The Barefoot Kitchen Witch

Unfinished Business

I bought a new sewing machine back in February or March; one I could use for heavy-duty projects involving denim or leather or the like.  I found it a place on my work table - actually on my Dad's old desk - and I unpacked all the accessories into a drawer - and there it sat.  

This is a silly habit of mine sometimes.  I get a new thing and then set it aside until I get used to having it around, and only then will I start acquainting myself with its features.  It is really silly.

Anyway, the other day I finally wound a bobbin and threaded the needle and stitched some fabric together.

The project in the above picture is the pieces of a double wedding ring quilt I decided to tackle within a year or so  after Bill and I were married.  At the time I just worked, and we had no children.  I had time.  And then we went and had children, and all my pieces of fabric took a back seat.  And then a spot in my mental attic.  Under luggage and old furniture and dust.  And eventually the carpal tunnel business started bothering me and holding a needle and stitching all those little pieces by hand (because that was the other thing - I was going to do it all by hand) wasn't a lot of fun.  And I got interested in other things, and so on and so on.  Life.

But I kept all the bits and pieces, intending - some day - to finish it.

After the surgery on my hands almost a year ago, I discovered I could hold a skinny needle and work pins and it didn't bother me at all!!  I was EXTREMELY happy.  I set to work piecing the small "ring" pieces together and it was wonderful to be doing something I'd loved to do years ago.  Like Dorothy walking out of her sepia-toned house and into technicolor OZ, 

But you know what?  No matter how great my hands are now (and they are), it's still a LOT of stitching and I still don't have all the time in the world any more.  I just want to get it done.  So - to the sewing machine!

And I have to say, it's really fun to work up the pieces.  I pin a batch, sew them up, pull the pins, and iron them flat.  Hard to explain how joyful this makes me.  But it does.  I love the smell of damp, hot fabric as I iron down the seams. I even like ironing clothes, but making a quilt is way more fun.

This morning I opened a big Rubbermaid tote and dug in.  I was looking for another old sewing project in particular (which I didn't find) but I found a whole bunch of others.  On one hand, it's overwhelming.  I don't even remember what my game plan was for some of these patterns and fabrics.  But on the other hand, I'm excited.  Where to start???  (I know, I know.  I'm working on the double wedding ring quilt.  Maybe I should start - and finish - there?)

Here are a few pictures of some of the chaos...

Okay, well this is not unfinished.  This is an embroidered picture on a pair of my shorts that I did back in junior high or high school, I imagine.  That person on top of the front mountain is a tiny little Scotsman playing the bagpipes.  I'm pretty sure I was pleased with my work, otherwise I wouldn't have saved them all these years.

This is a sample piece from a workshop I attended one summer weekend in Maine.  There was a class I took in trapunto, which is a sort of filled stitching - you use bits of stuffing or pieces of yarn or cording to add dimension to the quilted stitches.  Pretty cool stuff.

I also learned to do applique using freezer paper, a process I loved and utilized in a lot of projects after that class. 

I concocted these squares with the intent, I think, of turning them into big pillows.  the stars and the letters are all applique.

So were the tulips on this apron...no, wait, never mind that, I guess I didn't take a picture, or I deleted it.  

And this.  It's hard to see, but this is a blend of trapunto and applique, and it's also copied from the cover of the Broadway soundtrack album for Evita.  It was meant to be (and still is!) part of a quilt for a great friend of mine in college and after who HATED the music and suffered a lot at my hands and my record player.  I do not apologize.  It was educational.

Anyway, here are a couple of other squares meant for the same quilt:

Here we have a log cabin variation with denim and flannel on one half, taffeta (I think) and velvet on the other half.  The story involves this dear friend and a middle of the night trip to the grocery store with him in denim and flannel and me in a gorgeous dress with a black velvet strapless bodice and a shimmery blue skirt (that flared out thanks to the layers of tulle underneath).  I wore heels, and my hair was up in a bun and my makeup was over the top.  We put our groceries (we shared a house with another friend, so grocery shopping together was not unusual) in our cart and strolled up and down the aisles (well, I tottered around on my heels, which I very rarely wore) and acted as though we looked perfectly normal.  And I guess "we" is incorrect - I'm the one who had to pretend.  

And this is a game of cribbage. I think we both learned as kids. In my house it was a Sunday afternoon event - various cribbage games between my sister and I and our parents, with some sort of sport playing on the tv and cheddar cheese and Saltines and glasses of ginger ale.  Ginger ale for us kids.  I don't know what my parents had. So anyway, my friend, Ralph, and I played go-for-the-jugular cribbage games way back when, and if you look closely at the faux wooden board above you can see the word "blaze" - something we'd say when one of us, usually me, ahem, scored a lot of points in a hand and blazed past the other person's marker.  

I have a few other squares but these three are my favorites.

And that's enough for now - time to sew some fabric together before the rest of the day gets away from me.

 

Flip Flop Flop

It was just me and Overly Serious Girl this morning.  After running a quick errand and watering the window boxes and buckets (well, the plants growing in them), we adjourned to the air-conditioned basement/work space to accomplish something.

Rugs from Tee Shirts

You’ve probably heard of this sort of thing – using old tee shirts to make something new, like shopping bags or quilts or, in my case recently, rugs.  I’d say braided rugs, because that’s what they look like, but actually they’re kind of crocheted…sort of.

Anyway, I don’t have enough how-to pictures – woefully unprepared am I – but I taught myself to finger crochet and I made simple little bracelets for Julia and her friends out of the bottom seams of old tee shirts.  I taught Julia how to do it, and she made seven bracelets in half an hour. 

Anyway, using this same technique of crochet without a hook, you can make long chains with strips of old tee shirts (nice to use because they’re stretchy) or other strips of fabric…denim…yarn, whatever.

So I’d salvaged and sliced up a lot of old tee shirts from this household, and I decided to make little rugs for the kids’ rooms.  More summery than the shag rugs they’ve got now.

I made two lonnnnnnng chains, one with Julia colors and one with Alex colors, and yesterday I started binding Julia’s rug.  Now, if I was REALLY crocheting, I suppose I could crochet the whole thing together using some sort of round and round stitching.  But that’s not happening.  So I just started spiraling the chain and stitching it together on the back side.  Here’s a picture I took not long after I started:

Very exciting, except you can probably tell the “rug” is curving more like a hat or a really large soft bowl.  At first I thought I could stretch it out and it would lie flat…but as I kept going (past the above point) the cupping just became more pronounced.  So I looked up stuff online about this sort of issue with braided/crocheted rugs, and learned I was stitching it all too tightly. 

And after a lot of heavy sighing and frowning, I ripped out all my stitches and started again, this time with a looser stitch and paying careful attention to potential buckling.

Here’s where I was at the end of my day yesterday:

I’d gotten about as far as that white section before, and it was definitely NOT flat.  This is much better. 

It’s currently 17.5” in diameter, and I’ve got a bunch more left of the chain to go.  Not sure how big this will get, but it really doesn’t matter.  Julia already likes it.

I like it because I know where all those different portions of fabric came from.  That little dark pink section near the top of the picture?  A very small pair of stretchy pants Julia had…dark pink with black polka dots and black lace at the ankles.  The section that looks white?  Actually it’s also got tiny pale rosebuds, and it came from maternity summer pajamas I had when I was nursing. 

One more – see the section that’s a blend of deal and dark purple?  More very worn stretchy pants I couldn’t completely part with:

That’s about it for now, but I just wanted to share what I’ve been up to.  There are other things, too, but they’ll have to wait.

What have you been doing lately? 

Random Stuff

So the other day at dinner Julia said, out of the blue, “I don’t like eating raisins because it’s like eating tiny old people.”

I have no explanation. 

~~~

The baby quilt I’ve been working on has conjured up memories of other baby quilts I’ve made, especially one of the first ones.  Not sure if I’ve told this story before, but here goes…

This was back when ALLLLLL my quilting was hand-sewn.  Piecing AND quilting.  Everything.  I loved it.  And I still do, though too much of it bothers my hands.  But this was a while ago.

Anyway, one of my sister’s friends, Betsy, was having a baby – I believe she was the first of their group to do so, and I was invited to the baby shower, and so I decided to make a quilt.  I kind of blended aspects of the styles of Monet and Seurat, with colors from Monet’s Water Lilies.  So I used soft greens and pinks and blues, and all the pieces were hexagons.  I can’t describe it better, and I don’t have pictures, but I remember loving the creation of it…the artists, their styles, the colors…and yay – a baby!

Anyway, because I was a card-carrying member of Procrastinators Anonymous (still am, but not as bad), soon it was the night before the shower and I still hadn’t finished the quilt.

But I DO finish things.  And the shower was at something like eleven o’clock the following morning (a Saturday, I assume), so, hey, I’d just stay up kind of late and get it done.

I was up all night.  All.  Night.  I had the tv on, I was in the living room with my quilt on a table, and I was stitching my fingers off.

And yes, dammit, I finished that quilt.

I don’t remember if I took any sort of nap that morning, before the shower.  I kind of don’t think I did.

Anyway, to make it even better, I had to drive, because my mom, who was also invited, had had surgery on the bottom of her foot and it was still in a cast or boot or something. 

The shower was half an hour or so from where we were both living (and my sister wasn’t even able to come to the shower for some reason…she was living up in Boston at the time, so maybe it was because of work or something?) (and, as yet another side note, I now live just minutes from the church basement where that baby shower took place) …where was I?  Oh yeah, half hour drive.  So here we go, my limping mother and me with most of my brain wrapped in fuzz.

We put our gifts with the others and found seats sort of near the back.  I propped my eyes open with paper clips.  And the shower was under way.

While other gifts are being opened in the story, I’ll take a moment to explain the weirdness going on in my head during the shower.

I was big.

I felt, as I willed myself to remain upright on that folding chair in that church basement, with all the many sweet church member ladies and family members and friends, like I was twice the size – at least – of my usual self.  Not fat.  Big.  A giant.  That’s how sleep deprivation was distorting my world.  I tried not to move so I wouldn’t frighten anyone with my big-ness.

And eventually Betsy got to the baby quilt.  She pulled it from the bag (or unwrapped it – I don’t remember) and held it up for all to see, (as I tried to shrink down so I was normal-sized) and said, loudly, “JAYNE W MADE THIS!”

And the word loudly doesn’t do it justice.  Her voice THUNDERED the words, and as she said them I seemed to grow bigger and all the little old ladies and moms and cousins and friends turned, as one, to look at me as I was contorting into something that might pass for normal-sized in my metal folding chair.

I hope I smiled politely.

No one ran away screaming, so I guess I looked harmless.

And the shower proceeded normally, with the rest of the gifts opened, lots of oohs and aaahs and smiles at all the adorable baby things…lots of thank-yous from Betsy, and then, of course, food.

That is my best baby quilt story.

I made baby quilts for my sister’s two kids, both of which were late.  Not sure how late my nephew’s quilt was, but my niece didn’t get hers til she turned two.  Hey, there were a lot of appliquéd flowers on that one.  That sort of detail takes TIME.

Anyway, so that’s the baby quilt stuff.

~~~

Like I said in my previous post, all this quilting has resulted in a resurgence of my love of designing and sewing.  So naturally I had to rearrange my sewing/jewelry-making/other stuff-making area.  (For some reason I can’t stand the term “crafting” or anything “craft-“ related.  I can’t use it.  Ick.)

So that’s what I did yesterday.  I’m still not completely done, but that’s today’s job. 

Both pictures were taken in bad light and with my phone, so please excuse the poor image quality….

Before:

After:

The biggest change I wanted to make was to have that tall work table sticking out from the wall so that I could walk around it and work on big projects.  It’s a bit of a tight fit back there, but I made it work and I’m SO happy about it.  There are still areas that need to be tidied up or reorganized, but that’s the easy part.

The hardest part was moving the rolltop desk.  Now, it does come apart, so that helps, and I remove all the drawers, of course, but still – it’s heavy, even broken down into sections.  But I did it.  I’ve done it so many times over the years, I’m actually pretty good at reassembling it, which is tricky because the center writing part has to slide in between the two drawer portions, so those things have to be just the right distance apart, and that middle writing section is HEA-VY because it’s got a huge piece of some sort of stone inlay as the writing surface.  And, of course, there’s maneuvering the whole roll-top section – which is one enormous unwieldy piece – and fitting it onto the pegs that hold it in place (the pegs jut up from the corners of the two main drawer-holding parts of the desk).  Anyway, putting that together successfully is always cause for high-fiving oneself.  Not that I did, of course, because that would be weird.

And that’s about all the writing I have time for.  I’ve got some laundry to hang outside, and some reorganizing to finish downstairs. 

And, of course, that baby quilt isn’t finished yet….

So what have you been up to lately? 

Woven Denim Potholder Tutorial

Three and a half years ago I made one of these potholders and wrote about it in this post.  At the time, I planned to make more and sell them on Etsy.

Seeking Imperfection

I have spent too much time (or wasted, probably) not doing things because I was afraid I’d do them wrong.  If I didn’t think I could do something perfectly, I just wouldn’t do it.  So many roads not taken.

But that’s okay – I’m in a good spot at this time in my life.

Maybe that’s why I actually finished window quilt #4 today. 

One Bathroom Window Quilt Completed

Just hung this a few minutes ago.  So what do you think?

Window Quilt Update

I figured I should post a picture of Softie since Scratchy’s been getting more face time lately.

Here she is, sitting on one of the quilts, which is on my ironing board.  I’d been tying the layers together and went upstairs to check on the bread in the oven.  When I came back down, Softie had claimed the spot.

The Next Pair of Window Quilts

He has nothing to do with window quilts.  He just likes hanging out up on this shelf while I do the sewing and the birds outside torture him with their freedom.

The First Two Window Quilts

I finished them!

Yesterday, which was Thanksgiving, was also my only day off this week.  As I mentioned in my previous post, we did a brunch instead of the traditional turkey dinner, which was wonderful and relaxing and left us with a whole afternoon and evening to do whatever we felt like doing.

I felt like finishing these two quilts.

Window Quilts in the Works

On Monday I mentioned the wall quilts I want to make for our bedroom windows (and who knows, maybe I’ll make them for the other rooms, too.

Anyway, I cut out lots of squares and rectangles for each of my kids to use.  Then, when they got home from school and finished their homework, I put them to work.

Jumping Past the Planning

I do a lot of planning. 

I make lists.

I design things.

I rearrange.

I organize.

And sometimes, that’s as far as I get.

Witch in Progress

I’ve been working on her, on and off, for a while now.  She’s nearly done now.  Dress and cloak are completed.  She’s just waiting for her broom.

Over the Shoulder Galeux d’Eysines Holders

Well not exactly.

There are no shoulders involved.

Just the picket fence.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Messenger Bag

The girl, she is pleased.

The Skirt

Remember this skirt?

Juila finally wore it.

I love her sense of style…

Skirt for Julia

I needed to sew something today. 

Took me a while to figure out what.

And then it took me an hour and a half to put it together.

A Few Little Things I’ve Been Working On

 

A Few Things I’ve Made Today

I’m currently obsessed with making little zippered bags.  I made four yesterday.  Three today.  These are the three.

They’re lined bags, and the zippers are salvaged from pants the kids have outgrown.

A Day For Sewing Projects

We’re supposed to get snow tonight, though perhaps not much in this part of the state.  We often tend to be on the line where the snow and rain meet.  The ice and sleet line. 

It’s already pretty cold out, and the sky has that pale gray, thinly clouded look to it that says “yes, something’s coming.”

We’re supposed to get rain first, later this morning, and then the snow tonight as the temperatures drop further.

So…I am here in my work area in the basement.  I’ve got laundry in the wash, and I’ll work my way through all the week’s dirty clothes while I do more fun things like practice making little zippered pouches or drawstring bags and finish Julia’s Halloween costume.

Oh, and I’ve also decided it’s a perfect day for a Harry Potter movie marathon.  Sorcerer’s Stone is playing now. 

Anyway, that’s what I’ll be up to today, for the most part.

How about you?

Appreciative

Someone approves of the reorganization of my fabric into bins by color. 

She can’t decide, though, whether pink is her favorite, or brown.

Softie is Not Amused

“What the heck are you doing to my playground?”

Yesterday I needed to MOVE stuff. 

I go through periods of LOVING the kitchen, loving food, loving experimenting with cooking and baking, and writing about it and photographing it…

And then I hate it.

Okay, not hate.  That’s too strong a word.  But I get burnt out a bit and need to do something ELSE.

Day 3 – Girls’ Day Out

After a day of lounging around on the couch, reading and napping, I was very happy to hit the road with Julia the following day.

First Stitches By Hand

My friend Judith commented on this post that when she was taught to sew by hand, her mother gave her gingham to use, so she could use the little squares to space her stitches. 

What a great idea.

Finished – The Quilt Bill’s Grandmother Made

As I said in my post a few days ago, there wasn’t really a lot that needed to be done to this quilt.

Finishing the Hat: Repairs to the Quilt Bill’s Grandmother Made

Perhaps that should read “Repairs to A Quilt Bill’s Grandmother Made,” rather than “the” – I’m pretty sure she made a lot more than one.

Finishing the Hat – First Small Projects

I probably am creating too many projects for myself this year.  I can tell that already because it was only weekend number 2 and we didn’t bake any cookie cutter cookies.  Instead, we spent a lot of yesterday working on Alex’s room. 

It’s been a mess, frankly.

Making the Old New Again

I read an article on Etsy this morning called “Make Something Every Day.”  You should read it.  Go ahead.  I’m still typing anyway.  (ha ha.  a bit of blogging humor.  A very little bit.)

Anyway, the article, which features Noah Scalin’s book 365:  A Daily Creativity Journal, got me thinking.

At first I thought “Drat, I can’t particpate!  I’m already a week behind!”

Then I thought “What’s a week?  Okay…then what could I do…day by day…I HAVE NO IDEA!  I LACK CREATIVITY!  MY SPARK IS OUT!”

And then I tilted my head and looked at this from a different angle.

New Shop

I’ve opened a new Etsy store.  It’s called “Of Shreds and Patches.” 

I’ve had the name of the shop on my mind for some time now, though I had it wrong, which led to all sorts of creating of accounts and cancelling of accounts when I realized the whole world would be exposed to my inaccuracies.

New Little Elephant

Softie seems to like her.

Elephant

I finished her this morning.

I was going to make her pink, or purple, considering she was for Julia. 

But as I was digging through fabric, I came across some soft thin flannel pieces that I decided to use instead.