Friday Finishes - A Cardigan and a Couple Hats

I finished my July Camp Loopy project, an Old Growth cardigan, almost a week ago. Blocked it this week, but I haven't taken any post-blocking photos, yet. Maybe this week. Below are some pre-blocking pics. And some hats I made this week.

Not sure about the collar. Might fold it over and sew it down. And the sleeves really grew after blocking. Very tempted to throw it in the dryer for a couple minutes to try and shrink it a tad.

Had enough yarn leftover to make a matching hat.

Used the chart for the smallest tree from the cardigan pattern. I did throw it in the dryer for 10 minutes as it really stretched during blocking.

And I made a second hat this week. For some crazy reason, I decided to make myself a Branches & Buds sweater for my August Camp Loopy project and ordered the yarn. Then I realized it's color work and I suck at that. Decided a hat is good practice. Used one of the sweater charts and worsted weight yarn and my tension wasn't terrible. Going to make a second one this weekend to practice some more before casting the sweater on Tuesday. This hat will be going to Jen for her Hat-a-Long for Halos of Hope.

Did you have any finishes this week?

Friday Finishes - 2 Quilts!

Finished the two Scrappy Bento Box quilts I was making for charity. Took some pictures of them this week off my parents backyard deck. Glad to have them done. Now mom can donate them.

Here's the first one. I started doing free-motion stippling on this one when my sewing machine decided it didn't want to do that anymore. Couldn't get the tension right and spent a couple hours ripping out the quilting I had done. Parts of the quilting weren't too bad but when I discovered I could keep tension with straight-line quilting, I ripped out all the free-motion quilting and did diagonal lines across the whole quilt.

A closer picture of the quilting - and all those quilt pieces! There are 700 pieces in each quilt.

Another detail shot.

I'm running out of yardage to make scrappy backs.

Here's the second quilt.

Did horizontal and vertical straight lines on this one. Much quicker.

Slightly closer look.

And the scrappy back.

Did you have any finishes this week? Linking up at Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish It Up Friday and Kat & Cat Quilts.

WIP Wednesday

A few WIP's to share this Wednesday, a couple almost done and one little finish.

I've spent the past few days quilting and quilting and was able to finish quilting the two Scrappy Bento Box quilts. Above they are trimmed and awaiting binding, which I hope to attach this afternoon.

Finished 4 spools of thread doing all that quilting. Time to go buy some more.

I started a sock almost 2 weeks ago. Getting ready to do the heel in a couple rows. 

And I hope you can tell this has grown. It's the Hello, Hello shawl and I'm halfway done the eyelet section (it's doubled in size since the last time I showed it). Hope to make more progress on it this week.

And I've slowly been plugging away at my Sarah Fielke, 2017 BOM, Down the Rabbit Hole. Since the last time it was on the blog, I have sewn down the green bias around the centre and sewed down the brown circle in the middle. I have also cut out and glued down all the leaves and have started to stitch them down. I think I slowed down on this project when the April clue came out - paper-piecing! My plan is to face my fear next month and get the paper-pieced houses done. 

Yarn ready for July Camp Loopy project. It will become an Old Growth cardigan. 

And my one little finish is this Sashiko embroidery that was part of the Studio MME's Super Stitcher's Club. I don't remember which month this was from. It came with white floss but I changed it up a bit and added some pink. I had it done in four different colours but decided I didn't like it and ripped it all out. Think I like this better.

What have you been working on this week?

WIP Wednesday

Another week has flown by and I did make a lot of progress on a couple projects, but forgot to take pictures along the way. Now they're at a step that is kind of hard to take pictures of but I still wanted to share.

Bamptom shawl is blocked! Took the blocking wires and pins out about an hour ago. Still need to do it's final, modeled shoot but I had to share how lovely the lace looks after blocking. Totally worth it. 

The knitting project I've been focused on this week has been my Salita shrug. I have three things waiting to be cast on that have to wait until this is finished. Because when you finish one thing, casting on three new ones makes sense. Except two of them require the same size needle. Anyway, back to the Salita shrug - I am 57 rows away from being finished! Not too worried yet that I will run out of yarn, although my daughter thinks I will. We'll see.

Had to add another close-up of the lace. This is going to be amazing after blocking, as well.

And here is a terrible picture of what I have been focusing on most of this week. Monday, I pieced all 70 Scrappy Bento Box blocks into two twin size quilts (they finish at 60 x 84). Did I take a picture of the finished quilt tops? Nope. Tuesday, I ironed and pieced fabric to make the backs and then pieced batting for one of them. I had a big enough piece for the other. Then I basted both quilts (with too much help from my four year old) and rolled them up to await quilting. Which I hope to start tomorrow. Fingers crossed I should have one finished next week to share. I'd like both done by the end of the month so I can give them to my mom when I see her in a couple weeks. She will be donating them to charity.

And my yarn for July's Camp Loopy arrived this week. Plus a little but extra. This isn't all of it. I bought a sweater's quantity in the green AND the black. The green will be my July project and will become an Old Growth cardigan (a birthday present for my best friend). The black will become a Harvest cardigan (a Christmas present). I wasn't sure which one I wanted to tackle for July so I bought yarn for both. The variegated yarn on the right is the special Camp Loopy yarn and I will be knitting it into another Prairie Hills shawl for myself (I test knit this shawl last year and have been waiting for the right yarn to make another).  My kids are looking forward to the winding party for all this yarn. This is their last week of school and winding all 13 hanks should keep us busy for a little bit once they are home all day, every day.

What have you been working on this week?

WIP Wednesday - 5 Quilts and a bit of Knitting

It's been almost a month since my last WIP post and some of those WIP's don't look much different. I blame Camp NaNoWriMo for stopping my WIP's from becoming Friday Finishes. Now that my brain can fit something other than my novel into it, it is quickly filling up with all the crafts I want to make, and surprisingly a lot of those are quilts. 

I finished making the Spin Cycle quilt earlier this year. I picked the backing fabric which I need to cut and piece to fit (doing that today). I'd love to baste this today but making cookies for teacher appreciation week comes first. It wasn't until I looked at the selvedge of the backing fabric that I realized I am using Cluck Cluck Sew fabric, too. Fabric on the front is an assortment of fabrics that aren't Cluck Cluck Sew. Really dropped the ball there. This quilt is a gift for my son's preschool teacher. She also taught my two older children when they were preschoolers. She deserves a quilt. Her birthday is Sunday, but I'm aiming to gift her the quilt when preschool finishes at the end of this month. Have no idea how I'm going to quilt it. Ideas? ( I had one leftover block, which you can see. Using it on the back as a label and have all three kids sign their names, and maybe a little message, too.)

This fabric is for another Cluck Cluck Sew quilt pattern. My daughter and I fell in love with her Basketcase pattern. I bought it and some fabric and plan on making it for my daughter's birthday next month. Need to get busy cutting and sewing this one.

My Bento blocks have been ignored for weeks. I still need to iron these block halves. I think I got a little depressed about this project when I recounted and discovered I need to make 5 more block halves. It's hard keeping track of so many pieces - there are over 1,000 pieces cut - but in the end they will become 2 quilts for charity. Need to refocus and finish them.

This crazy collection of fabrics is for the Sarah Fielke 2017 BOM. I'm behind on this one too. Need to iron some fabric and then do some paper-piecing this month. I'm a little scared.

And this was a quick fabric pull this morning to make a Rin quilt. There's a QAL going on for this one that I saw on Instagram. And there was something about the pattern I couldn't resist. Not sure when I'll make time for this but the QAL doesn't start until May 17th, so I have time to finish up some other WIP's before then.

And here's the little bit of knitting that's keeping me busy. I'm about to start another test knit for Sarah of Imagined Landscapes.

And I've been working on my Duvessa cowlette. Above I am 2 rows shy of finishing chart B, with only chart C and the border left. The KAL ends on Friday but something was bothering me about the design.

The bump down from the garter section to the lace section. I didn't like it. I want to keep and wear this but that little design element had me thinking I was going to give it away. And that kind of pissed me off. There must be something I can do?

So I started over, working the first part in stockinette instead of garter.

But since I'm not sure I'll like it, or if it will even work this way, I haven't frogged the original. They're both still connected. Not sure I'll get either of them finished by Friday, but I'm going to try.

What have you been working on?

SaveSave

Finish It Up Friday - A Quilt!

Happy to share another finished quilt today. I hoped to have a second quilt finished but I've spent the last couple days fighting a nasty cold and looking after a 3 year old battling the same thing. Not much quilting has been getting done, but lots of movies have been watched (I think we've watched "Cars" three days in a row!) Anyway, here's the quilt I finished last weekend.

Another quilt for charity that used up a lot of scraps. Pattern based on the Patchwork Olympics quilt but I made it larger and didn't include the tiny squares. I had no desire to cut hundreds of tiny squares.

My mom (who will be donating the quilt) gave me this sheet last year. I was really tempted to keep it, but decided to use it as a backing instead. This is my first time using a bedsheet as backing. It's a heavy cotton so I hope it wears well. 

A closer look at the back and the front.

Machine quilted straight lines diagonally. Nice and mindless, it finished up quicker than I thought it would. 

What did you finish this week?

Linking up at Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish It Up Friday and Kat & Cat Quilts for Sew Some Love.

Finish It Up Friday - 2 Quilts!

 I'm happy to share 2 finished quilts this week! One was finished this week. The other was finished last October, but I hadn't written a blog post for it yet. Enjoy.

I finished putting the binding on this quilt yesterday. My daughter and I took it outside for a photo shoot after she got home from school. Made of 2 inch squares with some white stripes added in for length. Measures roughly 60 x 80 and will be donated. Can't link to the charity as I'm not sure which it is - I make the quilts for my mom to donate to a charity affiliated with their church, which asks quilts to be 60 x 80. This is the second one I've made for her to donate (first one is here) and I have the third one basted and ready to be quilted. I have two more in progress that I'd like to have done by this summer.

Patchy back. I made the binding for the quilt from the strips I cut off the back after quilting. Helped keep the scrappy look.

I free-motion stippled over the whole quilt. I had to rip quilting out twice when the tension on my sewing machine caused lots of puckers and yuckiness on the back.

The second finished quilt I'm sharing today, didn't get many pictures taken of it. This is the only finished picture I have of it. I talked about the health problems my mother had last fall in this blog post. I had this quilt top pieced before she became ill but decided to finally quilt it and give it to her as a get-well soon gift to give to her when we visited in November during the American Thanksgiving break. I didn't take a picture of the backing, but it is the same blue as the binding. 

In an earlier post, I talked about how I pieced the blocks but I'll just go over it again. I used a black layer cake (I used 42, 10 inch squares) and a charm pack of Cuzco, plus a few squares I had leftover from other charm packs to make enough. I cut the charm squares into 2.5 inch squares and sewed one onto each corner of a 10 inch square. The quilt is 6 x 7 blocks. There are some finished quilt top pictures in this post.

The quilting was pretty basic. I quilted diagonal lines across the whole quilt, using the Cuzco squares as a guide. I was pretty happy with my pin placement, I didn't need to pause and remove a single pin during quilting.

Linking up at Crazy Mom Quilts for Finish It Up Friday!

And Kat and Cat Quilts Charity Link-up.

Friday Finishes - Yarn Edition

     I have several finishes from the past few weeks to share today. All but one are for me. And one of those might get frogged. Let's begin.

First, a picture of me wearing all the finished knits. 

     Here is the Astrid hat I mentioned on Wednesday (I'm making a cowl to match). I used leftover yarn from the cardigan I'm wearing - more information about that below. It's Cascade Venezia worsted in the Denim colourway.

Here's a picture of it flat. Great pattern. Easy to memorize. And stretchy.

     Crocheted cowl that I "designed" myself. I used the worsted skein of yarn I had bought from Turtlepurl Yarns earlier this year. It was the last one so I knew it was going to end up a hat or cowl. When I saw how wide the stripes were going to be I opted for this cowl. I used the same stitch pattern as the rainbow cat scarves but joined in the round after the first row. I crocheted until I ran out of yarn. I also love that the cowl still stands up after blocking.

      Stripey without being striped. Does that make sense? (Here is the same colourway, in sock weight, showing the stripes). I like that the colours dip into each other here. Pattern is simple; chain an even number of stitches. Make a single crochet in second chain from hook. Chain 1, skip next stitch, then single crochet in the next chain stitch, end with a single crochet. Chain 1 and turn. To join in the round I just chained one and then single crocheted in the chain 1 space at the other end, making sure not to twist. When I was finished, I used the yarn end to close up any space that remained. Second row you're making single crochet's in the Chain 1 spaces, and Chaining 1 over and skipping the single crochet's. Simple, if you know how to crochet, and great for watching TV. 

     This red scarf uses the same pattern as the cowl above. I guess when I find something I like, I use it over and over again.  This scarf will be donated. It is made out of two balls of Cascade Superwash 220, really red.

Wraps around a couple times with enough to tuck into a coat.

     And my last finish has been in all the other pictures, my Beacon Hill cardigan. Here it is with the original collar (the above pictures have a different collar). I followed the pattern and then decided the collar was big enough and didn't knit the last 20 rows. So, yeah, it was suppose to be even bigger. For me, it was just too big and too warm at the neck. My husband liked it and my daughter now admits she likes it better than what I have now, too. 

The back and sleeves are my favourite parts of this cardigan. There is a lot of collar there.

      I frogged  the collar and picked up the stitches 4 different times. I thought I was happy with this collar and reblocked the whole cardigan. But I'm still not happy. The buttons are too heavy (obviously that can change, and I am missing one at the bottom), and it forces me to have it done up all the time, or the button side hangs low. And I don't like how the collar sits at the back of my neck. I think I stretched it too much during blocking. I could block it again but... I'm not sure that is the answer.

      Back view with the latest collar. I've tried to wear it several times since I finished it and I never wear it more than a couple minutes. I feel like I'm constantly adjusting the collar so I take it off. I'm afraid this cardigan is doomed. I love the stitch pattern. And the yarn. But there's something about the cardigan that doesn't allow me to feel comfortable in it. I think I might have to frog it. I'm thinking a sweater to avoid buttons. Perhaps this Feathernest Raglan would be best? I must be crazy to even be thinking about frogging it and knitting a different sweater (and having to knit 2 more sleeves!) but I'm just not comfortable in it and don't want to wear it, as is.

Did you have any finishes this week? I'm almost done quilting the Cuzco Corners quilt, so I'm hoping to have that finished and ready to share next Friday.