Piano Keys

Work on the T-shirt quilt has commenced! I swore that somewhere in the apartment, I had a bag of bigger chunks of t-shirts from when I originally was cutting the pieces, but it seems like I may have thrown it out in a fit of organization. So I was left with a bag full of tiny little chunks like these:
And the rest of the the triangles that I had already cut:
Which I just separated into lights and darks for now.
Out of the rest of the scraps, I cut 2" by 1" bricks. I would have loved to make them bigger, but the pieces were really small, and that was all I could eke out. I also cut some black bricks to alternate with.
So with my bricks and some black strips, this is where I'm at now. I think I'm going to have to make a thrift store trip for some more black t-shirts. I'm definitely thinking of doing a sawtooth border with the left over triangles, and I'm playing with the idea of using a gray t-shirt too, for some contrast. Maybe a sawtooth border with lights and the gray, then one with black and the darks?

I've also been looking at countless pictures of Turkish and middle eastern jackets and vests to get inspiration for my jacket piece. My next post, I'll put up some of the images I'm looking at. I think I've decided to go with leather as my braiding materials, I have quite a bit of really thin leather from thrift store pants and jackets, and it braids up really nicely (bonus--I don't have to sew it into a tube because it doesn't fray!)
It also gives me an option for thicker and thinner braids, and I do have both some gray and black leather. I can also use the leather or suede side of the braid for extra variety! I'm not looking foward to cutting many many strips of leather at about 1/16th of an inch though...

Dear Jane and an Project Revisited

I always have some misgivings about posting my quilting stuff on here--something inside me tells me it's not my 'serious work.' It's silly, I know, and I'm trying to just see it as both a more design oriented end of my work, as well as helping me gain further precision in my sewing, and giving me some blankets to put on my bed, in the end.

I've started working on a "Dear Jane" quilt. I'm not normally the type to want to make something from a pre-existing pattern, but it's a sort of brute force pinnacle of quilt-making, and I love the ridiculously small, precise scale it requires. It's like my little jigsaw puzzle.

The original Dear Jane Quilt. As it states proudly on the bottom corner, made of 5,602 pieces.
So far I've managed the first two squares.

A1-Pinwheel gone awry. I'm ignoring the idea of a background fabric and just making every square a different combo of colors. It'll be obnoxious I'm sure.

Yesterday I started A2, here's the 'drawing on freezer paper stage'

The 'iron onto fabric then trace around and add seam allowance stage'

And after four hours of meticulous piecing, I've got this.



I'm also restarting up work on my old t-shirt quilt. It's not what you would consider, um, a traditional 't-shirt quilt.'
I've posted it before, but in case you forgot, that's the status it's still in, and sat in for two years. It's a damn shame to let it rot, so now I'm determined to finish. But I sure as heck don't want to make any more 3" blocks with jersey knit. So I'm going to improvise some borders with the scraps and triangles I have left, plus some black and white shirts Seamus recently donated to the stash. Cutting some rectangles up tonight, I'll post progress soon.

Finally a New Post, Finally a New Camera!

I haven't posted recently because I got sick for a good week there, and didn't really work on much of anything. I had some sort of allergic reaction, we think to a cheap laundry detergent I bought, and broke out in some really terrible hives all over my head, legs and hips. And as that finally healed up, I caught a nasty cold from my coworker.

On the bright side, it gave me a lot of time to start organizing my enormous image archive of well, everything-I have about 2,500 images saved on my laptop, and they were just sort of jumbled into general categories, so I'm (still!) working on getting them on a thumb drive in some sort of orderly fashion.

And I got a new camera! I was fed up with my little Powershot--it kept telling me the batteries were dead, after only taking a few shots. And it was horrible in anything less than very bright conditions. So with a little birthday money donated by my parents and boyfriend, I bought a gently used Canon 20D this very night! Very exciting.Despite my relative inactivity, I did manage to finish both of the silk braid strips. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the rest of the coat. Part of me just wants to make it a very simple sashiko-style quilted jacket, the other half wants some sort of braided trim application.

The colors are so much more true-to-life with this new camera! And I don't have to play around with the color balance much at all--hurray!
I took some test pictures with my horns, thought I would post them, since I only photographed it on the head. Still thinking I need to redo the coif again...ugh.
I also reorganized my materials in the living room, and now I'm working on making some basic shirt/pant patterns for myself (you know, in case I ever get around to making myself anything)

Stripped and Braided

I ripped the coif I had started in the last post, and started over once again. This time around is better, and at least I know the shape that I wanted works. But I need to get it a little closer to the face, so I'm going to make the face hole a little smaller, and then increase some stitches at the top of the hole to curve it back out and cover more forehead. So it's back to the knitting needles again! I think this is why I didn't do much knit work in college, it's just so fiddly to get the shapes right, and I have to keep starting over.


I'm finally dipping into my little shoebox of precious dyed silks. I hoard every scrap, sample and dye mistake from my classmates, my students and myself, and I'm breaking them out for Mariah's coat. Like with the horns, small areas of color (unlike the all-over color of the others) but really concentrated, bright, colorful. On this I'm breaking it into cool and warm, to avoid the rainbowishness I wasn't sure about on the horns.
I'm doing a little strip of braid quilting, one cool, one warm, probably to go on either side of the button up front of the coat's lining. The silk is a pain in the butt to sew, very shifty/stretchy, but it's going okay with the foundation strip.Close up--it's really a challenge keeping them centered, they just want to stretch all over.


I was also making more blocks for my log cabin quilt, which is why there's not quite as much other work this week as their could have been. Now I'm up to 60, shooting for 150. Guess it'll be good for next winter, I think I'll still be working on it through the spring and summer.