Christmas table runner will be for late 2021

I've decided that I'm just not feeling it to finish the Christmas table runner I started a few weeks ago. 

I had put one green border on it, and it made the other greens look dull. 

To the stash!

I found a good red fabric with poinsettias, and that's going to be really good. I think the green will still work as the binding, but after taking off one of those looong sides I don't feel like pushing on that project right now.

Last night as I was finishing cleaning the drum carder the band snapped. I had fused it once, and hopefully I'll be able to do it one more time, but it's getting super old and cracking so I decided to just bite the bullet and get a new one. 

I'll photograph the yarn I spun and plied this week later when there's good light:

Luckily Gillian's quilt was coming along very nicely! The goal was to have it finished by Saturday morning (it's currently Friday evening) so that she can take it with her for her third semester of college. I'm so proud of the way she's taken this project by the horns and run with it! She's done every bit of the sewing and cutting (except for four blocks for the borders that I cut).  We've faced reality and pushing to get it done before she leaves would be insane, so we'll ship it to her once it's finished.

Experiments with carding fiber

The drum carder has been calling to me, and I went a little crazy on the Paradise Fibers holiday sale. 

In preparation for getting some nice fiber (merino) I decided it was time to pull out the mystery fibers and play a bit.

I was going for a yarn that would be interesting, and I was hoping for something that would read as a purple-ish yarn. Time (or more accurately the spinning) will tell.

Here's the first layer of red:

Then some blue that came from the spinning guild, then some coral on top:

I also used some pink/orange Angelina-type sparkly stuff, and a tiny bit of a light tan wool.

Here I'm about to start dizzing off the wool to make a roving-type prep:

And a some-what accurate photo (in my computer chair) of the roving:

This is slightly too orang-y, but it's not a terrible representation; I'll take better pictures in the daylight.

On the piecing front, I put a border on my Christmas table runner but don't like the fabric with the pieces parts, so that's coming off. I cut it at 2.5" so it's still super usable. Now to dig through the stash for something better.

Gillian finished piecing the center of her throw!!! Now she's cutting the parts that came out of the second cuttings and we'll use those for a border. The goal is to have it done by the time she leaves for school on Saturday, and I have to admit that it's not looking good. It's still a possibility though.

Christmas catch-up post

I originally had this on my Twister Tool note to self post, but I wanted to pull it out separately.

Other things I've done over the past few weeks:

Made masks for the library commission group as a thank you from the staff association:

Gillian made kombucha (with my prodding):

I made a bunch of pop-up cards with Gillian's help, although I still need to send out three of them:

Took some photos of some neat frost-rimmed leaves out in front of my library when I was putting out signs one morning for our curbside services:

Thankfully there were no customers in the parking lot yet because I spent a few minutes staring a leaves and taking photos, and it probably looked really bizarre. (These were on the sidewalk in front of the building, so it wasn't like I was standing in the parking lot, although that *is* something I do as I'm inspecting the building, etc.)

Some paper village mantel decorations, using my Silhouette Cameo I got as a present from Greg a few years ago:

And here's the design wall in progress:

While we didn't get good photos of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter the other night, I did use Gillian's old telescope to take a photo of the moon with my phone's camera:

And to continue the randomness, I got a new set of nail dip powders and organized my existing stash, including updating my swatches (only five are new):

And then of course I had to try one of the new ones, so this is "Double Gleam" with "Snow Elves" as the gradient glitter:

Then, because I sometimes do things that make me question my own sanity, I decided that for this year's branch (work location) and neighbor gifts, bean soup mix would be perfect. We went to WinCo and got a ridiculous amount of beans and onion soup mix from the bulk area, and I went totally overboard.  The first photo is the beans we had leftover from making 37 packets, and the bottom photo is the little packets I made of onion soup mix with minced onions added in, which we'll use instead of the two-packs from Lipton, etc. that are twice the price of doing it myself:

And yesterday (Christmas Eve) Gillian decided to pull out a puzzle. We were able to finish it (500 pieces, not 1,000) this morning. Here's a photo of Ryan putting in the last piece, and Gillian cheering him on:

In other Christmas news, Ryan got a new set of keycaps (among other things) and promptly replaced the old ones:

Gillian got a pottery wheel, and both she and Greg took it for a spin, although we've misplaced the box of tools that came with it (Amazon to the rescue), and we still need to get an electrician out to add a 220 outlet in the garage for the kiln.

It'll take some practice, of course, but Gillian has had a great time with it so far. She will be in the "shitty pottery" stage for a while but I have no doubt she'll be throwing beautifully things pretty quickly! She and Greg really enjoy the technical sides of these arts, and I'm eager to see what she comes up with. 

Whew! That's enough of an update for now. I'm going to try to keep up with the blog more frequently (I know, I've said that before) because while Ravelry is great for spinning, knitting, etc., I'm getting back into quilting and I need a space to record that kind of thing.

notes on designing for the Twister Tool

 This post is mostly self serving, since I have messed up on calculating yardage for TWO quilts now:

Use the first piecing dimensions for the border calculations, not the finished size!!!!

On both the Christmas table runner and Gillian's Christmas gift quilt, I made the border calculations on the *finished* quilt size, which is 3/4 of the size of the *pieced* quilt size.

This is such a great technique, but the fact that I've made the same mistake twice means I need a reminder to myself.

So far I've made this small quilt to test the technique, and it turned out great! However, it was totally slapped together and I didn't actually plan it out.

Gillian's Christmas gift quilt, that she's doing the piecing for, is going to be fantastic once we get it done. Right now she's almost done sewing the rows together, although in the photo below it's in the planning stages.

I failed to purchase enough black flannel from Missouri Star Quilt Company (where the layer cakes came from), but hopefully the local quilt shop will have a comparable flannel we can use for the inner border that has to be added before we make the twister cuts.

Gillian's quilt started with 10" squares.

My Christmas table runner is on hold until tomorrow when we'll run to the local quilt shop and hopefully they will still have another yard left of the fabric since it's a bigger version of the blue-and-white one, where the background and border need to be the same fabric. It's ridiculous--the finished one will be around 120" x 12". 

In this photo it's in three sections, although I've since sewn the three sections together:

My table runner started with two charm packs (5" squares), then I cut too many background squares (also throwing off my calculations for the border fabric), but hopefully it will all work out.

Cross your fingers for us. :-)  

OH, I forgot to say anything about my new design wall!

I'm finally organized enough to be able to use a design wall (things are unpacked, the area is cleaned out enough to access a big enough wall space, etc.) although the room is not clean by any stretch of the imagination. I have a LOT of stuff that I need to organize in a better way, but I'm getting there. Creativity is messy, and making a mess is faster than cleaning it up.

Anyway, the design wall is two 8' x 4' sheets of 3/4" insulation, and I trimmed 13" off one side so that it wouldn't cover the power outlet at the bottom of the wall. 

Greg built me a closet shelf

 I'm trying to get caught up documenting some projects, so there may be a bunch of posts all at once practically.

I realized that while I document all of my spinning, knitting, and other fiber crafts on Ravelry I don't do such a good job on other things so I'm going to try to be better about that here.

To start, this is a project that I asked Greg to do and WOW did he deliver!

I wanted a shelf or two in the closet specifically for storing toilet paper and facial tissue since otherwise it gets buries in the closet.

Greg went way above and built this shelf and tissue box holder, while still giving space to store really tall things like the poles for my fake fire effect at Halloween.

That's space that was wasted before. The closet goes back under the stairs (the bottom of the shelf is where the other part of the closet goes under the stair landing) and that triangular space is wasted. 

On the opposite side of the closet we have some tools propped in the corner, so an upcoming project is going to be a rack to hang things like a Shark steam mop.

I absolutely love this shelf though! Now I can just pop into that closet and grab a pack of toilet paper or tissue box instead of having to unbury them in the closet. I'm so thrilled! Happy birthday to me! (I'd asked for something like this for my birthday in October, and then I got sick for two weeks.)