These, too, are just finished. They were a delight to work on – the pattern as it emerged was interesting and kept my interest, even on the second sock which I usually find boring to knit. Also it was easy to find the repeat to start the second sock.
Peach Socks
Once finished on to another pair. Here’s the yarn I’ve started using. The purple for cuff, heel, toe and I’ll be interested to see what pattern appears from the variegated yarn.
Yarn For Next Pair
Many years ago, I was looking after the UNICEF booth at one of our local Christmas Craft Fairs. Across from me was a quilter with a gorgeous silk quilt for sale. She’d collected silk ties and had cut bowtie shapes from the silk she salvaged. I loved it and wished I could have afforded it – but it was too large to be wall hanging and too delicate to use regularly on a bed. I admired it every day I sat there selling greeting cards.
I never forgot it and when a friend gave me a bundle of silk fabric she’d purchased in Singapore and which she had decided she’d never use, I thought, a silk quilt. I decided the bronze silk dupioni would make a lovely quilt background. I ordered a dozen silk fat quarters from Etsy a couple of years ago in colours to complement the bronze.
I wanted to do something modern and decided to mix some small piecing of the coloured silks to form strips on the diagonal and solid strips.
Silk Quilt
Finally finished piecing the top this afternoon. The central panel is offset to the top and left. The finished quilt size: 51″ x 56″. I had wanted to make it more rectangular but I just didn’t have enough bronze silk. I have a few small scraps but in order to keep the grain of the silk running top to bottom I had to piece the top and bottom strips so my size was limited by the amount of silk I could cobble together.
Tomorrow I’ll set up the quilt sandwich. I’m using a second of the pieces of silk fabric. I have enough for the backing, but I will have to piece it horizontally because it isn’t wide enough to do a single running length and I haven’t enough silk left to create a pieced strip. Besides the embroidery in the golden silk is enough detail and I will be careful to cut it between the embroidery designs so the seam, when pressed open, will be relatively unseen.
Embroidered Silk Backing Fabric
I really see this as a largish wall hanging rather than a lap quilt. If I’d had enough bronze silk, I’d have finished the quilt with a narrow binding, but because I don’t I’m going to finish the quilt using a “pillowcase” turn. I plan on quilting it stitching in the ditch from top to bottom and adding some more vertical lines where necessary in the border areas.
Wimbledon has taken over my life for the past ten days! I don’t watch all the tennis matches but I am interested in a lot of them. So my time has disappeared and I haven’t accomplished much except some sock knitting while I’m watching. The pair I’m working on has another two evenings of work left in them and then I’ll photograph them and post the image.
As far as quilting goes – I’ve started working on the silk quilt – It will consist of an offset inner panel constructed from solid strips interspersed with pieced strips (with the piecing seams going in opposite directions creating a sort of chevron effect). Before beginning, I backed all of the silk dupioni fabric with “Sewer’s Dream” (a high quality sheer, fusible, washable, polyester interfacing) – to stabilize the silk which otherwise frays dreadfully. I have enough strips, both solid and pieced, assembled – but I’m only about 1/3 of the way through assembling that inner panel. Surrounding that panel will be solid strips of the bronze background silk.
Under Construction
I don’t know why, but I’m having difficulty making much headway with this quilt. Tomorrow it’s the women playing at Wimbledon (I prefer watching the men play) so I should be able to get back to work on it.
Yesterday, I took a day off completely to visit with two friends who are attending the Scout Canada Jamboree being held in Nova Scotia this year. I drove out to the site to pick them up early in the morning, brought them back to my place so they could shower and do laundry. Then we went out for lunch, did a bit of shopping, returned to my apartment to relax, have tea, and a light supper before I drove them back to the campsite for the remaining three days of camping. Brave women, let me tell you – aside from the 5,000 youth (and 1000 adults) at CJ’17, there is mud, and long hikes to tents, meals and toilets, and ticks. They smuggled me into the camp to have a cursory look around – I was happy to get back home. I’m too old for that sort of outdoor experience although the youth and adults all looked to be having a wonderful time. My connection to Scouts Canada is that for the past five or more years I’ve been involved in the program development that’s been underway – these two women and I were the driving force behind the preparation of the Scouter Manual. Now that program implementation is in full swing, I’m just on the sidelines watching how the rollout is progressing. Hence my interest in visiting the camp.
Andrea, one of the women, was wearing her outdoor hat day before yesterday when a scout commented on the “face” on the side of her hat! Needless to say, I got a photo – here it is!
Face
A nice clear “face” it is.
So socks, and quilt – I’ll keep working at both and share photos when I have something to share. Men’s semifinals are on Friday, final on Sunday. Then about a month until the US Open and two weeks of disruption, again.
Finished this pair of socks last evening. Been working on them for a couple of weeks – a pair of socks (women’s size 7-8) takes me on average 25 hours. I worked on these a bit while I was away. I already had the first sock completed. I was just past the heel on the second when I packed them to take with me. I got the gusset done while I was away. I did most of the finishing of the foot these past two evenings. I enjoyed working with this patterned yarn and the blending colour for cuff, heel, toe was a perfect match – that doesn’t always happen.
Opal Yarn
I started a new pair last evening as soon as these were off the needles.
It turns out my efforts to represent the shading of the child’s body with layers of differently colored fabric was misconstrued and interpreted as “clothes” by the majority of people who viewed the piece. Very few spontaneously saw him as naked. This was because the contrast between the lights and darks was too great – an artifact of the limited pallet of flesh-toned shades of fabric I was able to assemble.
Original Piece
So I darkened the ligher elements with crayon and wax pastels and stabilized the shading using a hot iron which melts the applied surface wax into the fabric. Now the child is seen as naked.
Child Darkened
I’m much happier with how people are responding.
Same pattern, cut out with the same modifications I used with the pink pants, and these came out larger – had to take in the sides 3/8″ at the top and from mid hip to hemline. Obviously the difference is the fabric in spite of the fact there’s no spandex in this fabric either….
The front has turned out fine, happy with that, but below the bum is a wee bit baggy. Not much I can do about that at this point – the pants may tighten up a bit with washing, although I prewashed the fabric. Sitting in them may also round out the backside some.
The pants are certainly wearable.
This morning I dug out some navy cotton twill (no spandex) that I will wash tomorrow, as well as some prewashed beige cotton twill – both will get made into pants when I get back from Toronto (going to my niece’s wedding coming weekend). I also found a prewashed length of French navy blue light weight cotton/linen blend to use for a loose shirt. Once those garments are done, the pants with the stretched out spandex will go.
Tomorrow, I intend to interface the silk dupion I’ve had waiting to be made into a quilt. I’ll get that project started next.
These pants were cut based on the modifications I made to my basic pattern in San Francisco – a small addition to the centre front crotch area, a 3/4″ drop in the front waist, and 1/4″ addition to the side seams because the fabric had no spandex.
This is a jeans pattern but I thought this wool/polyester fabric was a bit too “dressy” to turn into jeans so I left out all the top stitching, omitted the back pockets, and used a single seam for a neat hem.
Have to say they turned out pretty well – although everything that could go wrong did! I started by putting the zipper on the wrong side of the fly front, had to redo it, pockets went in fine as did the side seams, but I screwed up threading the embroidery machine and I had to take out a stitched (not yet cut, fortunately) buttonhole not once but twice. After rethreading the machine and doing a practice buttonhole (which I should have done in the first place) the third try was fine. Only then did I cut it open.
I’ve just finished cutting pants out of a beige fabric which I will sew tomorrow. The beige fabric I used for pants in San Francisco turned out to be dreadful – it’s a stretch twill and it now has a permanent stretch across the front where the spandex has failed – very visible. So once these new beige pants (with almost no stretch) are done, the SF pants will get tossed.
That’s the same fabric I used for the light and dark blue pants I made earlier in the spring – they’re starting to show the same permanent stress marks across the front so they’ll have to be replaced. This time, I’ll use a cotton twill with no spandex in it. The original fabric wasn’t a cheap fabric, either.
So lesson learned – stay away from fabrics with any amount of spandex – they may be intended to provide a comfortable fit with some give but the quality and durability is variable and pants take a good 5-6 hours of work. Too much time for such a limited result!
Here it is – just done:
First Swim
It always amazes me how much finish work goes into one of these pieces – inner border, wide mitred outer border, backing, hidden binding, hanging sleeve. And a lot of it is hand sewing – I’m getting better at hand sewing, but it’s still awkward; I’m having trouble pulling the needle through with my thumb and first finger, especially if I’m trying to get through multiple layers of fabric!
Now to put the art quilting aside for a while and on to making pants.
I did a bit of thread painting on the background of this piece yesterday during the Art Quilt Class – I wanted to demonstrate how I double up the rayon thread and use both in a single needle, how I stitch the raw edges using a very narrow blanket stitch, how I freely sew flow lines in the background.
First Swim
Today, I finished up the background by adding a bit more dark fabric to the water and doing quite a lot of stitching for detail (the thread actually becomes lighter the farther from the foreground it is). As well I did some dense stitching along the water edge to suggest foam. I left the darker edge of wet sand clear of stitching because that sand is always packed densely while it’s still wet. The stitching in the sand is intentionally more random to hint at the irregular detail from many footprints.
For the moment Charlie is still a piece of paper. Tomorrow I’m going to work on creating him from 4-6 layers of flesh-toned fabrics from very l light on his right shoulder to very dark at his bum and the backs of his lower legs.
I added my signature while I was working at the machine rather than struggle to add it later. I do the embroidery using the metal hoop which allows me to just place the art piece flat and hold it in place with magnets instead of trying to force it into a double pieced hoop – much easier to position the fabric.
I’m still not sure whether I’ll border this piece or not or whether I’ll use a hidden binding – I’ll see how I feel when the child is assembled and added. Finished dimensions will be approximately 12″ x 10″.
First Swim with Child
OK, so I didn’t wait until tomorrow – I pieced the child this evening. Didn’t turn out badly at all. Now to edge stitch all the pieces – slowly and carefully.
Striped Socks
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