Nashville Stitch N Bitch

square headed

I'm no longer a Square 1 person. I am a Square 2 person. What's the difference between Square 1 and Square 2? Why, gobs! An absolute Grand Canyon's worth of difference if you are me and feel as if you slowly may be unraveling what with all of the aligned edges and the everlovin' squareness of it all.

Kid 1 (not to be confused with Square 1), now a worldy and cosmopolitan 4 (almost 5) year old spent the night at Grammy's house this weekend and something about the, the.... freedom of it all gave way to a quilt-a-thon on Friday night in which I got more done in several hours than I get done in several DAYS around here. It turned out to be an awesome thing because I ended up getting sick first thing Saturday morning and haven't gotten shinola done since.

Here are the steps for a square:

1. Wash fabric - I am a fabric washer. The quilting world is divided into 2 camps - those who wash, and those who don't and never shall the two meet. It's like Liberals and Conservatives - it's tough to find a true moderate, and usually when you do, he overthinks it all and can't make up his mind about anything anyway.

2. Press it. And press and press and press....

3. Stack it up. Right now I'm stacking all of my prints together because I have 7 of those and all of my solids because I have 9 of those.

4. Cut. Cut, being very careful to know which part of the square you are cutting . So in this case, I cut, I walk over to my dining room table and put it in the correct position and label it. Bor. Ing.

5. Sew. Then press. Then sew. Then press again. And so on, and so on and so on until you have run out of fabric.

6. Repeat for next square.

If I am anything it is a person who likes to see results from my crafting.. it certainly ain't about the journey around these parts so will someone please remind me to never ever do a king sized ANYTHING ever again? Just the name suggests that it is a bad idea whether it's Burger King or the ambitious square quilt project for our bedroom.

And other considerations - who is going to quilt this? Certainly not my sad little machine. It has done its part for other quilt projects, but none of those were 108" across. It's a feisty little beast, but not one that will allow such girth to be pushed through it's tiny work area. I was listening to Annie's quilting podcast the other day and the whole show was on hiring someone to quilt your project and honestly, it just made me nervous. I fear I may have quilted (or not quilted as the case may be) myself into a corner.

A sidenote for you Olympians: my hat is off to you. It's been fun to read around the blogs both from those who have actually pulled off their intended amount of knitting and those who felt the agony of defeat. I didn't even set myself up for failure since I'm in that non-committal phase that follows a project in which I start and stop 8 projects before getting really frustrated and pissed off. Mostly it has to do with February, and thank God that ends on Tuesday.

xo

look kids!

It's like Chevy Chase in European Vacation when he says with a maniacal laugh as he goes around the traffic circle for the 80th time, "Look kids! Big Ben! Parliament!"

And that's how I feel about these squares. "Look kids! Squares! And even more squares!"

Another thing from my design days: There's this rule (well, maybe not so much a rule, but a suggestion) in typography that says something to the effect that if you are going to make type look odd or "bad" or rough or anything like that, that you should just DO IT baby. Don't be half ass. Go all the way. Make it look like you meant it. If you get it somewhere in between, it will be tough for your viewer to know if you were being cutting edge or if you just suck. And of course, like everything, there's a fine line in there. One side of the line says "I COMPLETELY OVER DID IT" and the other says "I DIDN'T DO ENOUGH AND NOW I LOOK LIKE I MIGHT JUST NOT KNOW WHAT I'M DOING" and it's really hard to walk that line without falling to either side.

So I'm hovering around in that guideline somewhere, trying not to be a pansy, and trying not to scream overkill with my random cutting. And we're, quite literally, on square 1 here people so if I'm overthinking things now, well, you quite possibly haven't seen overthinking to the degree that might come later. It will give you something to look forward to I guess, if you don't have much going on in your life otherwise.

I have 4 more square 1s to do before square 2 takes over. The plan is this: make 3 different varieties of "randomly cut" asymmetrical squares. Then, turn them in different directions so that they look even more random! Do you see the brilliance? See, I wasn't joking with the Denyse being the Kicker Of All Of Our Asses thing. I mean it. She's a real kicker of quilting ass in more ways than one.

More squares later, you lucky ducks, as they become available.

xo

snow day

It's no New York record snow storm, but give us a couple of inches here in the South and we're puling out the sleds. Our streets may be slushy, and it may melt by noon, but by God we're out there at 9am eating it off of the picnic table, making snow angels, and putting snowballs in our freezer.

This has been a supremely uneventful week in my craft world other than staring into the cold, hard barrel of my log cabin squares.

When I was a graphic designer, I used to tell my husband all of the time that symmetrical is easy, perfectly even is a piece of cake... it's the random that's hard. And good Lord almighty, random is harder than ever when you are trying to cut straight lines that are random in angle. Even more so when you are trying to make 9 layers of fabric randomly this way, and the next 9 randomly that way, and then put them all on your dining room table in the shape that you want them and pray that your 2 and 4 year old don't have a log cabin strip throwing party of some sort before you get to making all sixteen of this particular randomness that you would never ever ever in a million years be able to sort out again if indeed such a party took place. Oh, and then you have to make them all be able to line up in the end. Denyse Schmidt, I bow to you as my sovereign leader. You are a true Kicker Of The Asses Of The Rest of Us.

You poor people. Lots of black stockinette for your first month of the year, and now just lots of log cabin squares for your February and possibly March. At least they will all be very thoughtfully random.

xo

overheard

Overheard at the local Joann, Saturday, February 11, 2006, 10am.

Location of women: Yarn aisle
Location of me: one aisle over

Lady 1: I sure wish I knew how to knit! This is all so confusing.

Lady 2: Are you just getting started in knitting?

Lady 1: I am. This is just so overwhelming though. All of this yarn and all the needles sizes and things. Just so confusing.

Lady 2: You should go to www.masondixonknitting.com! One of them is named Ann and she's a, um, personal friend of mine. They have a book coming out in March. You can just write them a note and they will be HAPPY to help you with your knitting. You should get in touch with them!

Lady 1: I'll do that!

Aaaaand scene.

I was quiet as a little mouse I was. Not a peep. I was singing It's A Small World in my head though. Really, really, really loud.

To be a good copycat to kay and her log cabin making ways (and since I now know that I can write her anytime and she will be HAPPY to help me with my knitting) and to do more for sarah's denyse schmidt-along than just make 17 oven mitts while at the same time indulging in some much needed self love, I have gone whole hog, over the top, off my rocker into making a king size quilt for our bed. It's not exactly the pattern in the Denyse Schmidt book, but it will be highly Schmidt-esque. Particularly Drunk Love in Log Cabinish.

I started out with only one word in my head - delft. Why delft? How the hell should I know. It was just there. I wouldn't put delft in my top 10 of colors even, but it popped in there as an itch to be scratched. It has moved far beyond delft at this point into lots of yellows and greens and even a reddish earth color. Several colors of blue. All muted but glow-y as you can plainly not see from my terribly lit photo.

I would love to know the psychology of the Log Cabin square. Why is it so enticing to plan and wholly satisfying to make? Those of you who have done it must agree with me, and those of you who haven't should give it a go. It can be spiral or totally square (I'm going with square on this) and done in millions of ways, random, contrasting color values in different places to give it different effects, squares within squares (like mine here). And there all kinds of schools of thought on it - it's all about contrast, it's all about the print, you must have a place for an eye to rest so be sure to mix in solids and about 8 million others. There's definitely a kernel of truth to it somewhere that makes it so powerful an emblem and so interesting to explore.

xo

what's underneath

Almost to the same day, last year I told you about a certain black sweater, and let you know what a bad ass my husband is. This year, about the only things that have changed since are that he's now 40 and self-employed, but otherwise he's still a bad ass and he still wants a motherscratching black sweater. Well, now it's more in that bad ass father of young kids kind of way, but my own age has given me the perspective that that type of bad ass is the badassiest of all. James Dean be damned. Jim Morrison - laughable. Kurt Cobain in the worst of his days never dealt with so much vomit or bodily fluid. All pale in comparison with the guy who gives your kids a bath every day and puts a parachute on for their entertainment and calls himself the Rainbow King.

So all of that black stockinette slogging came down to this - the man wanted a sweater with a skull on it, has wanted one for years, and finally talked me into it. Thanks to Jennifer I had a skull ready to go!

I used blue sky cotton, which I think is one of my new favorite things. Absolutely soft - I mean a completely different animal from any other cotton I've used. Wash it, dry it, it doesn't budge an inch. Fantastic.

I measured him and just kind of flung the whole thing to the Knitting Goddess to see me, in her great mercy, through to a good fit. Apologies to kay for my use of a modified drop shoulder (I know, I know, it was his idea) but it did me the grand favor of being relatively easy for the Knitting Goddess to grace with her good favor.

Thank you to Pam for coming through in a pinch - Blue Sky Cotton only showing up in her store the day before, and allowing me to finish this thing before the husband travels up north with his Traveling Bad Ass Show to do some airplane related something or other.

And now, on to something for me. Not sure what, but it will involve Lorna's Laces and it will involve size 8 double points of which I could only find 2 as of this morning. I went to threaded bliss. this morning with 2 highly uncooperative children in tow and bless the Threaded Bliss crew's hearts, they came to my car window like Sonic carhops and brought me my needles. Sheila, if you only sold cherry limeade I would be set.

And since we're a traditional type family, here's our traditional yearly shot of the black sweater a la Johnny Cash.

xo

the jacket i would wear if i were 4

Yep. If I were 4 years old I would wear this jacket. Hell, if I had enough scraps to make a big one, I'd wear it at 38 years old. Which I am NOT yet. Until May.

So, remember me saying I sorted my scraps right? This is the result of Kid Prints - Cowboy.

A long time ago when Maeve was little someone gave me a toddler jacket made from vintage quilts that I really loved. I've always wanted to make another one like it and this gave me the opportunity to spend way too much time figuring it out.

First I basically made a quilt - pieced all of my scraps together along with a few other coordinating scraps from another oh so carefully sorted bag. I pieced it really haphazardly in kind of a vertical way. Then I stuck it on some batting and quilted the whole thing, which came out to be the size of a baby blanket.

Then, using the jacket that i loved so much as a pattern, I cut out the new jacket pieces from the "quilt". I sewed it all up and added a lining courtesy of joy, some fringe, some pockets, and a big ol' wooden button.

I'd try it on a kid and show it to you but they are refusing the model lifestyle at the moment. (which, hell, good for them you know? Kate Moss and all.)

I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. If you love it more than me, you can get it at the store.

Oh God, someone remind me to tell you about my "class" I took at the quilt store the other day. Flashbacks of public school lemme tellya.

xo

none more black

You'll be pleased to know that what shall henceforth be known as my Asian - Bright Colored period is over.

Finally I used all of those goddamn scraps.

Lessons learned:

1. Never cut ALL of your fabric into what seems in your PMS-colored mind very tidy 1.5" wide strips. You'll want to tie them all together and hang yourself with them eventually.

2. Scraps are deceiving. While it makes you feel as if you are using your stash and being meticulous by using the most minute of scraps, by golly you have been had. What you have actually done is made more scraps! More scraps that you will, if you have a scrap (a "scrap" - get it?) of obsessive nature, want to make into something else and so on infinitum until you come back around to that tying the scraps together and hanging yourself with them thing.

3. Those wiley scraps. Better than any therapist, they were sneaky in their approach. They made you think differently. Put things together differently. Find ways to make things out of things that you hadn't thought of before. O scraps! You move me from suicide to love poems in 2 short steps.

4. Scraps are even more clever than you orginally thought! While you toyed with actually killing yourself over those things using them as the instrument of your death.... ha! they got you. They sucked you in. They made you want to move on to the next bag of scraps (Kid Prints - Cowboy) to see just what you could make out of them. Oh, you learned your lesson before - no more 1.5 inch strips - but there are squares! and rectangles! and all kinds of possibilities. The scrap show must go on!

Meanwhile, if you want to see the end of the Asian - Bright Colored period, you can visit them in my etsy shop.

By day I court my scrap bag, but by night, I date the Men's Black Sweater. I am a mere 1/2 sleeve, blocking and sewing away from being finished. As ann reminded me, Nigel Tufnel said, "It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black." None more black indeed.

She also mentioned a slightly used leather toggle. Now, Ann, if you think the leather toggle got no use at your house, do you really think Black Sweater Only guy will hear of it? Hmm?

xo

P.S. - please forgive the lengthy vacation with no warning - we forgot to re-up the domain name. Too scrap happy around here.