Triple Kitties

I was expected a visit from my grandkids from Southern California so I pawed through my drawer of panels perhaps to make up something for them prior to their visit. I came across these three kitten stuffed toys already cut out from its parent panel. What caught my interest was that each kitten had an oval base. I have absolutely no idea how long I have had these plus there were no instructions anywhere in sight.

Inserting the oval base would take a bit more finagling than just flat sewing. I have recently completed a laser cut blue quilt top with curved piecing (post for January 10, 2018) so felt relatively skilled and not intimidated by the mini-challenge. I made a sharp central crease with my thumbnail enabling me to line up the midline of the base with the midline of the front and the back of the kitten.

Then I pinned the living blazes out of the little curve, sewed the base to the front and then repeated for sewing the base to the back.

Even though I pinned from the curved side, I flipped it over and sewed from the straight side. I stitched slowly directly over the pins. An instructor once told us that sewing over pins is not a problem for your sewing machine as long and you sew very slowly over them so the pins have a chance to move away from under the needle as it descends. Works for me. No broken needle and no bent pins.

Only after the oval base was on did I sew around the outline of the kitten shape. I like the little detail of the kitten breed printed on the base.

That oval base adds more dimensionality to the kitten and it can stand more upright on its own. I stuffed the kittens so they were squishy soft and not so much that the bottom base would bulge excessively.

The labeled bases, which sport the breed of each kitten, eased in very smoothly with no tucks or folds. I considered inserting some sort of stiffener in the base but rejected the idea as an additional complication that might also reduce the huggable aspect of the toy.

Here is the completed trio of kittens, one each for the 4 year old, 2 year old, and 2 month old.

The two older girls are positively in love with our geriatric cat Wima. When they Facetime my husband and me, we definitely have to flip the view to focus on our cat so they can pet her over the air waves via the screen on their mom's cellphone. They are visiting now and are thrilled to pet her in person. Next week they will be able to take their own mini-Wima replica home with them. Yes, the live Wima is grey – but details... details... ! Linking up with Let's Bee Social #231 to share the kitties.

Drapery Panels with Grommets

My family room has two 4 foot wide windows and an 8 foot wide sliding glass door. I planned on making four drapery panels, one each for the two 4 foot wide windows and two for the 8 foot wide sliding glass door. Panels would hang on only one half of the windows and remain open at all times. They were to add softness and homeyness to the room and not be functional for light control. The drapes were to coordinate with the rug on the floor which is a floral swirl pattern in blue, aqua, taupe, and navy on a grey background.

I picked a large scale fabric of stylized trees in the same colors as the rug but on an ivory background. I wanted the drapes to run floor to ceiling and, since the fabric is a very large scale print, I did not want to detract from the graphics with pleats. I decided to do a grommet style drape. I had never done this before. However, when my kids were babies I would sew their clothes and add gripper snaps at the crotch and down the legs. Other than grommets being way bigger, how different could they be from gripper snaps?

The pattern repeat of my chosen fabric is 25". To go floor to ceiling in an 8 foot tall room requires 96" plus 4½" turnover for the top heading 4" wide stiffener. Adding a 4½" rule of thumb allowance to turn up a hem totals a length of 105". Four repeats is too little at 100". At 125", five repeats is a bit wasteful, but necessary. I cut four lengths of fabric five repeats long each. I turned over 4½" at the top edge and stitched on a 4½" wide non-woven heading stiffener butted up to the fold. Then I wrapped ½" of the fabric over the lower edge of the stiffener and zigzagged in place. The back side of the header is visible in later pictures. The non-woven header is shown in the next photo.

I initially bought Dritz plastic grommets size #12 with that are meant to snap in place. But they did not hold well enough with the thickness of two layers of fabric and a stiffener sandwiched between the two layers. They may possibly be OK for sheers or light weight curtains but most definitely not for drapes. Instead I ordered size #12 metal grommets from Amazon, 1-9/16" hole diameter. From my ancient low tech drafting days I used a plastic circle template to draw the hole sizes to cut out. Using a 1⅝" hole was perfect and I drew them with a fine 0.5 mm marker on the right side.

Drapes must have an even number of grommets in order to return to the wall the same at either side. I chose eight, a pretty common standard and the quantity in which the sets of grommets are typically packaged and sold. The holes for the eight grommets were equally spaced  6⅝" apart:

½sp O space O space O space O space O space O space O space O ½sp

Before cutting out the holes,  I stabilized the three layer sandwich so the fabric and header would stay aligned. I stitched a vertical line at each position and then, with the largest stitch size I had on my Pfaff, I stitched all across the header parallel to the top, through the midline of the grommet circles, a stitching line I would later remove.

To get the hole started I first tried folding the fabric in half and snipping in the center of the circle. That was difficult to do through six thicknesses and I nearly nicked the tip of my fingertip a couple times. I later came up with slicing a starting slot by poking a hole with a seam ripper and slicing outward to a point on the drawn circle. I inserted a straight pin at the marked line so I did not overshoot.

Cutting out 32 circles with scissors was not as onerous a task as I first thought it might be. My husband tried using a hole saw in his drill press in the garage but that method just shredded the fabric and flung the sample far out into the driveway. After cutting out the stabilized holes, the next step is to insert the front part of the grommet, the one with crenellations along the inner diameter (like the tower of a castle or the top of a rook in chess), into the hole from the front of the drapes. The hole fits snugly around the upward facing crenellations and I smoothed all around with my pointer finger or thumb.

Then I added the grommet back retaining ring with teeth that grip the fabric. Each of those upright tabs from the grommet front will then get curled outward and bent over, tucked within the annulus of the grommet back all around.

A closeup of the black hard rubber tool illustrates a base with a curved upper surface to mate with the grommet front. A plug then flips over the mated grommet assembly that sandwiches the fabric header. When pounded down with a mallet or squeezed into place with a press, the grommet back and front are then joined, crimping the drapery fabric in between.

My husband has a press so we did not need to pound with a mallet. I was lucky to have him as my brute force input.

At first I had bought four sets of eight grommets each, exactly the amount I needed for the drapes. My husband wisely encouraged me to buy some extra grommets so we could experiment with non-drapery fabric and perfect the installation technique. I did order one more set of eight from Amazon and they were there within a day.  Doing trial runs also gave us the experience of learning how to remove grommets that did not go in quite as desired. His array of tools to peel open those bent over crenellations was quite extensive.

The circle on the right in our practice panel was cut - er, uh, shredded by the hole saw.  Removed and deformed grommets can most definitely not be used again. We only had one out of 32 go in poorly in the real drapes. I was not paying enough attention and an extra fold of fabric had gotten crimped in. All is fixed and to our satisfaction now. 

The grommets look great in the drapes on the rod.

We bought a rod that looks like pipe for an industrial vibe.

The drapes slide easily and are not so crowded that the fabric print is lost.

Backing away a bit, here is what the corner of the room looks like. That blue leather chair is my favorite to curl up in and read in –  or stretch out on and nap.

There are a lot of patterns going on in this room, a quilter's delight. They all seem to work together because they share so many colors in common. I have a post March 30, 2018 about positioning the fireplace tile. 

The hardest part about this project was dragging around and manipulating the weight of each panel. By the third panel, I realized it was best to pile the panel on a chair and slide that chair from the cutting table, to the ironing board, to the sewing machine, and finally to the grommet marking and press station on my hall counter. Other than that, it was all straight sewing and not rocket science. 

I have thirty two of these leftover cut-out holes. They are double sided. Like donut holes, they must be good for something. Perhaps the folks at Lets Bee Social #231 will have some ideas.

My DL2Q Blog Book – Volume 9

I have added Volume 9 of my DianeLoves2Quilt blog book to my ongoing series that I make from the online service Blog2Print.  Note to self: make up these blog books this more often and smaller. Volume 9 contained 355 pages which is really too thick and heavy to handle. It contains only six months of posts but is near the maximum that Blog2Print can handle. I typically choose to include comments in the book, maximize the photo size, and keep the formatting the same as when I published the posts online, opting neither to reposition nor resize photos to minimize pages.

Volume 9: May 31, 2017 - Dec 27, 2017

My daughter Robin and I are pictured on the front cover seated together while visiting the Houston Quilt Festival. The post for our fun time there was dated 11/9/17. My quilt out of Kaffe Fassett prints titled Out of the Blue is featured on the back cover. The post describing this quilt is dated 8/16/17. When I created this book in June 2018, I chose the cover color of green to pick up my green straw hat on the front and the green round of prints on the back cover.

The Dedication for Volume 9 reads

DL2Q Vol. 9 takes you to several quilt shows, the big one in Houston and three in California. Besides quilts sewn, there are many grandchildren-focused items: crib sheets, blankets, dolls, and pillows. Holiday decor includes pumpkin and haunted house wall hangings and a Christmas tree skirt. A zany zebra will greet you, too.
– Diane I. Chambers

Here is the Table of Contents for Volume 9

Links to my previous volumes can be found at
          DL2Q Volume 8 posted 06/27/2017

          DL2Q Volume 7 posted 06/27/2017

          DL2Q Volume 6 posted 06/27/2017

          DL2Q Volume 5 posted 12/16/2015
          DL2Q Volume 4 posted 03/18/2015
          DL2Q Volume 3 posted 03/18/2015
          DL2Q Volume 2 posted 04/14/2014
          DL2Q Volume 1 posted 04/17/2013

The Volume 1 post contains tips I learned when I first started making these books. The post for Volumes 3 and 4 has an explanation of why I no longer add captions to the photos on my blog. To these tips I'd like to add what I learned from Volume 9. If I keep the number of posts I include to 24 or less, the Table of Contents will be one page and not have that small spillover onto a second page. My nine-volume collection of DianeLoves2Quilt is shown below. From this overview I notice that square format photos make the best cover presentation and, after that, portrait format does pretty well, also. Landscape format is my last choice format option.

This book covered up to December 2017 so I have more than enough posts in 2018 to make up another book, especially if I want it to be fewer pages. I will probably do that now and then wait until the site's next sale to submit it.

Vintage Quilt Top from Street Fair

Sunday May 28th my husband and I went to an antique fair on the main street of our neighboring town of Pleasanton. One of the vendors was selling a quilt top that caught my eye. I am not a fan of the vintage 1920's look with the signature bubble gum pink but I liked this combination of pinks and blues and reds and navies and it had dots and checks, which also typically appeal to me. So I bought it for $20 and once I got home, I spread it out to get a better look.

The information on the sales tags gave its dimension as 64" x 77" and dated it approximately pre 1910 from Osceola, FL. I was not convinced of the validity of the dating but that was not important to me. I hated to see something that someone had worked so hard on a long time ago go unappreciated.

I looked up typical colors by year in a quilt index wiki. The pink could have been somewhat  associated with the stated time maybe a few years later.

The workmanship was not stellar but I liked the overall carefree feeling the quilt top radiated to me. From the closeup  you can see that some corners are nipped off, not all intersecting seams meet where they should, and the stripes are kinda of cattywampus and not consistently oriented. I would be beating myself over it if I had pieced the top but I am OK with the casualness of this creation.

I have a 5½ yard of pink fabric that I will use as a backing. Why I have that much of this pale pink novely mini-print is beyond me but I will now be able to put it to good use.

A close look at my backing fabric reveals the phrase Hippity Hop Hop over and over again. The vintage dot fabric is very thin, almost like a gauze, but perhaps when quilted to a batting and backing it will be a bit sturdier.

The colors do blend and are a decent complement to each other. Maybe a navy blue binding is in its future. Two sides have edge sashing in the dot print and two do not so I will need to figure out what to do with that. I am considering cutting the sashing width in half on the two sides that have it and using that on the two sides that do not. I have the best of intentions to not agonize over the quilting of this top and regard it as a learning experience. Fingers crossed.

 

Also at the antique fair I scooted into one of the home decor stores along Main Street. I bought this scarf. It is actually large enough to be a shawl.  It looks like I was in a coral pink and navy mood. I show it here because the pattern is so fascinating to anyone who loves fabric. It is uncanny how the colorway of the scarf and the quilt top are so similar, yet one screams modern and the other murmurs vintage. They both even have a little bit of taupe thrown in.

Speaking of interesting patterns, I also bought a table from one of the artisan vendors on the street. It is a table welded from a miscellanea of tools and hardware. I thought my husband would fall in love with it but he did not and argued we had no place to put it; but I bought it over his protestations. Here is the welded table top. It holds my interest for quite a while, noting all the items I see. Can you find the following: wrenches, nuts, hatchet, gear, bicycle chain, chain link, hook, washers, pan, horseshoe, hook, mesh, golf club heads, bolts?

I tucked it between two chairs in our family room. I think the nail heads on the chairs arms and the metal of the table complement each other. The curvy legs repeat the swoopy pattern of the carpet, also. I plan to get a piece of plexiglass or glass to set on top. My husband has agreed, now that he sees it in place, it is pretty cool and he is glad (sort of) I insisted we buy it.

Speaking of finding, I am going to find my way to Let's Bee Social #230 and link up.

Weekly Wordle 355

I am not sewing – other than cluttering the dining room table and hallway laying out fabric to cut drapes for the family room; so I decided to stall and write a bit.

An explanation of a Weekly Wordle is given in my previous post for June 5, 2018. Briefly it is a writing exercise to write a story or poem using all twelve of the words in the colored box. Here is my effort for The Sunday Whirl's Weekly Wordle 355.

The blaring horns from the city traffic on the street below were dulling her senses, crushing her spirit, and stifling her breathing as she sat huddled over her computer keyboard. If she were to write anything of merit, she would need to dig deep, act as if that urban auditory pollution were not bearing down on her ear drums, and listen to what her heart and mind were trying to whisper to her above the din. Silence was sacred but clearly it had been years since this small patch of earth had prospered from its presence.

Perhaps, since I am in a sewing lull, I should change the phrase "if she were to write anything of merit" to the phrase "if she were to sew anything of merit". But then I would have used only eleven words!

Then again, if I had written nothing at all I might have those drapes cut out by now.

Writing Is Creative, Too

Rather than dig out my sewing room so I could be productive, I chose to browse some of blogs I follow sporadically. My previous post was titled When You Don't Sew, Buy but we can't always do that, now can we? I needed another outlet.

I like the blog Not Afraid of Color by LA Paylor and her post for yesterday June 3, 2018, titled Writing prompts... caught my eye. She started participating in a writer's linking party at the blog The Sunday Whirl. Basically, once a week on Sunday, a list of words is given and the writer is challenged to compose a story or poem using all of them if possible. Here is my first attempt at Weekly Wordle 354 where I attempt to use all twelve words in the green box. Maybe when my sewing stalls, I will write for fun instead. 

Dang! First she felt the blast of hot air and then heard the front door slam. Were they back already? Had she lost that much track of time? She thought the traffic would be bad, literally at a crawl on the holiday weekend and suspected, or rather hoped, she’d have at least a couple hours to herself while they were at the Little League game. This was the first chance she’d been alone in quite a while. She could empathize with Anna from Frozen singing, “for the first time in forever”. As soon as they’d left she’d raced to hang up the clothes from the dryer before they wrinkled, started another load on a wash cycle, flipped on her favorite home decor channel, and flopped onto the couch, remote in hand. Sometimes she was convinced that there was an invisible link between her butt hitting a seat cushion and the utterance of a plaintive cry of “Mom…” from someone. Then she heard it. “Mom… the other team had to forfeit. Where are you?” Sigh.

When You Don't Sew, Buy

I have been traveling and not sewing and have no sewing related topics on which to pontificate. I did however, attend a Sandy Klop open house this past Friday featuring her American Jane fabric line where I purchased some blender and solid fabrics and two patterns. They are shown below.

The dots are ½ yard cuts, the solids are ¼ yard lengths. Solids are a stash expansion area for me.

I was intrigued by the spiral checks circle pattern and thought my husband would get a kick out of the flags and semaphores.

This entry is hardly long enough to be an engaging blog post but posts like this are my method of cataloging my purchases. Being short is good. It means I did not buy a lot. Even less engaging than this litany of what I bought, is digging out my sewing room counters so that I can sew! That will happen. Soon. Very soon.