Actual crafty content!

I haven't had a ton of time to craft, but I warped my loom with some dish cloth cotton a while back and whenever I got a few minutes I'd weave a bit.

Little by little.... and there you go - dishtowels!

Ok - not the sexiest of finished objects... but I wanted to make something practical and I've got more than a few scarves in my closet already. ;)   I was also excited to try warping stripes and seeing how they looked when I used different colors for the weft.

Also - I finished the edges by hand sewing the first/last two rows together - just to keep them from unraveling when I took them off the loom.  Then I folded the ends over and machine sewed a zig-zag stitch for a hem.  It's not super neat, but it does look finished, and held up through the wash.

I made a super long warp and then tried to measure out the length for three separate towels.  It was a bit tricky... but I actually got it kind of close.  Two of the towels are almost exactly the same length - the other one is maybe two inches longer.  Not too bad.  And heck - it's dish towels... nobody's going to care. =)

Playing with colors: Yellow

Here is the final quilt in my playing with colors series.  I liked the structure I used in the red quilt, but I wanted to try something a little different.  I also wanted to do a better job of blending the colors, unlike the total randomness of the blue quilt.

I divided out the colors into dark, medium, and light groups.  Then sewed together strips that blended from dark to light, and alternated which direction each strip went as I sewed it up.  I was thinking 'rays of sunshine' although generally those rays only go in one direction. 

The blending on this quilt is much better than on the blue quilt, and I like the way the difference in the level of contrast is  intentional rather than accidental. 


I went with minimal straight-line quilting on this one.  Yeah, that was partly laziness, but also because sometimes less is more.

I learned something really really significant on this quilt - the joys of a walking foot!  I was getting really frustrated by how even my straight lines were causing a lot of bunching and texture on the previous quilts.  In the past I've either tried to counter it by altering the direction I was sewing in every other row, or by just embracing the bunching with wavy lines.  But after my first line down the center of this quilt, I'd had it.  I really wanted it to just quilt flat!!!

So I went down to the fabric store and I picked up a $60 walking foot  (my whole machine cost less than $200 btw).   I set it up and sewed a bit on a practice scrap.  OMG!  Within about 10 stitches I was impressed.  I could not believe how much of a difference it made! The fabric wasn't bunching up - it was being fed evenly through the foot, and the stitches were so neat and even!  Everyone always talks about this gadget or that, and I'm always skeptical.  I simply had no idea that it would be so much easier, and look so much nicer to quilt with a walking foot!

In the end, I'm very happy with my walking foot, and I'm beyond thrilled with this quilt.  Who knew I'd be such a fan of yellow, but it is just so bright and so cheery and so yummy, it put such a huge smile on my face when it was all done.  There will definitely need to be more yellow in future quilts!

So that's what I've been working on this spring, playing with colors and trying to learn something about contrast.  I've got a few more WIPs but probably not much to post for a while.