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Episode 30: Garden update and Space Cadet mini skeins baby sweater

Virtual Design board – My Virtual Quilt

Space Cadet Creations Mini Skeins Club

Check out my Instagram for photos of the jumper project!

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Episode 24: Wait, more stash acquisition?

Biggan Design

 

White for blanket borders. And Deadlines logo colours for a tea cosy?

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Space Cadet  

Mini skein club from Space Cadet

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One of a kinds from Space Cadet

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Champagne and Socks: Episode 23: Glimpsing Old UFOs

 

Current WIPs in focus

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Episode 21: Bear’s Rainbow Blanket Update, Yarn Shopping Live and Tea Cosies

Biggan Design

Bear’s Rainbow Blanket

 

Current status. Running out of white

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Episode 17: Not so much with the finishing of things

Orixa by Andrea Rangel

 

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  Hitofude Here is the yarn that arrived just as I finished recording – the darkest skeins are for the Hitofude, the other two were because you can get a discount after a certain $ amount ordered :)

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Episode 13: Castitonitis, Baby Sweater, Mini Skeins are go!

Loop – 15 Camden Passage, Islington
(The coffee shop I mention is – The Coffeeworks Project and was my best cup of coffee in London – 96-98 Islington High Street)

Fisherman’s Pullover from 60 Quick Baby Knits – I’m using Cascade 220 Superwash

Space Cadet Creations Mini Skeins Club

Space Cadet Creations Mini Skeins Pinterest

Join my craft circle:
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Episode 9: An angsty meander through knitted shawl patterns of future past

Downton Abbey shawl is the MKAL by Jimmy Beans Wool hosted through Ravelry

Mini sweater pattern from greensandjeans.blogspot.com

Artisan Corner: Peppermint Bay shawl by Mitenae at knitty.com

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Episode 5: Just Your Average Mini Skein Obsession

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Bears Rainbow Blanket

KnitCrate Mini Skeins

Space Cadet Mini Skeins Suggestions Pinterest Board

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December 5   Grey skies

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Rough counselling session yesterday. Rough in the sense that there were more questions than answers, more work to be done. Maybe that’s not so different to usual but it’s the first time in a very long  while (maybe since I first started seeing her) that my next appointment is in two weeks and not a month. And worse, it’s possible what I’m having is an existential crisis – what is the point of life? Etc. And I’m guessing that’s not a quick fix.

I have no idea why this post is so hard to write. I’ve been working on it all week. Balance is a weird thing. Or maybe it’s not weird at all. Maybe it’s a completely fictional concept. Something to strive for but to be okay about never actually getting. That’s what Elizabeth Gilbert thinks – that it’s just another bullshit way to make women feel bad about themselves – and I kinda think she’s onto something with that. That’d be because I’ve been feeling bad about myself lately. I spent all last week down, and pretty frustrated, at me, at things, at the lack of time in a week. People say “but hey you had a BABY last year” and that’s true, I did. And they say “don’t worry [about your laundry, the state of your house, what you eat, what you look like etc etc]” but they don’t really mean that, do they? They still judge you, your house, why you haven’t done whatever it is they think is the thing you should have already done by now.

I’ve been frustrated. Frustrated that I don’t have enough time and that I won’t ave enough time in the year to come to get everything I want to get done done. Sure the obvious response to that is “move your deadlines” but the problem is that I don’t want to. I also don’t want to deprioritise anything. Frustrated that my brain feels like it doesn’t work the way it used to.

I work after the baby goes to sleep for the night. If she goes down at 6pm, I can get maybe 6 hours straight of working done. I have Skype meetings with coeditors in this time. I do my work and my research. And really, 6 hours is a pretty good chunk of time. Sure I might be trying to squeeze some me time in then too but what am I? Greedy? The problem is that I still have a pretty severe case of baby brain. I still have gaps in my vocabulary and my brain still doesn’t work as sharply. It *feels* like it doesn’t work as fast, but maybe that’s just that I have less actual time in the day and I’m still expecting the same output (or the same output plus 20%). But last week. Oh last week. Everything I touched after 9.30pm, I broke. And I mean really broke. I ended up screwing a book up so badly it had to be remade 3 times. I had tided my craft cupboard into one worthy of a pic on any self-respecting Pinterest board and in one rash decision to resize the shelving spaces, the entire contents ended up in a Hoarders Buried Alive mountain on the floor in front of it due to a horrible miscalculation of structural integrity. There might have been tears.

Meh. Things got dire. I’m pretty down on my myself, on everything I’m trying to get done, on all the things on my to do list that even a year won’t be enough time to do. On all the things I’m not getting done. On the state of my house, my studies, my press, my unfinished craft. You name it, I suck at it. And how. My lovely husband booked me a night away in a hotel. I suspect I was getting a tad stressful to be around. It was a nice moment to try and short circuit my downwards spiral.

I’m not in a great headspace. And I can see where this all leads and I can tell you that I ain’t sliding back into the abyss. I’ve got me a pretty overstuffed bag of tricks here to fight back with. The abyss might be waving at me but I’m flipping it the bird. Last week I skipped all social activities and that was bullshit. This week I’ve done better at that and gone to mothers’ group and hung out with people who get a lot of this.

On Monday, I woke up and decided to start running again. It’s so weird how you can just not feel like doing something like running for two years and then suddenly change your mind. I’ve been trying to do (any) one of the 12WBT workouts for weeks now and just can’t find myself enthused. Michelle Bridges even has a learn to run program but I’ve never had much success following it. I decided to return to the Couch to 5k program because I’ve done it before and kinda loved it. Plus I already had the app on my phone. And OMG it felt great. I live about 1km from the ocean so I had this delicious breeze which just smelt and tasted revitalising. My tunes (I went for the Pitch Perfect soundtrack) reminded me how much I love music. And as I threw myself into that first run, which wasn’t too bad at all, I remembered that this is exactly the way to fend off frustration and depression.

I’ve made some progress this week. I finally managed to get my grand garden project off the ground. I’ve taken my before photos and today the first delivery of soil improver has been dumped on my front lawn ready for next week. Step 1 will happen and from there, step 2, hopefully, to get some lawn in. I’ve nearly finished organising my craft cupboard and started work on my 2015 to do list (as in how to tackle some of it). I started running. I’ve cut down on the coffee I’ve been drinking and increased drinking water. I sent a book to Print. I’ve worked on ebooks and other books in progress. I had a great meeting with my Phd Supe. I’ve taken some podcast workshops and set other things up. Progress has happened. I’m still not in a great headspace but I can see a way forward, at least. I’m not going down without a fight.



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So while I was in London last month, I managed to catch up with a friend good, very old friend of mine. We had a really lovely afternoon (photos to come in another post) and in it, we caught up on all things. And one of the things I love about good old friends is that they know you, you can’t throw a glamour over yourself and fool them into believe your spin. They see you for what you are. And so during this afternoon, we had a good long chat about the fact that I am a Procrastinator, with a capital P. Which, you know, I can complain about a lotta stuff but I can’t get away with a straight face denying that particular thing. We spoke a bit about it and I toyed with the idea of tracking how much time I work on things – I’d read a really interesting article that said that working 8 hours a day is all you need and you will get everything done, but that you really need to work – honestly – that full 8 hours.

I had been thinking about setting up a way of tracking, not necessarily to see how little work I do, but to actually look at it and use it as a way to maybe counter some bad habits. As it turned out, I didn’t need to spend too much time setting something up as I’d already installed Tictoc some time ago and had a couple of heading tasks in that app – it sits on your dock and you just click on and off as you switch from task to task. I added a few more things in like social media, household stuff, etc and I have some pretty broad titles like TPP, PhD, emails etc. I don’t really need to know the minutiae for this experiment.

I’ve only been doing it properly since about mid last week so I don’t yet have enough data for pretty graphs or anything and let’s be honest, I’m not about to reveal anything earth shattering here. I only got close to anything resembling an 8 hour day yesterday and that was with me pushing working til 1.30 am. Now, yes, I have a baby at home, what do I expect? But I’m studying full time at the moment, so what I expect is to be honestly able to show those hours or else that commitment is unrealistic (hey, what? I can talk reasonably about myself!) So yesterday I was pretty happy as I managed to earn my 12 red ticks for 1 gold star (yes I’m still running that system, it makes sure I touch base across a bunch of projects and not just get lost in one) and I got the 8 hour day of work done.

But today I’ve not managed to get myself to do very much at all. I had Mothers’ Group and then also Galactic Suburbia. And pretty much no motivation or brain space to do much else. Which kinda proves that thing where you can push really hard to double on one day but you pay for that by being able to do nothing the next and thus averaging to normal across 2 days.

I don’t think that my regular work output (before yesterday) is any different to when I had a full time day job ie if I replace the baby for that (which is not quite an equal trade …) I’m still working the same hours on TPP. Which kinda makes me amazed at what I’ve produced in so few hours and annoyed because now given all the time in the world I still don’t have any more time.

But yeah, since a new song sister, we already know this tune.

Today, remarkably, I actually picked up my quilting and worked on one of the Jinny Beyer blocks. Not only that, but I also started looking at how to finish this quilt (the borders and block placement etc). I haven’t thought or been inclined to sew at all since before the injections in my hands (sadly, I’ve had some pain back in my wrists this last week, so I guess they might have lasted me 3 months?). As usual, I’ve been freaking out because I was worried this meant I would never ever want to quilt again (EVERY FRIGGING TIME) and I didn’t know what it was that makes me interested. And of course now I’m worried I’ll drop the knitting and then wonder if I’ll ever want to knit again. Why can’t I be all poly with my crafts? Why???



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This week’s blocks were a breeze to make simply because I’d done all the planning weeks ago. How GTD of me! I made one whilst mainlining Emma Approved on YouTube and the other I made during our regular Kaleidoscope Skype meeting on Monday night.

First up, the blocks.

City Life Holds No Glamor is this title of this week’s letter by MRs A. B. D.

This block is called “Flock” and is block 34. And it was one of the hardest ones for me because after, gosh, 10 years or something, I finally cut up this fabric. I’ve been admiring it for years and so unsure what project to use it in but so scared to cut it up. It’s so so pretty. But. I don’t think I am a fabric collector. Or if I am, it’s ok to collect the fabrics inside of my finished quilts. And. There’s never going to be the perfect project for fabric you swoon over. There will always be the fear of cutting it up. Something can be finished or perfect but not both. And this project is a bit about just sucking it up and getting on with it. About progress. About consistency. And about working on something towards the end point. Therapy, if you will. I have a lot of fabrics I’ve collected over time that I want to just have large squares of it framed and I realised that the number of quilts you can make and have like that is one. So … you know … Get Things Done already!

This block is called “Hill and Valley” and is block 46. The lady in Paris fabric I bought at the craft fair trip just gone. So that has barely hit the sides of my stash. The other thing I’ve realised is, you can’t buy more fabric if you’re busy not using the fabric you already have. And there’s so much more beautiful fabric out there to buy and own …

This week’s letter from Mrs A. B. D. is all about how she loves good honest moral hard work having previously lived in Chicago and how she doesn’t miss it. I dunno that I am looking forward to the day America tires of jazz, as she yearns for, but I do agree that there is much to enjoy about watching the slowly changing landscape. That’s something I realised my soul misses, living in the suburbs of Perth which are flat and boring. And I only discovered this after visiting Tasmania and finding so much to drink in from the surrounds.

In other things I finished this week, Block 9 in the Solstice Quilt:

This one nearly broke me because of the lack of a good white pencil on black which meant all the pieces weren’t marked quite right. I bought a chalk pencil at the craft fair but I’m not loving that much more.

And something else.

I’ve been working on this sock for quite some time. I cast it on straight after I finished the socks I made for Deb. And … yeah. So, the sock knitting project for the year (knit as many as I can) was basically about picking kinda mundane sock patterns and the yarns I’m happy to gift away and then knit in the dark whilst I catch up on reading. I would both move theough my stash, make yummy socks for people I love and also get some reading done every day. I have carved out some time in my day for reading by, ahem, getting into bed at about 1am, a bit early for me, and then reading for about an hour in the dark whilst knitting. I can do pretty straight forward knitting without looking at the work.

But it turns out for me, that a lot of the enjoyment in knitting comes from playing with the yarn as it unravels and turns into the fabric. The enjoyment comes in watching the pattern of the colourplay reveal itself. And you miss all of it when you knit in the dark; you become completely disengaged from the piece. And I guess I’m a process knitter. So I stopped working on the sock completely for ages. Which is a ridiculous response. Lately I’ve been grabbing the project as I run out the door in case I have the opportunity to work on it somewhere else. And it’s progressed. I’m packing the sock for the weekend away and I’ll be finished with it pretty quickly.

And finally, my travelling projects. I am going to be travelling and this is what I’ve packed. I hate to be bored or to find myself in any moments where I have nothing to do but could have done something if I’d planned for it. So here are all (some) of my current projects all GTD’ed up. I have to say that in sitting down and cutting out all the blocks for the Farmers Wife ahead of time a couple of weeks ago was a bit of an epiphany for me. The envelopes in the top right hand corner are the last of those but when I get back I’m going to sit down and do another month ahead again. The ability to just grab one and have everything in there for the block ready to go has been awesome. And having it made me realise the value in planning for crafting.

I’m really a fly by the seat of my pants crafter, cutting materials up as I need them because that end of crafting is not the fun part. It’s the chores and it doesn’t feel like recreation or down time. But there are moments when you aren’t up to crafting, like if your eyes are tired, and they make good times for prepping ahead. So for travelling, I prepped little ziplock bags with everything I need for the project. So above, I have the pattern, the yarn and the needles/hook and any other tools, all in there for easy grabbing. And all the pieces have been precut for the quilt blocks as well. And there lies a week or two of happy crafting because all the thinking is already done for me! I’m going to start setting aside some time each week to do this regularly. It’s the “think and plan” bit of GTD and means projects won’t stagnate going forward! I can’t wait!

Happy Friday!



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And so I have begun! My intention was to post finished blocks on Fridays and I was really determined not to meet that goal on the first week. Which was really good because it’s pushed me to finish off one of the blocks in time for this post! The format is working!

So first up, the excerpt from the letter for this week, titled “Living in God’s Open Air” is by Mrs J E F, from Valley County, Montana. In her letter, Mrs J E F says that had she been asked the question (if she had a daughter of marriageable age, would she encourage her to become a farmer’s wife), 50 or even 20 years ago, she would have said no. But she says yes for having been asked in 1922. Firstly she cites the healthy lifestyle and also that the town lifestyle can be [well she doesn’t say bitchy but that’s what she means]. But then she goes on to say that she loves living on the from because it gives her an opportunity to make her own money from her eggs, from churning butter and from having her own veggie patch. She feels like this enables her to contribute by buying almost all the things for the house. Bit of a feminist answer out of the gate. I especially like the closing:

How beautiful our home was! It was only of logs, covered in summer with a wild clematis vine. I told out doctor that after five o’clock on winter nights we became New York millionaires for we had our easy chairs, a big fireplace and good books. We could not have had more in a mansion.

Indeed that does sound cosy!

So my plan for the quilting was that I would print out the templates I need as I go (there are 100 or so and are provided as PDFs on a CD that came with the book – 1 template per PDF. That’s a lot of paper. Definitely a downside to being provided this way). Anyway, I’ve seen that these little blocks are nice portable projects so I thought that it would be great to set up the 2 I needed for this week’s goal and then perhaps get ahead and set up a few blocks going forward.

You know what happened next. Yup, I started working on the third block cause it looked more fun than finishing the first two. This means I don’t actually have any in reserve either! Posting on a Friday with the week’s work is good for me because it forces me to actually finish two each week!

And here they are (excuse the lighting, I tried to get them done before the sun moved, didn’t happen).


Block 26: Cut Glass Dish


54: Kitchen Woodbox

I am hoping to get wadding this weekend so that I can experiment with Quilt As You Go and also so I can see how much fabric I’m left with after taking out for backing, as I go. Sadly I do not have as much fashion fabric stashed as I led myself to believe. That will need to be rectified …

One thing missing from the book is why Hird chose the blocks to go with the letters. I think that would have made a nice addition.

I’m now thinking I might like to read up on the history of quilt blocks. Do you have a recommendation of a book I should read?



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I promised myself as reward for finishing publishing projects X and Y, I could start playing with a new project. Well … I finished project X yesterday and maybe setting myself the goal of finishing two books in one day was a tad overreaching. So … I’m going to play with this new project anyhow.

On the weekend I popped in to the Perth Quilt and Craft Fair (and by that I mean that my husband shoehorned me out of my pjs and dropped me at the train station to make me go). I had a quick race around all the stalls – a lot of them are the same each year and this year I’m not feeling the buying things without a project intent. I grabbed some tools and ok, maybe some fat quarters just because.

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I then wandered through the quilt exhibition and enjoyed quite a few quilts. I really liked this one, which looked like a really example of the kind of version of Farmer’s Wife Sampler that I want to try (more on that in a bit).

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And then I had a chat to a friend who pointed out one of the special quilts on display – a Dear Jane quilt. And this is possibly the thing that made the whole event for me. The Dear Jane quilt is very similar to the Farmer’s Wife – it’s a pattern of sampler blocks, in this case it reproduces an original quilt made by Jane A. Blakely Stickle, and finished in 1863. The one on display at the Quilt and Craft fair was made by Angela Davis and made out of a collection of Liberty Fabrics over time and using a technique I’d never heard of before called Quilt As You Go (QAYG). This is quilting each block as you finish it and then sewing them together at the end and voila quilt is done! She had used the fabric she used in each block as the backing for it. This meant that the back was a gorgeous display of the collection of fabrics. This really appealled to me in the sense that if you use fabrics you’ve been specially collecting, it’s a nice solution to the cutting it all up to use it problem. Also, I LOVE the idea of QAYG because I hate quilting so much that I not finished any of my quilts yet. I have a nice pile of finished tops. I think I could attack quilting just one block at a time and also I assume this would give me the chance to improve across the project.

You see where this is all going, don’t you?

The eagle eyed will have already noticed I went and bought myself some fancy quilting thread before I left the show.

Some time ago, I bought myself a copy of the Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt. I loved the idea of it – a sampler quilt with a block each dedicated to a letter that was written to the competition run by the magazine The Farmer’s Wife: A Magazine for Farm Women in 1922 to answer the question, if you had a daughter of marriageable age, would you want her to marry a farmer? I’ve never actually been particularly interested in sampler quilts, they look so busy to me. But I love the idea of a quilt with a story and I thought it would also be a good opportunity to try a bunch of traditional blocks (yes, that is the point of a sampler quilt, ahem). And so the book has been on my shelf for a year or two as I’ve wondered how to make this project work.

On the weekend I decided that it might be fun to actually do this quilt. And do it with intent – as a blogging project. I also think it might be the best solution to try and use my fashion fabrics I’ve been collecting which I don’t want to cut up, and would rather have displayed in some way, yet don’t want to do straight blocks with borders with them. But they also don’t really all work in one cohesive colourway. The sampler quilt might get around that. Plus I get to keep the pieces whole for the backing and maybe improve my quilting.

The fabrics I’m thinking of using (funny how the collection wasn’t actually as many fabrics as I had thought I had, in my mind).

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In 2013, I picked up the Jinny Beyer Block of the Month project in 2013 with the idea that I would like to have a project where I finish one block on a regular basis. At the time I was knitting more than I am now. But when I’d been part of quilting circles, they had kept me honest about working on a smaller project and finishing it each month. And I really liked that.

So here it is. The Farmer’s Wife Sampler Quilt Project – it’s about 111 blocks, each 6 inches. I’m going to work on finished 2 a week which makes this a one year long project. And I’m going to post the finished blocks every Friday (is the goal) and read the excerpts of the letters as I go along.



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For my birthday, I allowed myself to buy a yard of a bunch of fabrics at the Fat Quarter Shop that I’d been leaving open in tabs in my browser.

So uh, yeah. I have a Paris thing going on. I’m adding these to a stack I already have. For a um, as yet non defined project. And quilt shop fabrics – it’s so meta I had to get it.

Ballet fabrics. Also a theme I am currently unable to resist collecting. I’m hoping the pinks work together so I can just make the one ballet themed quilt. Two is probably overkill.

I had to do a big thing and unpack the fabrics for these photos. It took me a couple of days of “can I really do that?” but  think I’m ok about it now! And I might even start thinking about what I’m going to do with these! I suspect a long time ago I made a rule about not starting new projects when the textiles came in because I might have a tendency towards startititis. You’re shocked to read this, I know. But the rule seems to have set in so hard that I now am leaning towards scary hoarder who buys stuff and then just never unwraps it or looks at it but stacks it in the ballooning back room.

I have a cute idea for the fashion fabrics I’ve been collecting which may or may not extend into using some of these. I’m going to let the idea percolate.

Meanwhile, my March KnitCrate finally arrived, and a little worse for travelling as it looked like customs had to pack it into a plastic bag, it having come apart at a seam. I was sad because a couple of my friends had already got theirs and I couldn’t yet agree that I loved the pink yarn but not the shawl pattern (now I can agree on both). The indie yarn this month is from Hazel Knits – a new dyer to me. And I can’t believe we got two skeins – that would make two pairs of socks if I went that way. Instead, I’ve cast on a little sweater/shrug for the baby. I’m going to think about what I will do with the second skein later. And MINI SKEINS (10) in Hazel Knits various colourways too.

The baby yarn is LanaMundi Yarns and is spun with a thread of silver which is exceedingly cool! I don’t fancy the little baby slippers, especially after seeing how quickly baby socks got schlepped off this morning. The kit came with ideas though – apparently silver threaded yarn makes mittens that can still navigate an iPad! Goodies in the kid included some boiled lollies and these two lovely knitting needle rulers. Can never have too many of those!

My finished piece this week has been the first (of 12) of the alternate blocks for the Solstice Quilt. They are log cabins with a fussy cut centre. 6 will look like this and the other 6 have a different centre. I’m sewing these sort of in batches but the lead block is finally done!

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March 23   Crafterly Update

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I’ve been posting these blocks of my current quilting project on Facebook as I finish them but here they are all in one place. These are the individual blocks of the month from 2013 Jinny Beyer block of the month quilt – Solstice. C bought me the kit for my birthday last year and I was so hoping to work on just one block a month as they got emailed out to me. It seemed like such a reasonable goal. Unfortunately, I got carpal tunnel with the pregnancy and ended up not being able to sew at all for most of my confinement. This was very devastating – being cooped up at home with time on your hands and being expected to loll about on the couch watching TV and NOT being able to craft!

The other obstacle with this project which I now know I should have tackled differently is that at the very beginning of the project, before the first block, Jinny sent out the in between block pattern which is a basic log cabin with a fussy cut internal square. You have to make 12 of them and the instructions suggested making them up whilst you wait for the first block. I took that to me, finish these before you make the star blocks. And that would have been well and good had I been machine sewing and not hand sewing because 12 log cabin is actually more than 1 month of hand sewing. And it took me a long time to let go of finishing these before starting the project. (I’m still sewing these damn log cabins!). But I’m very proud of myself for wading in and attempting this project. Yes I made mistakes on the fussy cutting but making mistakes and having a quilt is much better than never starting for fear of failing, I ended up buying some extra fabric for the fussy cutting and now I can cut away with error room to spare.

Block 1

Block 3

Block 4

Block 5

Block 6

Block 7

Here’s a close up of the fabric that is being fussy cut for the details in the stars (colour not quite this purple in real life)

And the fussy cutting – cutting out exactly the same diamonds etc across the fabric to produce the extra patterns when sewn together. I’m thoroughly enjoying this process. It requires precision and exactness but the payoff is amazing. I’m hoping to do this by myself in other projects when I’m finished this one.

And!!! Because the socks in 2014 project plods along, here is Sock Pair # 2!!! A gift, so clearly not my size!

These are made from Blue Moon Fiber Arts, Rocking Sock Yarn, with a Mille End in mediumweight. I’m not sure I’ve knit in medium weight of theirs before and I was surprised by how much leftover yarn I had even with making these socks in a few sizes bigger than mine. I love this colourway so the baby is getting a pair of socks from the leftovers!



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Look, I have a stashing problem. And I’m ok with it. But before I post about the actual problem, let me distract you with these miniskeins that just arrived last week in my Knitcrate kit for January.

These are from Zen Yarn Garden – a yarn dyer I’ve had my eye on for probably a decade but never actually bought any of their yarn to look at in person. These miniskeins  (10g of yarn each) are Serenity 20 Hand Dyed Fingering Yarn in 70% Superwash Merino Wool/20% Cashmere/10% Nylon.

This is the first month that I upgraded my subscription to include the miniskein Add On of 10 miniskeins. I LOVE miniskeins – so sweet and cute and a great chance to see a bunch of different colourways. My plan when I upgraded to this option was to crochet squares from each skein to make this blanket called Bear’s Rainbow Blanket. I had started this pattern to use up some stash of mine but I thought it might be nicer in these luxury yarns.

I think I’m right:

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This is the first square in the colourway Composition Storm from the Art Walk Series inspired by Kandinsky. This is exactly the purpose of subscribing to a kit like this. I’ve looked at this series for years online and not really liked it. But working with it up close, the colours are subtle and rich and just beautiful as a worked up piece. I don’t think this photo really does it justice.

I’m so excited about this project!

 



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Charm Quilt ProgressI’m unlearning everything I thought I knew.

I guess somewhere along the line I joined the cult of David Allen’s GTD. And it involves rolling out management systems to increase your productivity across all of your life. The goal is to have a mind like water and in order to do that, you need to feel like you’re on top of all aspects of your life – all the projects you’re working on, the ones you want to be working on at some point in the future and be able to take a step back and see it all at a glance whilst also being able to view your life’s goals and dreams all in the one go.

It’s taken me a while to get all those systems into place but I can see how once they are, and reassessed regularly, how your mind gets calmer and you feel less stressed. Even though, you don’t have any less work to do or are any less busy. You just get to stop thinking thoughts over again, having to remember things or having to figure out what you have to do when or what your priorities are.

One of the techniques I’ve used in the past to remind myself of things I have to do or to get myself to do things is to leave them out in front of my face – piles of paperwork on my desk when I really prefer  clear desks, things out on countertops and tables, craft projects in progress out on chairs and by my bed and all over the place. My thinking was if I put them away, I’ll forget that I was working on them. Or because I prefer clear, clutter free space, I’ll work on or do whatever is in the way so as to get the reward of clear spaces. Thing is? Your mind desensitises itself to the clutter so you get numb to it. But only numb enough so that you don’t notice it at a glance but not so numb that it doesn’t create background white noise stress.

It never occurred to me that there could be another way of keeping track of what I wanted to get done. Or that living in organised, clear spaces would energise and motivate me. I thought that was the goal rather than the means to the end.

Allen says that everything should have a place and that everything should be in its place. And the process of working towards that requires an assessment of just what exactly each and every “everything” is and a decision about what should happen to it – does it need something done? What’s the next action required for it to be done? Do you need it? Is it to be filed? Trashed? Does it need to be found a place. And then you put the next action on your list of actions and you put it somewhere, maybe away, cause you already have a stake in the ground so you no longer need the item itself to trigger a reminder for you. You have a system now.

I always thought that order and organisation and systems ruined/prevented creativity. I’m not really sure why I thought that. Considering I actually really love to feel organised and I thrive better on routine, or rather am a person of habit (just usually bad habits). I suppose I thought that my natural tendency is to want to *create* order through *doing* and that if there was already order, I wouldn’t be motivated to *do*. It never occurred to me that order and feeling organised and on top of things would actually energise and motivate.

It turns out, it feels fantastic to be able to put things out of way and know they aren’t out of sight and won’t be forgotten. A huge relief. A massive weight gone. And I can’t describe how it feels to start to see my house begin to look how I always imagined a grown up person’s house to look.

And the bit about creativity? I don’t think my brain has been so clear and able to work, effectively and productively, in a very very long time. I find myself writing paragraphs for my PhD randomly and with ease. And I’ve been working solidly on the quilt in the picture here.

In May, I took apart the whole quilt top that I’d assembled on this project so far as well as well as all the rest of the hexagons I’d pieced (which was enough for the rest of the quilt top, except I hadn’t decided that yet). It took me nearly a week to unpick all the hand sewing which I’d done over the course of maybe two years. And then I picked a new pattern. The original pattern, you see, didn’t work out – I had wanted to work with more colour play – light, dark and mediums to create a sense of shadows and movement. Except, I’d pieced the hexagons with related materials rather than in true charm square style – randomly – and it just didn’t work. I decided to abandon the original plan and just go with something else.

I pieced all the new hexagons first because I knew that what I needed to do was lay them all out and work out how I wanted to piece them together for the quilt top, rather than do it ad hoc as I went along. As I normally would have done, eager to see “progress” as I worked. But I stuck with it and I really did piece all the hexagons first. And then I got my husband to help me rig up a design wall. My very first design wall. And I’m addicted to it now! The freedom it’s given me to be creative has been amazing. I threw all the hexagons up, in a rainbowish layout. And then I spent a few days rearranging them all til I got the quilt to look balanced. I’ve never done that before. I’ve never worked on the overview as well as the fine scale at the same time, knowing where I was going as I was going. I thought working like that, on craft, would reduce the feeling of creativity – the knowing how it was going to look by the end at the very beginning. I thought it would take all the fun out of it. But actually, it’s given me focus and direction because at each step, I’ve known what the next action was. There’s no need for procrastination because I don’t need to think or improvise what happens next. I don’t need to put it away for a year to think about how I’m going to make it work.

And before the end of August, I’m going to have finished this quilt top. I’ve never worked on a project this way before. I’ve never finished a project this quickly before. And I ended up with colour play in the end after all. Adding the white triangles to create a star around each hexagon has added a sense of movement. The rainbow (a layout I have formally always detested as I felt it was pedestrian) actually gives the unmatched pieces a sense of uniformity and pattern. And the dark and light layout for each hexagon actually gives some shadow affects too.

The process has been really enlightening. Both for how I will approach crafting going forwards but also for much bigger life projects.

And normally, I panic when I am so focussed on one craft because I feel like it means I’m never going to be obsessed with the other one again. My old knitting versus quilting war. And I have a lot of knitting WIP projects there to be done. And also a lot of quilting ones. But now I have a “Craft Projects I Want to Make” list. Which I am still building. And now I have a management system that I am looking forward to trying out, once I’ve finished the Charm Quilt, to see if it will ease my distress over choosing my craft obsession :) We shall see! I suspect there will be some serious finishitupitis going on around these parts in the next few months.



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December 6   Finished Socks!

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Sunrise Socks

First up. Finished pair of socks! These are my standard sock pattern in Lightweight Socks that Rock (Blue Moon Fiber Arts) in the colourway Zest.

And they make me happy. They are like a tequila sunrise or something. I love that they don’t match. I think they look exactly like the end of a great day. I can almost smell the heat slipping out of the air as the sun slides out of the sky.

Two days in a row of finished projects. I could get used to this! I picked up the closest work in progress when I finished my cardigan, something that wouldn’t require much thought to pick up and work on. It turned out these only needed the toe on the second sock which took not even half an hour to do. I think the stumbling was I’d lost one of the needles and I had to go find one. Sigh. So easy to put something down and find a stumbling block to prevent you just finishing it!

I’m intending to do an “airing of the stash” a la Cast On which I’m hoping will both catalogue all my works in progress into a nice neat spreadsheet of to dos for next year but also find a bunch of projects that I might get excited about. I’m thinking of being a bit more stern with my stash management. I’m thinking of *gasp* culling some of the stash I may not like or prioritising gifting finished pieces to those who might appreciate the colourway etc. I thought it might be fun to set those up in kits going into 2013 and then having them as things to work through over the year. *If* that doesn’t make “fun” into “work”.

The thing I’m starting to realise is, I tend to knit socks a lot because they use 1 skein of yarn and they justify the accumulation of random skeins of yarn that I love. And that’s what my stash is – a huge pile of single skeins of yarn. That you can only then make what? Socks, mittens, scarves or hats in. And jumpers etc are scary cause you have to invest more money in the yarn (and that makes it harder to justify changing your mind or going off a project idea …) But the stash itself has guilt attached – I feel like I can’t really buy more yarn that I like cause I have so much I have accumulated and done nothing with … I’m still wrestling with this guilt.

Let’s not even extend it to see how it works with the book stash. Or the fabric one. Or …

Today’s tea: T2 Strawberry Bliss Chai 1 star out of 5. (I *want* to like this tea so much more than I do. I think I just do not like chai. Or perhaps just cloves)

Today’s craft project: Blackberry Socks

 



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December 4   Knitted Jumper!

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photo(34)Here it is! My very first completed adult sized jumper! Sure it’s a cardigan. Sure it’s still got to have its ends sewn in and buttons sewn on and be blocked. But still! Finished!!!

I cast this on as my Olympic Knitting project way back in was it July? And for me, this is pretty focussed effort, really. Finished in the same year I started! Obviously not worked on continuously ahem. But yeah, it’s got me excited about the potential of knitting more large garments ie other than socks.

So, this is a pretty happy tick in my knitting bucket list book – first sweater knitted.

I also knitting I-cord for the first time. And button holes. And struggled with the cast on which drove me crazy! It was knit top down all in one piece and then the arms knit in the round, casting on to stitches that had been placed on hold. Pretty fun!

So details – Ravi Cardigan by Carol Feller  in Aubergenius colourway, Socks that Rock by Blue Moon Fiber Arts.

 

Today’s Tea: T2 Chamomile

Today’s Craft Project: Finished!



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November 29   Honeymoon Knits

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This is a couple of things in one – multi list ticking!

I decided I wanted to have a knitting project to take on our honeymoon. Sometimes I feel very industrious on the plane. Sometimes I feel over tired and need something to keep me focused. And I also feel like, as well as the site seeing and the hanging out with C, I want to do a few things that just make me happy – after a whirlwind year (of awesome) in which I haven’t really felt like I’ve had a lot of time to do downtime things, like knitting.

Coupled with this, earlier this year I bought a copy of The Knitter’s Life List and had a skim read. Something I really was taken aback by was that I’ve been knitting for over 30 years and whilst I love what I have made, I’ve actually not been as adventurous a I might think I have in terms of my knitting. I taught myself to knit socks with double pointed needles. I’ve made some shawls. I’ve knit in the round and so on. But here’s this big book of things that actually I’ve not even thought about trying. And it encouraged me – yes via the favourite tool of a tick-off-able list – a whole bunch of new ideas of things to go out and look for and try. These include trying new patterns as well as different textiles.

I’ve been on the lookout for these so I can tick them off my list, trying them out first, of course! And I came across this little KAL (Knit A-Long) with a partnering with my favourite yarn dyers – Blue Moon Fiber Arts (ie discount voucher) – Sartorial Cowl. Basically, the idea is you get a clue – or part of the pattern – each week and you knit along and find out what you were knitting at the end. Sounds like heaps of fun. It usually takes so long for the yarn to reach me that mostly the KAL has finished by the time I can start. And so it has again this time. But that’s ok.

I don’t think this is a usual pattern for me. Firstly, it’s a different yarn from what I normally buy from Blue Moon – this is a superfine merino in a bulky weight. When I was browsing the site for colours I thought I might like, I came across this one, called The Kracken, and knew that was the one I had to have!

I’m not normally into cowls – I’ve not knit one before but they always struck me as well .. headbands for your neck or something. So… not something I’ve knit before and in a yarn I’ve not tried. Seems to tick some boxes. And then it seemed small enough a project for a short trip and then I could wear it on said trip too. Seemed like a win all round.

The yarn arrived today and I’m so tempted to knit it now. And I would have started tonight if I wasn’t still working on my first cardigan which I am hoping to have finished to take with me as well.



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