Sunday, June 24, 2007

Craft ADD

On the way to & from Black sheep, I was able to make quilte a bit of progress on Montego Bay. However, I take issue with Amy for calling it a 'mindless' project. Easy yes, mindless no. For me a mindless project involves knitting essentially the same thing each row, or even better, knitting the same thing over & over in the round like the body of a stockinette sweater, or a 2x2 ribbed scarf. The pattern only has four lines, and two of them are purl every stitch, but the other two start with different numbers of border stitches before going into the lace pattern, and end with different numbers of border stitches. I kept losing track of which line I was on, and I kept ending up with the wrong number of stitches (forgetting to do the last YO before the border stitches). Making mistakes in a so called 'mindless' pattern can really give a girl a complex!! Anyway, I frogged back what little work I'd done and started over in the car. I made the same mistake at least once, and had to make up the lost stitch later in the pattern, but I don't think it's that noticeable.










Note to self, if Amy ever puts out a lace pattern she calls 'begginer/intermediate', there's no way I'm qualified to try it!







In quilting news, I'm still slowly but surely ripping the seams & resewing the sashing strips on my flying geese quilt. One thing's certain though - I'm far less enthusiastic about working on it than I was when I started. I'm also having second thoughts about the fabric. Believe it or not, I'm wishing I had used *more* and that I'd taken time to really build up stash before starting. Oh well, nature of the beast I guess, quilts can take a while to make, so there's plenty of time to over-think everything.




So, while I was avoiding working on my quilt, I started cutting up fabric for my neice's flower-basket quilt. But then I had second thoughs about the design of it. It's going to have tons of triangles, and at first I thought just sew two squares together corner to corner & clip the excess. When I'd originally planned the quilt I was going to use 2" triangles, so that seemed reasonable. But then I redesigned the pattern for 3" triangles, and started cutting out the squares. After thinking about it though, I think it would be a bit too wasteful to use the square to triangle method with 3" squares. Soooo I'll either have to accept the waste, or change the design or scale of the quilt again. Which really isn't any more fun than fixing my mistakes on the first quilt.





Which is why I started a completely different quilt - can you tell the theme yet? I'd like to get a few more red fabrics, but so far so good.

I think I've developed a really bad habit of jumping to a new project every time I mess something up on my current project. If I stuck with one project longer I might actually finish things once in a while! Well, I guess there's a reason this blog is called Work in Progress... not Finished Objects!

7 comments:

Libby said...

Hanging out w/ sheep sounds fun btw.

You could do the thing where you draw a line diagonal across the square and then sew a quarter inch on either side of it. If you start w/ 3 7/8" squares you should end up w/ 3" units - it's more work but less waste!! Or you could just sew the "waste" triangles together and save those units for another project (baby quilt?) I've got loads of those sitting around my room somewhere...b/c I know what you mean, I hate to be wasteful.

Good luck! I'm sure it will be lovely...

Mag said...

There's no such thing as a mindless pattern that involves yarn overs! :-) I had to frog my Montego a couple of inches here and there too, nasty in Sea Silk since it "marries" or felts a bit really quickly, and I used a row counter to remember where I was in the pattern of a stultifying four rows! And I am experienced enough with lace to supposedly be able to handle it. You just can't mindlessly do any lace, no matter who tells you that you can. ;-)

Rebel said...

libby - I thought about trying to make two triangles out of each square, I just haven't decided yet.

magatha - that makes me feel so much better! Now that I've done several more repeats i'm doing better at reading the knitting.

Bezzie said...

Yeah I tend to fudge lace all the time. Do I tink back? Nah, never!

Michael5000 said...

Libby beat me to it. You make a second stich a half inch over from your main diagonal stitch; then when you cut the excess you've got a second set of smaller blocks.

How many projects do you have going? I don't know if I've had fewer than a dozen quilts in motion for years....

Rebel said...

Michael - thanks for re-explaining what libby said - I think I'll do that.

As for how many projects - 3 lace knitting projects & one wash cloth are on the needles, and I have the yarn for several more projects just waiting. I'm currently in the process of sewing two different quilts, and I've started cutting out fabric for a third. I've purchased more than enough fabric for my nephew's quilt, but I haven't cut any of it out yet. And that's more than enough for my little apartment!

Batty said...

It's OK, we all go through this. Quilting is one of those things I've always wanted to try, but it'll have to wait till I've figured out a little bit more about crochet...