Diary of a Mad Fabri-Holic

How Sammy got her groove back...

For the record, I despise being called Sammy.  And yet the only way the cadence of that title worked was to suck it up and use the dreaded nickname.  Can't really remember why I have always hated it, but, as far back as I can recall, I have...  So don't go getting any ideas about having a new pet name for me, okay?

Now that I've got that out of the way- hey, look, I finished my 1st Project Improv top!!

And I LOVE it.  I know I went super simple with the pattern on this first attempt, but hey, it made for a good warm-up and confidence builder.  And I love the simplicity of this top, and how it shows off the fun fabric choices.  It's lively and fun without being over the top- always a danger for me...  For the first time in months and months, I am truly excited about how a project came out.  Not just happy to have finished something, not just happy to have used the cute fabric I couldn't resist buying, but actually thrilled with an end product and proud of it.  What a feeling- I'd forgotten just how good it was.  My happy quilting endorphins seem to be coming back.  I'm already planning some other projects in my head...

Between pushing my own quilting boundaries AND having the free time on Mondays to follow through on my ideas, I'm feeling pretty good.  Last week kicked up some surprise stress- we had calculated the economic impact of my Mondays off, and while it won't be super fun, we'll make it.  But then we got some more news from work re: my paycheck, and it looks like I will be taking a bigger hit then we thought (unrelated to the 8 hours off).  ACK.  Not good.  But after only 3 weeks I can already feel a difference in my stress level and so we've found a way (love you, mom) to make it work.

And hey, I had another revelation about my fabric-line buying habits.  You know when I started to really get trapped buying a coordinated line instead of just random pretty fabrics?  It started when I began predominantly buying my fabrics on-line.  The inter-web, my love and passion, tricked me!  On-line retailers organize fabric by manufacturer and then collection- making it really easy to find one you like, and then the 7 that conveniently go with it...  Oooh, sneaky.  The worst culprit?  The fabulous Fat Quarter Shop- those gorgeous bundles of new lines, color coordinated and packaged like wonderful presents- are like crack to me.  I may need to rethink the organization of my stash- I have one shelf of batiks sorted by color, 2 shelves of basic colors sorted green/yellow/orange/pink/purple/blue,a bin of red, a bin of blacks and whites, a shelf of Kaffe, a shelf of novelties, and one shelf of designers by line.  I think what needs to be done is that designers-by-line shelf broken down by color and mixed in with the random fabrics.  Maybe that will help free me up mentally?

We shall see!

A Night at the Improv

(Except really it was part of one day...)

Stuck-in-a-rut is a good theme for this blog these days...  The blog itself barely exists and ain't so very impressive when I do bother with it...  I got stuck knitting socks and only socks for the better part of a year. I basically stopped sewing at all.  So much fun to read about, right?

So when I saw Jaqcuie's blog post about Project Improv- and I saw it late due to my blog-reading rut- I was very very excited.  Maybe to get excited about sewing again, I needed to get pushed right out of my complacency.  I never used to be one of those people that bought a bunch of fabric from one line and made it into a quilt.  In fact, when I worked at a quilt shop, I kind of secretly scoffed at people who weren't brave enough to play with their OWN fabric choices- the ones who came in with a picture of someone else's quilt and said "I want to make exactly that".  When I started quilting back in college, the first and foremost draw to me was--- picking out fabrics!  Mixing color and patterns!  Playing! 

So how did I become this boring lady who sees a line, buys a stack of FQs, and goes to town?  (I admit, if I look at the last few years of piecing, that's not ALL I do, but it does make up a goodly portion of it...)

First and foremost, I blame the designers.  Yup, I'm calling you out Kaffe Fassett, Joel Dewberry, Heather Ross, Anna Maria Horner, Heather Bailey, Denyse Schmidt, and of course Amy Butler.  A long long time ago, Kaffe was the only man who could claim my true fidelity.  I've always loved nearly every single piece he's put out...  But then, out of the blue, these other amazing, modern designers started popping up, making the niftiest fabric lines in the funkiest colors, ever!  Who could resist buying bundles of them?  And then, they all looked so pretty together, well, why would you mix them with anything else?  Slowly but very surely, I became the person who buys the bundle and makes the Yellow Brick Road. 

That right there is the other problem I've been dealing with.  My inherent lack of patience, combined with my full time job and two small-ish children, not to mention a husband who likes to spend at least SOME time with me, have left me with not so very much sewing time, and a desire to finish as many things as possible in that time.  Challenging piecing and designing became the absolute last thing I wanted to touch.  Give me a super simple cut and piece and be done with it project any day...  Patterns designed for FQs are often just the ticket... and I just happened to have all those FQ bundles laying around. 

Do you see the trap I laid for myself?

So there's the really long explanation for why Project Improv is exactly the kick in the pants this boring quilter needs to get back in the creative saddle.  (Let's see how many metaphors I can squeeze into one sentence there, eh?)

I'm starting slow and gentle.  Let's call this first project out of the gate my warm up.  I spent Monday- my new day off, hooray- playing in my sewing room. Well, and also cleaning, but that's NOT exciting or inspiring!  I have a recipient in mind for this one already, so that dictated color choices.  I luxuriated in spending a huge amount of time pulling fabrics from the shelf and playing.  I browsed around Flickr more than I have in months, seeking inspiration- and I found tons of it!  I changed my project idea several times as more and more fabrics seemed to want to a role in this quilt.  Eventually, I cut different width strips from all of them and laid them out in a big row.

They all got sewn together, and then brutally hacked apart a few moments later to form striped blocks, inspired by Flickrite and blogger Annaleih...

And that is where my time ran out... Had to pick up the girl at school, and then we stopped to pick up some white-on-white for sashing. My original plan was to use some plain turquoise Kona cotton, but even for me and my bright tastes, I think it was too much.  Right now I am debating cutting the striped blocks to slightly different sizes before adding the white sashing.  The quilt will probably be 3x3 blocks- small- and I wonder if having them the same size will give it a nice fluid but slightly dull look?  If they're all a wee bit different, will it be more interesting?  Look at me go!

I'm sure that like any new workout regimen, I'm going to be excited at first but then want to backslide into my old routines.  So I'm hereby publicly stating my goal of making several more progressively more adventurous pieces.  Now I can't slack because you all will call me on it, right?

Wish me luck! 

These hats are multiplying like, well, bunnies...

Silly little animal hats keep flying off my knitting needles...  I managed to finish a bunny in 3 days for Miss Bella, born on St. Paddy's day last year.  She was greeted with this quilt at birth, so it seemed right she should get another Sam-original at age 1! 

The best part? Bella liked it! She hugged it like a teddy bear-

it it SUPER soft- and the happily wore it around so I could take pictures...

A note to anyone considering making this hat, or any hats from Jean Adel's Knitted Critters for Kids to Wear- I made Bella the size suggested for 3 years.  Other reviews I have said on Ravelry point to the same problem- the hats run small!  Extremely small.  Trust your instincts, because her gauges are a wee bit whack!

Now, for Henry's shark, Jody's Cat, and 3 more by request of others.  I imagine I'll be sick of these soon.

What I'm REALLY looking forward to is tomorrow- an entire day to myself, which I plan to spend locked in the sewing room.  Project Improv away!

Cleaning the slate

Even though as of late I have been sick of both stitching AND blogging, I'm hoping to reinvigorate my interest in both.  The blogging, well, not sure how to do that, but the sewing?  I have some ideas...

First and foremost, I had to get all the partially finished projects out of my sewing space.  Which meant... finishing them!  Of course, in the no-sewing time around here as of late, the sewing room took on a life of its own.  Piles began to grow and sprout all by themselves.  Fabric covered the floor to the point where I began to believe that there was no floor, only fabric all the way down to the center of the earth (oh, wonderful dream!)  Then there was all that newly acquired yarn- so much of it that I had to re-create my yarn storage system.  Poor me.  The mess was so bad, I didn't even want to enter the room.  Perhaps that was part of my overall ennui?  So a few weekends ago, I spent not one, not two, but over 5 hours cleaning the room from top to bottom.  I even tackled the computer desk.  That was 2 hours right there.  Sheesh.  But then it was done and I had this amazing clean and organized space at my disposal.

Of course, I also still had two WIP tops to tackle.  First and foremost, my parents' Xmas gift.  From last year.  No more excuses, time to do it.  They'll be here in just about a week and a half, and it would be nice to be able to give it to them.  So- I finally put the blocks together and even finished the border.

2 months late, but, better than never, right?  I still don't love it, but done is better than perfect.  I don't know if I just did the worst job piecing ever, or if I suck at using jelly rolls, or if the pattern was less than stellar, but there is an awful lot of easing in this top...

Next, my super simple Project Runway quilt!  I love the PR fabric line from Robert Kaufman.  So pretty!  Oh, I miss that show.  It's painful to know there is an entire season filmed but unairable due to legal wrangling.  All the more reason to finish my quilt...  after finishing my folks' top, I put the final rows together on this one.

Two down leaves me with a free design wall, and a free spirit.  Yee-haw!  (FYI, there are many UFOs remaining in the sewing room.  But I'm okay with that- it's the recent WIPs driving me crazy...)

Next up?

Project Improv.

I've been needing something to get me interested in sewing again.  I'm far too dependent on patterns.  I have no aspirations to be an art quilter, but I would like to be a more artFUL quilter.  More unique.  More daring.  More... improvisational.  So when I stumbled on Jacquie's blog post a few weeks ago, I jumped at the idea!  Next Monday, when I am home free from work, I plan to spend the entire day locked in the gleamingly clean sewing room, and to simply play.

Wish me luck!

You and the horse that rode in on you...

Normally, after a blog break of this long, I'd come back and tell you all about why I'd been gone. 
But, you know what?  There's not much of a reason.  I haven't been super productive craft-wise, but that's not why I've been gone.  I'm just not that into it these days.  It's been, what, almost 4 years?  Really, who wants to hear that much from me, anyway?  It's probably time for some serious examination about why I blog, and if I want to go on.

But since today is Ellen's birthday, and since she called a whole bunch of folks out on the no-blogging thing last night, here I am!

There has been no quilting as of late.  At least, none until this past weekend, when, after a massive cleaning of the sewing room, I finished two lingering quilt tops.  But I need help to get photos of them, so, you'll have to wait on that.  And after that, I'll move on to talking about my own Project Improv ideas.  But, again, we'll just have to wait!

Instead we can talk knitting.  Katherine inspired me to break away from selfish knitting for a while, and make some hats for Children's Hospital.  The fact that I bought an adorable book earlier this year had nothing to do with it.  I busted out some super soft but very washable yarn, and made two kitty cat hats for her.

Annie was only too happy to model for me...  Here's hoping these kittens bring smiles to some faces at Children's.

And then it just happened to be crazy hat day at Annie's school, so, with yarn she picked out a few months back, we made her a horsey hat (from the same book).

Annie has named her new pet Emerald.  Emerald debuted at school yesterday to great fanfare.  Go, crazy hat day!  Next up?  A shark hat for Henry! 

And maybe a return to blogging?

Anything is possible...