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. 

I'm back!

Back to blogging, that is. :-)

I have no excuse, really, for neglecting my blog, other than catching up becomes overwhelming after a while and then inertia takes hold and, well, no blog posts.

Since my last post it's been five months. School ended, it got really, horribly, nastily hot, and my enthusiasm for most things went out the window. I don't like heat. But life goes on, and I've managed to get a few things done.

The biggest thing I've done lately is converting my Roman Maze quilt pattern to PDF and listing it on Etsy! I took a new picture of the quilt, since it's been a few years and digital cameras have improved quite a bit since I took the original picture.

Here's the new cover pic:


I've had quite a few requests over the years for a PDF version, but the stars hadn't aligned in the proper formation until I realized that Etsy would be MUCH easier than trying to coordinate things through my web site. Now the challenge is going to be converting my other patterns and getting a new pattern out (I designed it back in 2003, but then we moved, Ryan was born, and the hard drive died, so it's been on the back burner until now).

Let's see, on the knitting/crocheting/spinning front, I've managed to finish a few things.

I participated in the Tour de Fleece but only managed to finish ONE skein during the tour:

That's a fingering-weight merino two-ply yarn, and it's actually plied from stuff I'd spun a few years ago but hadn't ever plied. I had 8 ounces to begin with and it was early enough in my spinning career that I hadn't done a great job and put it aside. I managed to spin up the rest of it and chain plied it for this gorgeous bulky skein:

It's fun to see the effect of the two different plying methods on the same roving. (The colors are nicer in person on the chain-plied skein.)

So that's my one skein I started AND finished during the tour. I did spin on other things, as you can see in this collage.

About halfway through the tour the kids and I went to Idaho. I did get some roving—quite a lot, actually—while we were there, but I didn't get any spinning done. (Pictures of Idaho to come.)

I crocheted a necklace/bracelet with pearls:


I wear it as a necklace sometimes, or as a bracelet wrapped around my wrist six times.

My first crocheted sweater, a Butterfly Cardigan, using yarn left over from a sweater I knit for Greg about five years ago:



I finished a small shawl using my handspun:

The roving is from Dawning Dreams, and it yelled at me from across the room at Fiber Christmas in July a few years ago. The pattern is Holden Shawlette.

I started a pi shawl and my plan is to put sleeves in it to make a cardigan:


I'm a lot further along on this project than in that picture, but it looks like one big messy pile of yarn at this point so I'm not taking a pic until it's blocked.

There are a few other things I've been working on but I'll post pics of those another time.

In other domestic news, I got into making my own yogurt:


It's really good and really easy! I use this recipe, except that I use the crock from my crockpot, and I use the insulated cover that it came with and put the whole thing in the oven, and I don't strain it any more.

I'm woefully behind on posting pictures of customer quilts but hopefully I'll get my act together on that soon, now that the kids are back in school again. (YAY!!!!)

Happy Labor Day to my U.S.-ian friends, and everyone else, I hope you're having a great weekend!

Snowmageddon 2011

We have a lot of snow.

A LOT. (Not alot, that's a whole different thing.)

How much snow do we have? Well, 14" + at this point.

Here's looking out across the cul-de-sac to the neighbors' house, with the kids helping Richard shovel the driveway:

I took this picture to show the impressive drift at the corner of the roof:

The one along the fence is cool, too.

Here's Gillian's snow fort that she made using the snow from the driveway:

So that was February 2nd.

Today we got MORE snow:

I figure we got about 2" more, judging from the arms of the chairs.


The kids have been out of school Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today. I suspect there won't be any school on Monday and possibly later since they're predicting more snow, and none of the neighborhoods around here have been plowed. This is a record-setting amount of snow and this area just isn't equipped to deal with it.

The grocery stores are pretty impressive--I've *never* seen the entire egg, bread, meat, and milk sections decimated, but there is NOTHING left on the shelves. Greg managed to time it just right this afternoon and got four dozen eggs at Braum's, thank goodness! I hadn't realized how many of my favorite recipes use eggs until we were down to five eggs.

Thank goodness we've not lost power so far! The 30-something hours we were without power a few years ago was sufficiently traumatic that we've stocked up on mini-propane tanks for our indoor-safe heater, but I'm hoping we keep power through the next wave of ice/snow.


Despite the kids being home I've managed to get a little bit of quilting done. This one, actually, was finished a few weeks ago but I'm just now getting to posting about it. This is Carolyn Lamp's quilt. She bought the blocks (minus centers) at a garage sale and put them together. I think it's a gorgeous quilt!



Aaand now Ryan wants my help with taking a bath so I'm off to do that and get back to quilting.

I hope everyone is staying safe and warm!

Quilts--lots of them!

It's been very, very busy around here. I just finished the final quilt that's due out before Christmas. I feel like a huge load has been lifted from my shoulders.

This is going to be a *very* picture-heavy post, so I'll apologize in advance.

I'll go in order from the ones I haven't posted pics yet (although I'm deliberately leaving out one that I know if a gift, and she's asked me to hold off posting about it until after Christmas).

This is a team effort from Leslie Hale and Teresa Marler:


Janet Hall made this beautiful Irish Chain:



Janice Drehobl put this neat quilt together:



I LOVE how this one by Janet Hall turned out:




And another of Janet's:



Monica Maklin made a couple of really cute kids' quilts using similar patterns and cute prints:



Brooke Lindamood put this cute quilt together for her daughter. She wanted the quilting to look like bubbles, and I think it does!

This is Brooke's other quilt, made to showcase a t-shirt of her Dad's:




Here's another of Janice Drehobl's quilts. The back has notes from "the cat" and it's really cute. I wrote some sayings down the long strips ("a cat's a cat and that's that," "you own a dog but you feed a cat" and the like).



Janice's autumn quilt. We decided on leaves and pumpkins for the quilting.



Janet and her sister pieced this beautiful batik quilt:



Diane Turner's daughter put this top together using her t-shirts from high school:



Leslie Hale made some quilts for Christmas gifts:








Kathryn Blalock had some quilt tops pieced by some of her relatives, and she brought them to me to quilt. They all use vintage fabrics, and they're mostly hand-pieced.