Antiqueing..

Is that how you spell it? Hmmm, hope so..LOL

I spent some time this weekend roaming around the antique mall in my hometown. I started on Friday with my Mom. The dime store has converted half of its space into antique booths, so we explored those while out and about. I found 2 wood spindles that are working great as Nostepinnes. I didn't know what a nostepinne was until I saw one on a knitting show on PBS last week. When I saw these 2 things in a bowl in one of the booths - for $1 each - I snatched them up. They work just like a nostepinne should work. However, now that I've researched them online a bit, I realize they are wooden spindles - probably for an industrial loom, as they have metal pieces on the ends....oh well, I'm repurposing them well and they look great in amongst my things in my sewing room :)

Mom and I also checked out the new yarn shop, as well as the new quilt shop in town. Both shops are great and I expect we'll both be spending some time in each one. I even sold a few pincushions to the quilt shop for them to sell on consignment for me. Win win :)

Well, apparently the antique bug wasn't satisfied, so on Sunday I went back to town and roamed the large antique mall for a few hours. It took me 2 1/2 hours to poke my nose into every booth they have - this place is huge. It has 2 upstairs and 2 basements....whew! Anyway, I found a neat windchime of glazed pottery for $1.25 and a glass flower frog for $2.50. Then, as I was at the 2nd to last booth in the place, I noticed all these planks of wood stacked up against the wall. The tags on them identified them as cherry, hard maple and walnut! They were huge pieces of wood, and none of them over $11.00 a piece! So, a quick call to DH and I was lugging one of the pieces down the stairs for him. Then, I learned that everything in the mall is 10% off if it doesn't say "firm" on the tag! Whoa! All told, I got to shoot the antique bug in me for a while for $9.23! Not bad :)

Oh, I finished the crochet bag this weekend. Mom likes my variation much better than her version of the pattern. She followed the pattern faithfully and got a very floppy bag out of it. I followed the pattern and got a circle - it wouldn't turn 3-D for me at all. I finally ripped the whole thing out and revised the bottom - now I have a very nice bag to hold my odds and ends of yarn bits. I'm liking it :)

We're having a yard sale at my sister's house next weekend - so the house is in an uproar as DH and I are pulling things to get rid of. The criteria for this sale: if it hasn't been touched in more than 3 years, it's going. There are a lot of things I love, but I'm not using, and since we need the money, it's time to get rid of them.

What I've Been Working On...

I promised you an update on what I've been working on lately. Here it is!

While on breaks at work, I've been working on my cable scarf. I found the pattern for it here. It's a good beginner cable pattern, and I'm enjoying working on it very much. I'm using WoolEase yarn and it's so wonderfully soft. I'm not a very fast knitter, so I don't expect to have it finished this year - but as long as I'm still enjoying it, it'll still see some working time.

The other thing that's been on the work table lately is the Circle Quilt. I had found sticky dots that were the size I needed for the circles, and was in the process of basting the seam allowances around the dots. But it was going very slowly! And, I couldn't iron the circles with the sticky dots in there - they became permanent! So, one day, as I was working on appliqueing some more of the leaves, it occurred to me that I enjoy needle-turn applique. And why is a circle considered harder to applique than any other shape? Sure, getting a perfect circle can be tough, but if you have a perfect line to follow - it can't be impossible. Also, I was having some trouble getting the circle's seam allowances to stay tucked under (as you can see in the picture below). So....I changed my approach.

I've begun tracing around the sticky dots on the front of the fabrics and things are moving along much quicker! I got about 150 of these done last night while watching a movie with DH.

I also wanted to share with you a recent purchase I made. I found both of these glass jars at Hobby Lobby. I think they work perfectly for my spools of thread and my fabric scraps. And I just love the look of clear glass bell jars.

This last picture is included only because I felt it was time to introduce you to another of our family members. This is Boots. She lives with us both by accident and force of will. You see, her mother was a member of our family about 10 years ago. We rescued her and took her home. We lived in a 3rd floor apartment in a large city. We used to leave the sliding door to the balcony open for the cats to get in and out when they wanted to. One morning we woke up to a cat missing. Apparently she had jumped from one balcony to another and disappeared. Imagine my surprise when I spotted her hanging around the apartment building in the middle of winter the following year! After 2 or 3 days and nights of trying to catch her, we finally succeeded and brought her back home again - only to find out she was pregnant. Later that spring we welcomed Boots and 2 brothers into our family. We found a home for one of her brothers, and finally decided to take the rest of the family to my uncle's farm so they could live as barn cats (we were currently at 7 cats in a 2 bedroom apartment!) When we got to the farm, the mother and brother took off, happy as larks to be outside running around. Boots, however, hunkered down and started wailing. Well, soft-heart that I am, we ended up taking her back home with us. She's been with us ever since. And you can see, she loves getting involved in everything we do. In fact, right now she's circling my chair as I type, trying to find a way up on the computer table. :)

It's the Journey for Me

If your favorite kind of blog entry is one about a finished project, my blog probably won't be on your favorite's list. You see, I just don't seem to get many things to the finished stage. Don't get me wrong, I love a happy dance as much as the next gal, but it's not what drives me. For me, it's the journey.

I usually start a new project with the pattern. I am not and will probably never be an "art quilter." Maybe it comes from my history as a cross-stitcher, but for me, my jumping off place for a new quilt is the pattern. I never feel comfortable when I try to start a quilt from the fabric-pulling stage - I always have a pattern in mind when I raid my stash. Now, that doesn't mean I won't make changes to the pattern - quilt or cross-stitch - but I don't like to start from nothing. I have to have a plan to work from.

I've even considered translating a photograph into a quilt. But I can't just look at the photo and start creating the quilt from bits of cloth and thread, oh no. I have to come up with a way to enlarge the photo onto paper so I can make templates. Of course, the easiest way to manage this is with a projector and a dark room. Unfortunately, I don't own or have access to one. So, I'm stalled, waiting for inspiration to strike and show me a different way to get my templates.

Don't get me wrong, I love the process I choose to make my quilts. That's what keeps drawing me back to the craft. The more handwork a project has, the more I love it. I'm actually considering giving my rotary cutters and cutting mats away and going back to templates. They're tried and true and I get much better results using temmplates than I ever did with a rotary cutter. Plus, it connects you to your project more, the more you handle it. You stitch more memories into it the longer you work on it. Heck, I've got projects that I've been working on for over 8 years, and I love them as much now as the first day I started working on them. I'm almost afraid to finish some of them - it will be like losing a good friend that I could sit down and enjoy the evening with.


On that note - I'd like to share a couple of things I did manage to get finished. These are my carry-along goody bags. The first one is my current favorite. I got the pattern as a free insert from Connecting Threads when I purchased a fabric pack. You can find it here, with a different fabric pack than the one I bought.

(I have no idea how the link to the above picture was goofed up...sorry - I also don't know how to fix it)

I changed the pattern slightly by stuffing one of the inner pockets with fiberfill and stitching the top closed, rather than constructing a round pincushion for the bottom of the inside. I still want to add beads to the drawstrings, but I haven't made the time yet. As you can see, it holds everything I need to work quite well, and when it is closed, it becomes small enough to toss into my bag for work so I have everything I need for breaks and lunches.

This next one is another favorite of mine. I made this one from a pattern that was given to me (I don't know where it came from). I modified it again by making the outer layer of fabric a solid piece, rather than construct the flying geese that the pattern calls for. It's a good way to use a favorite piece of fabric.

The ends are stuffed so they can be used as temporary pincushions. Long-term needle/pin storage is inside the flap, though, so nothing comes up missing during transport. It holds quite a bit, as well, and is very compact, too. You may notice on the close-up of the following picture that the end circles are a bit worse for wear. That would be because Pips, our dog, got a hold of this when he was a puppy and thought it tasted very good. Luckily, I was able to rescue it before he did too much damage, and just a bit of minor repair got it back to decent shape again.

Oh! And in case you thought I had forgotten about Summer Days, I finished the 3rd border last weekend! I tried to get "artsy" with the photo, so it's not the best, but I'm still learning how to do this whole photography thing. I'm working on the last border now and hope to get it done in the next week or two.