In which I get cool stuff and you get two blog posts

Hey all! You guys get TWO new posts today because I was dumb and wrote a post a few days ago and hit "save" instead of "publish." Isn't this the opposite problem most bloggers have? Sunday's post should be below this one, so go ahead and read that one first if you want.

Anyway, both my swap goodies came in this week and THANK YOU SO MUCH, SWAP PARTNERS! I am actually pleasantly surprised and touched that you both took my incoming baby into account and made stuff for her, too--I genuinely wasn't expecting that since my blog is more about self-centered me than about the kid. Jennifer at Knotted Thread made an ADORABLE mug rug that features both my kitties on it--how cute is that?! And Benta at SLIKStitches' autumn-themed rug came just in time for me to start my fall decorating since I love autumn so much. The scissor tags are perfect too, since lately my scissors keep disappearing from my sewing pile (yeah I don't have a dedicated sewing table). Now I can point to the tag and say, "SEE, MY NAME REALLY IS ON THEM!"

Jennifer's goodies on the left, Benta's on the right. Why yes, that's the back of my Fall blocks quilt, which has not yet made it onto a wall due to being stolen and slept on by a certain orange kitty.  Oh, and Jennifer also sent a small container of green buttons that I forgot to take a picture of...

I really enjoyed this goodie swap. I wish I'd had little more time to complete what I wanted to for my swappees, but it is what it is. Right when I was getting back into "sewing mode," real life took over and got in the way and unfortunately "Sewing Goodies For Internet Strangers, Which Is Far More Fun Than It May Sound" gets pushed further down the list, behind things like "I Need To Reapply Thermal Compound To My Computer's Heat Sink Because It Keeps Overheating, Oh No Now The Computer Is Crashing Every Time It Comes Out Of Hibernation Mode, WHY" and "I Just Filled My Car Tires With Air Two Weeks Ago, Why Is One Going Flat Again Already?!" and so on. I really admire those of you who seem to have it all together and manage to balance kids, work, hobbies, and everything else.

Now for more action shots of my goodies:

Yeah, this is my "sewing pile," otherwise known as the dining table, which is really just a card table shoved next to a wall by the kitchen (I miss living in a house). Um, I usually don't use my tomato pincushion upside down, so ignore that. I am very happy that my scissors are labeled, without that label being some squished lettering in Sharpie on an ugly piece of masking tape. This is a great idea!

So my cats are enticed way more by treats than they are by water, and I would have been mauled to death had I tried to intertwine their tails together, but here is the closest I could get to making them imitate Jennifer's mug rug. I also think this is Gray Kitty's pictorial debut on this blog--construction is being done on our apartment building and Gray Kitty spends most of his time cowering under my husband's desk, terrified that all the Scary Noises coming from outside are going to invade and steal his cat tuna or something. Orange Kitty couldn't care less.

Proof that taking pictures of cats is a several minute, multiple-try endeavor.

Thanks again to my swap partners! See you around the blogosphere (or whatever they call it these days).

In which "pregnancy brain" wins again

I spend way too much time at the fabric store. Part of the reason for this is sheer stupidity on my part. Like, yesterday I went in to buy supplies for the mug rug goodie swap and walked around the store for thirty minutes with an index card with the words "embroidery thread, interfacing, fiberfill" scrawled on it. What did I walk out with?

I would say "Ignore my messy sewing space" but the mess just proves that I AM working on stuff, so meh. 

Embroidery thread, interfacing, buttons. Buttons? Well, the button racks are near the cutting table where I got my interfacing cut, and I got totally distracted by the bee buttons, which I thought were adorable because I love bees, too, and then there was a rack of 30% off buttons so I went through those for a while, then paid for everything and left.  In my mind I knew I had three types of items on my list and I left the store with three types of items, so, satisfied, I drove home.

Cue a few hours later after I'd made dinner and sewed for a while, I got to the part of my project that instructed me to start stuffing it, and I looked around and wondered what I was going to stuff it with. My eyes fell on my buttons and OH YEAH, I was WALKING towards the batting section of the store earlier, but never actually reached it because of CUTE BEE BUTTONS. Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that I forgot my fiberfill, because I set aside my sewing earlier than usual and went to bed before midnight, so I actually got some decent sleep. Still, I felt dumb pulling up to the fabric store for the second day in a row after work today, and forced myself to bypass all the buttons and fabric and go STRAIGHT to the batting section at the back of the store.

Then my pregnancy bladder called, so I ran to the bathroom and got distracted by felt on the way back to the batting section, thus I nearly walked out the door without my fiberfill AGAIN, but by some miracle remembered at the last second, and actually managed to pay for it and bring it home. See? I even took a picture to prove it.

I don't know how some people manage to do like 3 quilt-alongs and 2 fabric/goodie swaps and their own personal projects and raise kids and cook dinner and stuff all at the same time. I mean, I apparently can't even manage to buy what's on the three-item list I'm carrying around the store with me, though I'm sure the fabric store employees get some amusement out of me. They probably refer to me as the absent-minded pregnant girl since a few weeks ago I left my car keys sitting on top of a shelf of autumn fabrics and ran back through the store in a panic after paying for my purchase, retracing my steps to find them. One person's forgetfulness is another person's amusement, I guess!

As a bonus, have an Orange Kitty Story of the Day:  When the cat heard me get out my camera to take a picture, he ran in the room and shoved his face in the lens because he's vain like that. I pushed him out of the way and he apparently went, "Screw this, if you ain't taking a picture of me, you ain't getting a picture of what you want" and shoved his tail directly in my line of sight as I snapped the photo. He is such a brat.

In which pregnancy hormones take over all sense of logic and time

Even though it's still August, I suddenly needed to make an autumn fall hanging. Like, now. I don't know if this is a result of pregnancy hormones making me "nest" since I'm now in my third trimester, or if I'm just nuts, but I stopped working on all my other projects and sat down on Friday afternoon to finish rapidly churn out my autumn quilt.

You know, I was really disappointed with how much of this came out. I love the pattern and I love the fabrics, but I'm not sure if it's because I was rushing because Oh Crap It's Going To Be Autumn In A Month And By God, My Kid Needs to Have An Autumn Quilt On The Wall Before She Is Born In November.

This was my first time using spray basting. I read that you didn't have to use a lot, but I don't think I used enough--the fabric still moved around and puckered a bit, though far less than I expected it to. It's most obvious in the upper right corner--actually, before binding, the top edge was quite warped and I almost cried since I figured the only way to fix it was to rip out all the quilting and smooth out the fabric again. Luckily, some creative trimming and the binding completely hides the warped edge.

This is really the only spot you can see where my nice straight seams curved on me during quilting. Boooooo!  At least, overall it's not TOO obvious...

Second, the quilt doesn't lie flat. I have no idea how that happened since the puckering really isn't that bad at all. This would bother me far less if it wasn't going to hang on the wall, though I think, again, with some creative use of tacks and such, it will end up being pretty flat on the wall. It's still annoying since I am assuming this all stems from the batting and quilt top not being completely flat during basting, which I actually spent a lot of time on. 

Gaps in the green binding. You can see where it just suddenly decided not to be sewn down and the batting pokes right through. Also, a certain orange kitty tried really hard to be part of this picture. 

And then there's the binding. From the front, it looks fine. The back looks HORRIBLE. I've had this problem with every quilt I've bound so far and I'm not sure how to fix it. The binding on the back likes to curve up as I sew from the front, and then I end up with whole bits of binding that completely missed being sewn, as you can see in my picture. I use both pins and clips to keep the binding down, so I'm thinking that the fabric is flipping up as I remove the pins and clips while sewing, and then of course I don't notice since I'm machine binding from the front and can't see the back binding getting all flippy. Do I need more pins? More clips? Different pins? I'll have to experiment and see. 

Now that I've spent half a post complaining, what did I LIKE about this quilt? Well, like I said before, I love the fabric and the easy pattern. I had begun quilting with white thread, but a few minutes into it, stopped and ripped out every stitch, then hopped in my car and drove to the fabric store. I initially meant to buy cream colored thread to quilt, but my eyes fell on a mid-tone brown and I wondered if that would work better, so I bought that instead. I am SO happy I went with the brown--it was my first time quilting with anything but white thread and I think it really complemented the fabric colors, rather than overtaking them, like I felt the white was doing. This was also my first time free-motion quilting something larger than a kitty block, and overall I do like how it turned out. I quilted it all in one three-hour stretch, after which I realized that it was 1am, my wrists were screaming in pain, and the faint smell of burned rubber was coming from my sewing machine, but I'm happy, overall, with my quilt--just disappointed that I didn't catch fixable problems until it was too late to fix them. Which may have been related to me dead-set on finishing the quilt immediately, even if it was 1am, because my unborn baby needs an autumn wall decoration in August, logic be damned!

The GOTTA MAKE NOW quilt sitting in the first baby gift we received this weekend...little baby girl, the pain over this autumn quilt was all for you. Also, Orange Kitty literally has to stick his butt in every picture possible. 

And anyway, I rationalize that the only way to overcome my disappointment and get better at quilting is to make more quilts. So everyone wins! (except maybe my bank account...)

In which my cats are quilt-ified

I need more decorations for our apartment. It's something my husband and I say to each other every couple of months--"Hey, we should get more art and stuff to put on our walls." "Oh yeah, honey, the walls are so white and bare, you're right." And then we look at nice photography and stuff that we absolutely fall in love with but never get around to buying.

Happiness arrived in my mailbox again the other day: a darning foot! I have a cheap Singer machine that so far has done its job quite well, but the Singer website was decidedly unhelpful when it came to determining what additional feet would fit on my model machine. After figuring out that mine is a "low-shank" machine, I looked at several pictures of presser feet and finally decided "This type will fit for sure!" and ordered a Brother brand darning foot because it had good reviews on Amazon. Thankfully, it fit perfectly, but I debated what I wanted my first free-motion qulting practice to be on--I didn't have any projects ready for quilting, and the thought of practicing free-motion quilting for the first time on something really big was kind of daunting.

Digging through all the scraps I got a couple of weeks ago, I found a square of orange that reminded me of my older cat.  And then needing more stuff for our bare walls plus wanting to practice quilting on something small with my darning foot resulted in this:

Hey! I'm all blocky and soft now! 

This 12" x 12" block whipped up pretty fast (for me, anyway)--it took me 2 hours flat from yanking the fabrics out of my stash to putting the last (machine!) stitch on the binding. This is either a block so simple an idiot could do it, or...perhaps I'm just getting better at this whole quilting thing? Anyway, I'm pretty happy overall. Free-motion quilting wasn't anywhere as hard as I assumed it would be, and my bindings are looking a lot less...uh...curvy? And of course once I made a block for one cat, I had to make a second for my other cat:





I affectionately refer to these as the "Moby" (gray) and "Dreadnought" (orange) blocks, as those are the names of my cats. Except now every time I talk about their quilt blocks, they hear their names and run towards me, meowing, thinking it's food time.  Maybe I should make a cat food quilt block?

In which I talk about my very first quilt

This is the very, very first quilt I made. I saw some rag quilts online, thought, "Hey, I want to make one of those!" and went out and bought some flannel the next day.

I didn't have a rotary cutter or mat. My only ruler was an 18 inch metal one. I had no idea how big I wanted my final quilt to be, so I just bought a few yards of flannel in different patterns and winged it. Best of all...I DIDN'T HAVE A SEWING MACHINE.

The only reason I could make this quilt with no proper tools or skills was the fact that the thought never crossed my mind that I couldn't, otherwise known as "complete naivety," or, "stupidity." I carefully measured out my 10" squares and cut them out with scissors--all three layers of flannel--then threaded an old hand sewing needle with cheap polyester thread, sat in front of the TV, and sewed each block.

Closeup of my wonderfully not-straight hand stitching

After stitching together each row of five blocks and stitching a couple of those strips to each other over the course of a week, my hand was ready to fall off. Pushing a small sewing needle through several layers of flannel left calluses in strange places on my fingers.  I was dead tired and yet, I was going to finish this quilt if it was the last thing I ever did (and at the time it felt like it WAS the last thing I'd ever do).

Then the opportunity to buy a sewing machine suddenly came up, and I snapped it up in an instant. Despite being certain that death was near only a few days prior, I thought, "Hmm...maybe this quilting thing isn't so bad after all..."

And thus a quilter was born, even though the quilt ended up being used more by the cats than by me. But then, everything I own is really theirs, anyway.