out the dough


Arranging the filling


After adding the second layer of dough, cutting the ravioli apart



And the finished product!

Here's the bread pudding. I forgot to take a picture before we served it up, but you can see how much we enjoyed it: