Saturday, April 16, 2011

Friday Night Sew In




And here we are ... the official Friday Night Sew In results....

I didn't get quite as much done as I would have liked but then again, I haven't gotten as much done as I would like everyday for the last 2 weeks! I blame it on the sinus infection and the fact that I only had one glass of wine! I got the blocks joined on the pinwheel quilts I was working on the last FNSI day. Turns out I am 7 blocks short! So much for being good at math!
The second one needs one more row so I am thinking I will take one row off the top, slap it on the side, add 2 more blocks and call it good. It will be 5 x 6 instead of 5 x 7, the sawtooth blocks finish at 2 inches so it should still work. Just don't tell anybody. ;)

I got the inner borders on the one and still have to add the sawtooth border on it (or I could quit here and it would be ok).

 Next I cut the squares for the half square triangles that make up the outer borders on both quilts. I didn't have enough of one fabric to do both quilts so these are the two that I chose. Jaydin drew the lines on for me but I still only got a few stitched out.

I did get the bindings made for both of them though so that is something....
Hope everyone had a productive sewing night...now I am off to surf the blogs to see what y'all did last night.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Silk Wallhangings

Gift to Chai Pani
Gift for Awesome Neighbor
I started these little wall hangings last fall and I am ta-da FINALLY finished with them! I added them to my Phd Challenge so that I knew I could force myself to get them done. I stared out talking about them here and what a pain the silk was to work with. I will definitely chalk this up as a learning experience. I feel like I learn something from every project. Sometimes it is something small like 'trim the ears off of your half square triangles'. Other times it is 'don't do this again no matter how much she pays you!'. This time it was 'if you are going to use silk, do something to keep it from fraying'. I did make it all the way through both of these with out stabilizer or super glue but I think that both of those things may come into play when I find something to do with the scraps.

So I plan to take the one I made for the restaurant in there as soon as I can get a excuse chance to head down there for lunch. I hope the empty spot is still on the wall. Anyone up for a lunch date? ;)


I other one I made for my way cool neighbor. She is an amazing artist so I thought she would like something crazy bright and I hope it does her house justice what with all her own great stuff hanging about. Plus since her roommate got some love last year, I didn't want her to feel left out. ;)  I added a hanger to hers and am somewhat disappointed with it. I had these grandiose ideas of about 10,000 seed beads forming a hanger that attached to the hanging sleeve. It started messing around with some wire and what not. Then I started thinking 'this think is already kinda nuts, maybe less is more'. So I opted to make a hanger with just some fine weight yarn and a few bead to accent it. Since I didn't want it to hang too low or have the hanger be the focal point, this is what I came up with. Like I said, boring but functional.

Here are some shots of the quilting and colors.

K is for 'Kate'