Question for the ages

Why, why, why? We went into our sewing room this morning intent on picking up where we left off on our knitting themed quilt. We were so into it last winter. We knew just where we were going with it. It seemed SUCH A GREAT IDEA!!! New. Fresh. Exciting, even.

Then we were side-lined by the eye thing and we had to dismantle our studio so house guests could actually sleep in there and then other projects beckoned and FINALLY, after that 6-month hiatus, TODAY we get back to it...only to find that it's something we hope we wouldn't step in if we were walking down the street. If you get our drift.

How is it that the brilliant piece you put down one day wakes up the next as such a monstrous dud?

... and found?

So we took a shovel to the old sewing room/studio in what turned out to be a veritable archeological dig. The whole process actually ended up taking way less time than we had feared (it always does!) and it was oddly satisfying. Sort of like taking a calming breath.

BONUS!!! Look what we found!

This is a tiny practice piece that we did several years ago. It's only about 6 inches x 9 inches. We also found some strip-pieced remnants from an old slipper design that was part of our pattern offerings back in the '90's...a contemporary of the Cosy Quilted Cap and Mittens patterns.

The colours go well together we think and the idea of finding hope at the bottom of a quilted nightmare is just too good to pass up. This will become part of the Frankenquilt....the knitting-themed quilt.....Knitter-Knatter.

Here's how we're going about it:

In the photo above, you can see we laid the Hope motif so it overlaps the strip-pieced fabric slightly. We then cut through both layers. This makes the 2 motifs nestle into each other.

To join the 2 motifs, we cut ON THE BIAS a 1 inch strip of this bright pink fabric (which we bought when we were in Maui 4 years ago) and a 1-3/4 inch wide strip of fabric (for the back).  Fold the wider strip in half and pin the cut edges to the raw edge of the back of the Hope motif. Line up one edge of the 1 inch strip with the raw edge of the right side of Hope (right sides together) and stitch through all the layers. Next, stitch the remaining edge of the pink 1 inch wide strip to the corresponding raw edge of the slipper strip-pieced fabric (right sides together).

Then, we opened everything up. You can see the narrow pink bias strip stitched to both pre-quilted pieces.

And, on the back side, we just handstitched the folded edge to cover the machine stitching. Neato!

Definitely a Frankenquilt!

Coming together

We have more knitting themed vignettes sketched and ready to appliqué but for today we thought we'd like to start bringing the various parts together. Will it come together as we envision? or will it just look like a textile explosion? Time will tell.

We have one of our wonky stars with the dog centre and the circles that were cut out of Barnyard Roundup. .... the quilt we made recently for our great-niece. They look good together.

This is going to be a double bed sized quilt and there's a lot of real estate involved in that big of a quilt....a lot of bed to cover. As much as we can appreciate art for art's sake, we find it very difficult to make quilted wall hangings. We are way too practical for that. Quilts have that wonderful tactile quality that's totally wasted if you never get to touch them or wear them or cuddle underneath them. So, this will be a quilt for our bed and since Mr. Coco is very forgiving and since most of the time that we're in that room it's dark, we're just going wild. No one to impress. No one to care. We highly recommend the process. It's very liberating.

Our friend Karen of Sew Karen-ly Created turned us on to the idea of using pages from old phone books for stabilizer. We had been using freezer paper (which is heavier and harder to remove) and that freezer paper is expensive. The phone book pages are FREEEEEEE! and such a good idea. Karen uses her phone book pages for string piecing and you can see her tutorial for placemats made with them here. Very pretty!

Next we're adding a couple of those crazy cat panels we got from Sew Sisters. We LOVE these cats. So bright and brash. Just like us!

Next, after removing the stabilizer paper we'll trim away as much of the excess fabric from the back as we can and we think a couple of the circles are just crying out for some hand embroidery.



approx. 17 inches x 24 inches



Be sure to visit Karen's blog tomorrow (Friday) because she's taking part in a blog tour for Quiltmaker's 100 Blocks Blog Tour. She has a block in the book and she'll have a copy of the magazine to give away.

Scrap Happy Dog Sweater

Another motif for the knitting themed quilt ...


Copyright © Cheryl Coville 2011


About 15 inches x 15 inches.

Are there any fans of the TV show Castle out there? A while ago, Terri from Purple Moose Designs sent us her copy of Heat Wave by Richard Castle. It's a quick and entertaining read. Anybody want it next? Leave a comment here and we'll draw a name and mail it off. Anywhere in the world. Deadline: tomorrow night (Tuesday) at midnight.

Patchwork muffler

Remember when you were a kid and it was cold and your mother wrapped you up in a scarf to keep you warm? Sort of like this?

A Patchwork Scarf

For the knitting quilt ...

A little embroidery goes a long way



Copyright © Cheryl Coville 2011


We made the trek to our favourite local quilt shop yesterday and found the perfect background fabric for the Need New Socks? motif. To be honest, we don't really believe there's ever one perfect fabric. There are just many, many....too many!....choices. And each one will spin us off into a different direction. And for the record....ALL those directions are pretty cool. We got 2 more colours of that rayon embroidery thread, too. A fuschia and a coral. We are truly addicted to the stuff.

So, once we had the appliqué stitched to the background, we were able to trim away all the excess fabric (to keep it supple) and remove the freezer paper. Then, Grandma Coco embroidered the eyes by hand. The eyes are the windows to the soul and we haven't figured out how to automate this part of the process. However, we do think this guy's got soul.

So, how's the knitting theme quilt coming along?

Glad you asked.

Grandma Coco has been stitchin' up a storm. Let's see....where did we leave off? Oh, yeah, the last time we checked in, the sweater gift tag was getting its outline stitching on the text. We learned an awful lot on that one (and we use the word 'awful' on purpose). Free motion embroidery is some tricky stuff (as Thelma once said). We've decided we prefer to keep our feed dogs up! It means we need to work on a slightly larger scale. Good to know. In the interest of full disclosure, some of the embroidery (the cat's face, for instance) was done by hand.



Copyright © Cheryl Coville 2011


Then, we set to work on the Need New Socks gift tag/band. (You probably saw that one coming, didn't you?) This one's about 12 inches x 18 inches. The text is larger and much easier to handle. Although we liked the Lite Steam-a-Seam 2 for fusing the pieces of the Sweater gift tag (much better than WonderUnder, in our opinion) it still gives a stiffness that we don't really like. And if you have to do much layering, that stiffness becomes a real problem. We tried trimming the fusible so it was only under the very edges, but that was a lot of work. For NNSocks, we used the old stand by freezer paper and a narrow zigzag with invisible thread. That works very well. This one will get some additional embroidery detail.




Copyright © Cheryl Coville 2011


And then we tried a different approach, just for the fun of it. This is the Froggie Rip-it! block. (For all you non-knitters, that's not a typo. The frog says "Ribbit, ribbit" which sounds to a knitter like "Rip it! Rip it!" and that's what you have to do when you make a knitting mistake. So, knitters talk about "frogging" a project or "sending it to the frog pond" if it has to be ripped back. Right, so we've got that out of the way!)

With the appliqué fabric right on top of the background fabric, we traced the outline of our frog. Then we stitched through both layers of fabric (with freezer paper stuck to the bottom for stability). We used a very short stitch. Next we trimmed the top fabric as close as we could to the the outside of the stitching line. Then we did a zig-zag, sorta satin stitch with rayon thread all over that raw edge. 




About 15 inches x 15 inches


It's easy. It's quick. And it's fun. Did we mention that we're calling this our Franken Quilt? It's kind of a surgical assemblage of all sorts of motifs and blocks in a very spontaneous approach. We hope it won't frighten the villagers!

We made some Wonky Stars that Elaine (from the Maple Leaf Quilt Guild) pointed us to, and overlapped them over a pieced strip that was partly stitch-and-flipped and partly over-laid spontaneous appliqué.

This piece will be the lower right hand corner of the quilt. We also have some orphan blocks that are good colours for this quilt. We haven't had this much fun in a long time.