amy a la mode

Awesome New Scarf!

I’ve been wanting to make this scarf literally for months, and I finally got around to it!

I’m wearing it right now, and it is 100% squishy, cozy goodness!

This scarf is made from 2 balls of Classic Elite’s Liberty Wool Prints. This is really lovely worsted weight yarn, and the chunkiness of the variegated sections is absolutely perfect for this scarf!

The other scarves I’ve made for myself were long and rectangular, but this one is an intriguing wide but shallow asymmetrical triangle sort of shape. Very fun to style!

Details of my project can be found on my Ravelry page.

My fabulous friend and coworker Dolin wrote this pattern, and you can download it from Ravelry for a mere $3.50. Totally worth it, because you’ll make this again and again. The pattern includes instructions for making both this worsted weight version and a fingering weight version!

My big employment shake-up is dragging on a bit, as one particular event has been postponed about two weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to scrounge up more projects I can polish off before any major changes occur!

A Little Biased Quilt

Ah! I’ve finally finished the second scrap-based quilt that I wanted to make! I’m calling this one “A Little Biased” for two reasons. 1) A lot of the strips I used were a little bit on the bias and 2) the whole thing reminds me of a graph, and so I think it’s funny to imply that the data for the graph is a little biased. I managed to sneak some geeky science into this quilt!

If you’ll remember, many moons ago, I made the Greek To Me quilt to sell on my web site.

I also made a throw-sized version for the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

In the process of making these quilts, I ended up with little strips from trimming up the blocks. I thought these bits were really interesting so I saved them, and while cleaning out my stuff in November, I realized that now was the time to do something with them.

And this is what I came up with!

(Oh! The light around here this time of year is SO terrible for taking quilt pictures!!!)

I really liked the idea of lining them up with the blue bits all facing one way and the lighter green (olive, I think is the color) bits facing the other way. They reminded me of those graphs where zero is in the center and the negative values are represented by bars that extend to the left and the positive values are represented by bars in a different color that extend to the right.

So, I lined up the centers (sort of) and sewed them together. I had a bunch that were too narrow to use — after taking out the seam allowances there wasn’t anything left — or that weren’t wide enough. The center section is only about 9-10″ wide in the final version.

I pieced together the center section and then looked at it for a long time. I considered making it into pillows or a long table-runner sort of thing, but I wouldn’t use a table runner and I didn’t want to have another thing just to hang on the wall. And I’d been thinking about making another nap-sized quilt. They use this size in The Modern Quilt Workshop book, and it’s really a nice size. The Real McCoy quilt is a nap-sized quilt (though it’s only 77″ long).

I scrounged around in my stash and found enough fabrics to make this about 51″ wide by 90″ long. I was super excited to use that much stuff from my stash AND get the nap-sized quilt made!

I considered doing a narrow border around the center section, but I tried lots of colors I had and just couldn’t find anything that worked for me.

And since the center section was inspired by a graph, but is done in a wonky sort of style, I opted for quilting that is inspired by graph paper, but in a wonky sort of style as well.

The back is a bunch of pieces of Kona cotton aloe that I had, all stitched together (it’s a little greener than the bahama blue on the front, though it’s hard to tell in this photo).

I really love this quilt, but I think we are now pretty full up for quilts at my house. However, I’ve dug out some more IKEA fabrics that I’ve had forever and I’m planning to work up some charity quilts when I need something to do!

Still Ringing in the New Year

While I’ve been catching you up on projects I was working on as far back as November, a variety of things have been afoot at our house.

If I haven’t mentioned it before, the awesome shop (Bobbin’s Nest Studio) where I have been working for the past two years is closing its brick-and-mortar doors and going strictly online. The owner, the employees, and the customers are all really sad that we are closing, but sometimes difficult business decisions have to be made!

I’m going to miss not seeing my wonderful coworkers all the time, but we’ll have to make some efforts to get together with each other periodically. I’ll be continuing to help the owner with the online store, but that won’t even require me to see her in person all that much.

The last day of the brick and mortar store in Santa Clara, CA, will be next Tuesday, Jan. 31. We are clearancing out all the stuff that we aren’t currently carrying in our online store, so if you live in the area, you might make some effort to come by and look for a bargain!

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to clear out my project cue. I had a few requests from my family that I took care of (a seat cushion for my mother, a label for my sister’s quilt, and a pair of fingerless gloves for my sister), which I knocked out fairly quickly.

And I’ve been working on the second quilt from my stash that I wanted to do. Part of my use it or lose it plan. I finished that just the other day and hope to have a tiny bit of sunshine tomorrow so I can get some pictures.

Another part of my use it or lose it New Year’s approach to my stash of stuff was to make curtains for the living room. I have a number of HUGE pieces of fabric from IKEA that I have had for 5 years and need to be put to some use. This piece was big enough and the right colors for curtains for our living room.

The fabric is fairly thin, but there are some of those ugly vertical blinds (provided by the landlord) on the window as well, so now we can open the blinds and get some light in without having people see in. It also helps minimize the early morning glare by filtering the light. My husband and I are both really enjoying them already!

And there is likely to be a big employment shake-up around here, both for me and my husband, both in good ways. Maybe very good ways. So, between being super busy at the store this month and the new job stuff going on, it’s been very busy in a less crafty way. But I’m trying to clear out that backlog of projects in case there is a big shake-up! I’ll definitely keep you posted!

More Redecorating

I hung the mini quilts I had lying around together on the walls in the spare room where I sew. The Zen’s Won’t Mind quilt was already hanging on the wall in there, as was that awesome Sound of Music album cover, but I shifted things around and made more room so I could add my new Bits and Pieces quilt, the Ducks in a Row quilt, and the A Little Lute quilt, all of which were hand quilted, as it turns out!

I’m so happy these all now have a home instead of being tossed from one surface to another all the time!

How to Hang a Quilt Tutorial

As I was hanging up some of my quilts recently, I was thinking that some of you might be interested to know how I’m doing this without any visible hanging mechanism showing.

I learned this method from the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, and figured if it’s good enough for a museum, it’s surely good enough for me! And that you folks out there might like to know how it’s done as well.

First thing you’ll need to do is make a sleeve for the back of your quilt. I didn’t take any photos of this process, but it should be wide enough to fit whatever you are using as a hanger, and a little narrower than your quilt. I cut my strips 6 inches wide, then sewed them in half down the long side with a 1/2″ seam allowance. I pressed the seam open so that it was oriented down the middle of the strip, and then laid the strip with the seam side against the quilt. I don’t bother to do any finishing to the seam OR to the short ends of the sleeve. Not really necessary.

Here’s the slowest step: hand sew the sleeve to the back of the quilt. No way around this really. And it doesn’t have to be pretty, it just needs to be secure.

Okay, now here’s what you’ll need to get it up on the wall:

1. Quilt with sleeve attached
2. Piece of wood or dowel for hanger. Make sure it is thick enough to put your screw eyes (see below) into. Mine was a piece of pine 1/4″ thick by 1 5/16″ wide. It was less than $1 a board foot. We were able to cut it to length and buy however much we wanted at the Home Depot.
3. Two screw eyes – here’s a photo of the ones I used

4. Straight edge
5. Pencil
6. Hacksaw (or your favorite tool) for cutting the wood or dowel.
7. Sandpaper

Step one: Lay the wood or dowel on the quilt to see how long you need to cut it. You want it long enough so that when you screw the screw eyes into the end they will stick out past the hanger but NOT past the edge of the quilt.

Step two: Use the straight edge and the pencil to mark a line where you need to cut.

Step three: Cut the wood or dowel. Sorry, I don’t have a photo of this step, because I was cutting! This is the most fun step, by the way. Who doesn’t love tools?? Use the sandpaper to sand the cut edges so they don’t snag your quilt.

Step four: Screw your screw eyes into the end of the wood or dowel. I did this with my hands – no other tools required. If you are having trouble screwing them in, try holding the screw eye with vice grips, or putting a pencil or something through the eye that you can use to turn it.

Step five: Check to see that everything looks good. The screw eyes should stick out past the hanging sleeve but not past the edge of the quilt.

Step six: Put the hanger into the sleeve.

Voila! You are ready to hang!

Here’s what you need to hang your quilt:

1. Hammer
2. Two nails
3. Level (if you care that much)
4. Oh, and maybe a pencil

I don’t have photos of this either, but all you need to do is take your quilt with the hanger in the sleeve and hold it up on the wall where you want it (this, of course, may require a helper so you can step back and look). Check to see that it’s level, then mark the spots through the centers of the screw eyes with the pencil. Hammer a nail into the center of each circle you marked and hang the quilt on the nails.

(You can even see here where I screwed up and hung this one crooked the first time and had to go back and redo it. That’s what I get for doing these without a helper!)

It’s so simple, that I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out by myself. Note that if you are hanging big quilts, you will likely want bigger, sturdier wood. The museum told me they hang big quilts on what is essentially flat baseboard molding. Who knew?

Happy Hanging!