The Bitter with the Sweet

  

My dear cat Fatty died over the weekend.  She was 15 or 16 years old, and came to live with us after the neighbors she'd lived with moved away and left her behind.  They'd adopted her from a shelter, so she had an uncertain early life, but she had great spirit and a big personality, that helped her maneuver in the world until she landed at my house.

  

The neighbors named her Cleo, but giving nicknames based on physical attributes is a Mexican sign of affection and familiarity, so she became Fatty to me.  Ironically, when she got sick over the last few months, she shrunk down to half her highest weight.

She was very photogenic, and she liked to "talk" and "sing."  Here's a favorite post I wrote in 2007 about Fatty, with one of my favorite photo sequences of her.

 She's in the Spirit World now, but I'll always remember her with great love.

Wedding Bells and the Honeymoon Shawl

Michael and I were married May 20 at my house with my kids as witnesses.  We've been moving toward this step in our relationship for some time, but hadn't quite set a date.  Then in May we booked a vacation cruise to Mexico, and readied to leave town on the 21st.  Suddenly The Right Time had manifested itself, and our vacation turned into a honeymoon, with visits to my parents and to one of Michael's sons and his family as bookends.

The wedding itself was hastily arranged.  I only had a dress because I'd bought one for the trip.  We got the license that morning, and I called my kids at noon to tell them that the wedding would be at 2.  Troopers that they are, they showed up right on time (both on their way to work)  for the short ceremony performed by a local judge, a friend of Michael's, who also gamely agreed to perform the ceremony at my house on short notice.  We would've gone to his office, but he insisted that a less bureaucratic location would be much better.  

That night I put my tennis shoes back on and we went out to dinner at our favorite local Mexican restaurant.   Though the arrangements were very casual, we were both very happy.

The cruise was wonderfully relaxing.  We stopped at Cabo San Lucas and at Puerto Vallarta, where we enjoyed the hot weather, shopping and the beach.  On the ship we spent time reading, getting sunburned, listening to music, and otherwise honeymooning.  It was very romantic.

Looking back on the photos Michael has noticed how happy I look.  Yes, definitely happy.

And there is a fiber-related angle here too.  I started knitting a simple shawl to take on the trip, a variation on the Kid Silk Haze Shawl pattern.  I used some anonymous thrifted mohair yarn on size 11 needles.  If I'd known I was going to get married I might have planned a more elaborate project, but as it is, I finished the shawl, not before the wedding, but on the long drive to Sacramento before our flight to southern California and the cruise ship.

So this is my Honeymoon Shawl, and it worked perfectly as a lightweight but warm shawl for the nights at sea.  It's very much a reflection of our whole wedding experience: it's plain, thrifty, yet cheerful and not without style. 

Mother's Day Aprons

I've had the idea for awhile to use some of my vintage linens and fabrics to make aprons, and Mother's Day provided me with the inspiration to make one for my mom and one for my sister.  These were quick projects that went into the mail the other day, and hopefully they'll arrive on time.

My mom and sister actually wear aprons when they cook, so this is a functional gift.  I usually only wear an apron when I'm going to be cooking for a holiday, when I plan to be in the kitchen for a long time involved in a big cooking production.  But lately I've been wearing a couple of aprons the kids made in middle school home ec., and I think I may make myself a new apron too and expand my choices.

 

The fabric for this first apron is probably from the 70s.  It reminds me of a Marimekko print--remember those?  It has that bold graphic and bright colors.  This fabric was a tablecloth someone had roughly hemmed, and making the apron allowed me to cut around a couple of stains and the ugly hem.  The pattern is one a I copied from an apron that belonged to my grandmother.  That poor apron is threadbare, but I outlined each piece onto waxed paper and I've used it as a pattern.  Even the bias tape is vintage.  The pink tape came in a package with a 15 cent price printed on it.  I've noticed that some vintage aprons mix and match the bias tape colors, so I did that here too.

The my sister's apron is made from a commercial pattern, the Sassy Plus Size Apron Pattern, which runs from sizes 14/16 to 26/28, which allows for a generous apron that covers more than just the front of your clothes.  The paisley fabric is new, but the flounce and pocket were cut from a pillowcase.  These aprons can easily be made from odds and ends, I used a third fabric for the ties and neck straps.

I've got a big stack of fabrics piled up to make a few more aprons.  This is a very satisfying project.  I may have to join the campaign to bring the apron back into widespread use so there will be a reason for all this sewing.

Happy Mother's Day to all!

Sacred Threads

My Fall Madonna has been accepted into the Sacred Threads show in the Washington D.C. area this summer. I'm very exited to be included in my first non-local show.

Converting a Pullover into a Cardigan Using Ribbon, and Making 1000 Pyramid Quilt Blocks

 

I'm having a cashmere love affair.  It's softness makes it a wonderful indulgence, and I've been on a streak finding cashmere sweaters at the thrift store.  Recently I found this really nice pullover, clearly from the 90s since it's long, and brought it home, only to discover why the tag said "as is."  

It had a tiny hole right in the center of the front.  Undeterred, I turned the pullover into a cardigan by machine sewing two lines of stitches up the middle to prevent raveling, and then cutting between the stitching lines with a sharp scissors. Here's a link to another sweater conversion I did using bias fabric, which has additional photos of how I cut the sweater.

At the fabric store I found a wide ribbon in a matching color, and pressed a seam along the length so that one side was a quarter inch wider that the other.  I then cut a piece of pressed ribbon for each sweater front, making sure I had a little extra on the tops and bottoms.

I machine sewed the narrow side of the ribbon to the inside of the sweater, having lined up the cut edge of the sweater with the fold.  Do this for each side.

 

Then I hand sewed the wider side of the ribbon to the outside of the sweater, and trimmed, folded, and stitched up the top and bottom ends as well.  Initially I thought I'd do a Laura Ashleyesque finish on the sweater, embroidering a few French knots along the ribbon, and using a flower button for a closure.

But then I found these great wood fish beads in my stash, which is really more my style.  These are purely decorative.  I sewed hooks and eyes to the inside edge of the sweater.

I'm loving this new-to-me sweater.

I also stole an hour from my day to make some blocks following Debra's 1000 Pyramids Tutorial.  I have a drawer of 3" strips in purples and greens.  I'll throw in some yellows and oranges for good measure.  When people were making 1000 Pyramids quilts for the millennium I was a newish quilter and never made one.  This is my second chance.

Spring Scenes

I was invited to do a poetry reading at the University of California, Merced last week, so I hopped in my car and took the drive down to the Central Valley.  I had a lovely time on campus, reading to a receptive audience of students, and chatting about Chicano literature with Manuel Martín-Rodríguez the faculty member who invited me, and with his graduate assistant Martha Acevedo.  That's me in the orange (store bought) sweater. 

The trip had many other benefits: I got out of the torrential rain zone here on the north coast.  We've really been soaked this year.  I also got to visit with my parents, sister, and nieces, who live within a short drive of Merced.

 

Spring had sprung at mom's house.  Here she is in her garden with Handsome her cat.  She's wearing the Corrie vest I knitted her for her birthday last year.  She has assured me that she's wearing it a lot.

Her tulips were in bloom, and Handsome was enjoying his sunbath in the grass.  God, it was nice to see some sun.

Baby, one of my parents' other cats, also kindly posed for me.

 I took a different route back home, as highway 101 had suffered a major mudslide near Garberville since I'd left.  The highway has been closed down for days, though there is some hope that it will open tomorrow.  I returned home on highway 299, and caught this view of Lake Shasta from my side window.

This is a beautiful drive, and at the summit, there was a considerable amount of snow on the ground.  The day after I got home, a mudslide temporarily closed 299 as well,  and I felt lucky to have negotiated the highway closures without getting stuck.

When I got home, the skies were grey, but the azalea in my front yard was putting on the best show in years, and some red tulips were also showing themselves.

I returned to the Top Down Raglan sweater I'm making with Laura Chau's free pattern and a bag of Noro yarn I couldn't resist buying recently .

The sweater is knit in one piece from the neck down, so there's no seaming.   I'm in the home stretch, making my way down the second sleeve, and I'm thinking of adding some embroidery over the fabulous long color changes for which Noro is famous.

While I was gone, Fatty kept the knitting basket warm.

Confection (76 x 90)

 

I'm in love with this quilt.  It reminds me of black licorice and cotton candy, or of Good and Plenty candies, so sweet they makes your teeth hurt and delicious to eat in the dark of a movie theater.  

The blocks were pieced on my treadle machine with some 5 x 5" squares Debra sent me, with some of my fabrics thrown in for good measure.  When I finished the blocks I took them upstairs to the sewing room, where I organized them on my design wall, and sashed and bordered them on my modern Janome, which is way more accurate.

For the border I had a very special piece of black and white  print which I bought at IPQF a few years ago.  I didn't quite have enough to go all the way around because it looked like the 1-yard piece had been cut in the dark with a hack saw--don't you hate it when that happens?--so I substituted a related print on the bottom.

Here's a close up.  I think those blue cornerstones make everything pop.

Have a great weekend.  If the new version of Jane Eyre opens in my area, I'll go to the movies.   I hope they have Good and Plenty at the theatre.

Spring Break

I'm now officially on Spring Break--whoo-hoo!  Although there will not be any bikini-clad beach trips  to warm locales for me, I will be off work for a week, and taking a much-needed breather.

Very appropriate to the season, I recently read our dear friend Allie Aller's new book Crazy Quilting: Modern Piecing and Embellishing Techniques for Joyful Stitching, which is a happy bowl of eye candy and practical skill-building instruction. 

 

The book is beautifully photographed, and has clear and precise tips and instructions on a number of fresh approaches to  crazy quilting.  In addition, it's a homage to the friendships among stitchers in the on-line community.  We see contributions from Susan Elliot, who has posted tutorials here and here for her beautiful queen project.  There are are also contributions from Debra Spincic, and...

...yes!  From me too!  My St. Therese quilt is in the gallery.  If you'd like to see process photos for how I made this quilt, the links are tabbed under "St Therese" in the sidebar and they're right here too.

Also appropriate to the season, I finished this lovely shawlette, which is from Stephen West's popular pattern Pagona, knit some some inexpensive Deborah Norville sock yarn.  The design is very attractive and not hard at all to knit.  Just a little something to throw over the neck, just in time for Spring.

Adaptations

After a lot of de-griming, I got my treadle up and running.  Like I posted before, she's a 1903 Singer 15, and according to the serial number she was made in Elizabeth, New Jersey, though, mysteriously, she came with a manual written in German.  After several rounds of cleaning and oiling, I replaced the belt, and she was ready to go.

I got all my technical information, including a facsimile version of the manual in English, off the web. There are YouTube videos on changing the belt and threading the bobbin.  If not for the Internet, I don't know that I could have gotten this machine working on my own.

After some false starts, I figured out that a small post was missing from the otherwise working bobbin winder, so I turned to yet another modern adaptation: the electric bobbin winder.  These are pretty useful, I don't know why I didn't get one sooner.  It easily solved my problem, and now the treadle is fully operational.  There's something sweet about the rhythms of sewing on a 108 year old treadle machine, and the modern adaptations don't subtract from it one whit. 

I'm reminded when sewing on the treadle of how easily I've adapted to the needle down setting, the automatic thread cutter,  and other handy innovations of my modern machine.  The old Singer is more temperamental and fiddly.  I have to be very precise with my technique, which isn't the case with newer machines.  I also have to pin a lot more than I've become used to due to that funny narrow foot.  Now I'm remembering vividly what it felt like to sew on the old family Singers when I was a girl: I have to approach this machine like a wild horse: cautiously and calmly.

But when the woman- machine relationship is in sync, some lovely things can come of it.  I've been making these big 9-patch blocks from 5" squares Debra sent me.  I'll sew them together when I get enough of them--either with or without sashing--and let her quilt it for donation. 

I also wound my Kool-Aid dyed yarn into balls:

I think I'm going to make a shawl with these coordinated colors.  I'll knit the body in the variegated yarn and do a lace edging in the solid color. 

The greenish yarn has already been cast on for a 28's Big Sister 77 shawlette, available on Ravelry.  The old lime green sweater is adapting to its new life as two completely different colored shawls quite nicely.

Playing Mad Scientist: Unraveling a Sweater and Kool-Aid Dyeing the Yarn

 

I saved this old sweater to harvest the yarn.  I wore this sweater a lot, but although the wool yarn was still good, the color had started to fade in spots, and it didn't fit me very well anymore.  

I unraveled it and wound the yarn into skeins. Here's my favorite tutorial on reclaiming yarn from knitted garments.   I got two big skeins: one from the back and one from the front, and two smaller skeins from the sleeves.  I soaked these for several hours until they were good and wet and then Koolaid dyed the yarn similar to the way I did before.

The small skeins got dyed with two colors of Koolaid:  purple and orange.  I just barely dipped part of the skeins in the purple, which resulted in an olive green.  The parts I left in longer dyed a dark brown, and the orange turned into a nice rust color.



Snazzy, huh?  These will make some nice fingerless gloves or a shawlette.  The yarn is fingering weight.

 

One of the big skeins got dipped in a pot of blue Koolaid, and then I pulled out one end, added more Koolaid to the pot, and let the other end get darker.

This is enough for a nice shawl.  Those light bands are the spots where I tied the skeins.  Next time I'll tie them more loosely, though I like the random light bits.

I ran out of Koolaid for the other skein, which I dyed an almost solid rust after a quick trip to the store for more orange. I've been accumulating  some shawl pattens on Ravelry, but I'll have to wait for the yarn to dry to cast on. 

I hope you're looking forward to a creative week.  I feel my schedule calming down into a more manageable pace, so I'm looking forward to some new projects.

"Her Radiance" (11x17)

I've been even more MIA than usual, working on a big project at work, and not having a lot of spare time.  However, I've been working on this piece a bit at a time, using one of Flor Larios's fabric images.

I had the idea that I wanted to use prairie points as a textural feature, and some of my extensive collection of metal buttons.  After some initial clumsy construction errors, this piece came together very nicely.  Friday I came home late and buzzing with adrenaline, so I sat down to finish the machine sewing, and then on Saturday, I added the hand work.  There are times when I just need to sew for the sake of my soul, and I finished this piece in just that mood.

I embellished this Virgin of Guadalupe image with machine stitching and embroidery, which also acted as quilting.  Don't you love her blue eye shadow?  That's what drew me to this sweet image in the first place.  I remember shopping for a Virgin of Guadalupe statue in Tijuana and selecting from the ones whose makeup wasn't too heavy-handed and whose eyeshadow wasn't too obvious.

I used a variety of plain metal buttons.  You can see my free motion quilting on her dress, and the blue inner border was cut from a pillowcase my mother sent me.

I've continued to use vintage linens for small quilt backs.  I used half a doily for the rod pocket, and I cut the back from an embroidered dresser scarf.  

The title of this piece comes from the Nican Mopohua, the narrative of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, written in the 1500s.  On the label I've included a quote from the narrative in the original Nahuatl language and in English: Her radiance was like precious stones, it seemed like an exquisite bracelet.  This is what I wanted to capture with the prairie points and the buttons: a picture of the light radiating from her person. 

Have a creative week everyone.