In the Studio With Gracie

 Our newest family member has been with us for almost two months now. One surprise has been to discover that she actually watches the television!

And now you can see how I have filled my limited working space. 😉

She has also delighted us with her efforts to bury a new chew-bone. She carries it from room to room, looking for the best place to bury it. She has tried to bury it in the cushions of the couch, under a quilt on a bed, and in the depths of my scrap basket. I've tried to keep the scraps in that basket sort of organized, mostly by the project they came from. After Gracie pulled her bone from the basket half of the contents had been dumped on the floor. I didn't have time to sort them when I replaced them. Needless to say, the basket has been higgeldy-piggeldy since then. 

I have reorganized the scraps from the basket. They won't all fit in anymore (no surprise there; it was overflowing before Gracie rearranged things). I have put the larger pieces back in the basket and kept the strips separate. 

The basket measures 8" deep and 13" wide. It's still overflowing.

These are the piles of strips. My challenge now is to utilize them somehow. The obvious solution is a very liberated log cabin set of blocks. I'm not sure my OCD will let me do that however. Stay tuned. 

On another front, I was doing some embroidery the other day. My favorite threads to use are perle cottons. Apparently I left a ball of Valdani on my work table while I was busy in the kitchen. I happened to be alone in the house at the time (a rare occurrence) so there was no one else to monitor Gracie's actions. In the studio she hopped up onto my chair and snatched the ball of thread. This is what I found on the floor when I returned to the studio.

I was glad to see the label intact at least. I spent yesterday untangling and winding the thread onto an empty spool. ALL DAY yesterday, aside from short breaks for play time and meals. After two hours this is the progress I'd made.

I didn't find any damage to the thread itself in the course of untangling and winding. Another mercy to be grateful for. 

And now I have this lovely fat spool of thread to return to my stash of perle cottons. It was after eight o'clock in the evening when I wound the last length onto the spool. I hope I won't have to do this again!

To my readers in the United States I wish you a Thanksgiving Day full of family and friends, love and laughter. Not to mention gratitude! 😊

Black and White Flimsy

 This collection of black and white blocks from the Parts Department...

 

Grew into this assortment of blocks.

Which then became this 60" square flimsy.

Whenever I can I enjoy including little surprises into the blocks I make.

I find it challenging to create backs for quilts smaller than my usual 60" s 80." For some reason, I can wrap my brain around piecing a quilt block but not when it comes to a quilt back. So I'm quite proud of myself for figuring out a giant 4 Patch block to back this quilt. 

detail shot of the center of the back

 

 I had a little over one yard of the two white prints and just enough of the black to pull this off. And now I have less yardage in my stash but more scraps. This won't be the last black and white quilt coming out of The Magpie's Nest!

Scrap Happy in November

 I wanted to be making a quilt but had no motivation to start a new project from scratch. Parts Department to the rescue! I pulled out eight and nine inch blocks, figuring that they would make rows just under 60" each. There are 8" variable stars, 9" wonky or liberated stars, 9" Shoo-fly blocks, and 9" Hole in the Barn Door blocks. (They don't show up in the photo below.)

 They really are a random lot. That's all the wonky/liberated stars I had, and I think the Shoo-fly and Hole in the Barn Door blocks are all gone in that size too. 

 As you can see, I used a tone-on-tone blue for sashing between the rows and as compensating strips at the ends of the rows to bring them all out to 60" wide.

 This is the completed top. The quilt will be about 60" x 80" when it's finished. Not my most original or creative use of random blocks but it got the job done. Someone will now have a warm, colorful quilt to snuggle in and perhaps be entertained by. 😊

You can see how others have used their scrap materials or repurposed something that might have been thrown in the trash by following the links below. Enjoy!

Kate, Gun, Eva, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Tracy, Jan, 
Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Claire, Jean, Dawn, Gwen,
Sunny, Kjerstin, Sue L, Vera, 
 Ann, Dawn 2, Carol, Preeti,
Nóilin, Viv, Karrin, Alissa,
Tierney, Hannah, Maggie

Black and White

 For a while now I've been thinking about another black and white quilt. No specific plan came to mind so I rummaged through the Parts Department to see what turned up. There are blocks in almost every size from 6" to 12." I put the 8", 10," and 12" blocks up on the design wall. In full disclosure, there were a few 4" units that I combined to turn into 8" stars.

 I have begun using 6" Shoo-fly blocks as the centers for 12" variable star blocks. At the moment I'm thinking I'll make a total of 25 blocks. The 10" Churn Dash and 8" stars will be framed up to 12."

 Setting 25 blocks 5 x 5 will give me a 60" quilt top. I've found that to be a useful size for a child or an adult. What you see here is only a tentative arrangement. No doubt there will be tweaks as new blocks are added to the mix. 😊

Not Very Spooky

 Not only have I slowed down my blog posting, we've reduced the amount of decorating we do for Halloween. Which could be a sad thing except that quite a lot of "Halloween" decorations actually stay out on display all year long. 😉 

The prompt for #kookyspostcardsal2024 for October was "spooky cute." Not long after I began to think about what I might do I ran across a fabric sample from the late 1990's. It's a large checkerboard pattern with a border at either end featuring very American country toys. In and of themselves the rag dolls looked a bit spooky to me. I found a spiderweb print and then appliqued the dolls on top. From there I fussy cut a couple of ghostly shapes out of another print that is nothing but pairs of eyes on a black background. This postcard was primarily raw edge applique. I seem to be doing a fair bit of that lately. 

I couched the chunky yarn around the perimeter of the card to represent the dust bunnies one would find in an attic. Oh, and there's a spider charm in the web in the upper left corner. I'm calling this one Spooky Cute in the Attic. (I'm nothing if not literal.)

For the first week of the stitch journal project k3n taught us about enso, a meditation practice. This involves calming yourself, then drawing a circle without thinking about it. I drew my very open circle with a watercolor crayon. Wetting it then allowed the color to spread a bit. I stitched over the drawn line and then added other stitches as seemed appropriate in the moment. 

The next week we did some 'scrapplique.' Kathryn and many others made a butterfly image with two or more layers of fabric to decorate the wings. I chose to make a heart to celebrate Gracie's addition to our household. 

The theme for week 42 of the stitch journal project was "all of a piece." We were to take a single layer of fabric and pull threads from it to stitch with. Kathryn used a piece of linen with larger threads and a coarser weave than anything I could find easily in my stash. I ended up using a piece of muslin. 

Part of the muslin was dipped in tea to provide slightly different color threads to stitch with. I pulled my threads from the other side and stitched where the tea stained the cloth. The threads from the muslin were so fine I had a hard time seeing to thread the needle. I did not enjoy stitching through the single layer of thin fabric either. It's an interesting concept though, to use the threads pulled from your cloth to stitch back into it. 

Last week we explored stitching for the senses. Various textures of fabrics of course, but also paying attention to the sound of the thread going through the cloth, any scents embedded in the scraps, etc. 

In the upper left corner I have a piece of huck toweling that had been dyed in a tea that left a faint scent behind. Just below and underneath it is a strip of paper ribbon. I played with a few French knots and a tiny bit of turkey work to create more texture. Felted wool is the foundation for this piece, and the green square dead center is another bit of wool. There's a lot to feel when you close your eyes and run your fingers over this piece. 

As I write this I am debating what to do about the prompt for this final week of October. Kathryn has invited us to blindfold ourselves and see how we can stitch without sight. With appropriate preparations I can see this being a very enlightening experiment. Unfortunately, my gut reaction to this prompt is one of fear. Not of stabbing myself or anything like that. I don't want to make myself that vulnerable, even in my own studio space. I don't understand entirely where this is coming from. I do suffer from a degree of PTSD; maybe that accounts for it. In any case, I need to decide how to address this in my journal. I could write on the page where the stitchery would go, explaining my reason there's no stitched cloth there. Or I could just stitch something else altogether. I haven't yet decided what I will do. In the meantime, those of you who celebrate, have a happy Halloween!