Norway 🇳🇴

We are in Oslo! It’s been a crazy busy 6 days ~ I am posting a few pictures from our first leg of the journey, nothing will make sense but I’m posting on my phone in a bar while trying to listen to the conversation around us! Will post more later!

SCRAP-tastic! Project Quilting 9.6

This week was the last challenge for Project Quilting Season 9 and the theme for the week was Scraptastic. Our quilts this week were to be made entirely of scraps and were to have at least 12 different fabrics.

I was visiting our oldest daughter and her family in North Dakota over the weekend when the last challenge winners were announced and traveling home when the new challenge came out. So I didn't get a chance to watch the winners video and check out what we were going to be doing this week until Monday morning!

I was very excited to see that my little mice from the last challenge were in the top 10 viewers choice  quilts.
Thank you to everyone that has voted for me this season :) I really appreciate your votes and all of your comments. This is the last challenge I will hound you for votes until next year!

On Monday I was still tired after a whirlwind weekend and over 800 miles of driving from here to there! When I left on Friday it was an ugly snowstorm, and the roads were starting to drift. I needed to drop something off at a friends house north of town so I knew I had to drive at least that far before I turned around and went home, but when I turned north the roads were better and by the time I crossed the Cheyenne River the snow had slowed and the roads were clear. So I kept going! By the time I crossed the ND border the sun was out & we drove in clear skies the rest of the way!

I  had gone up to watch our oldest grand-daughter skate in her annual figure skating program, and to help her create an Annie Oakley costume for her upcoming history class Living Wax Museum at school. I picked up a yard of flannel & some trim along the way north and with some creative ingenuity, a few more scraps from my daughters fabric stash, a cowboy hat and a pair of gloves we put together a pretty authentic Annie Oakley outfit! It was a good weekend & the weather cooperated until after I got home.

Monday was a crazy busy day, and I really didn't give the challenge a lot of thought. I knew I wanted to do something similar to the yellow challenge and sew strips of fabric together to create something. I thought about doing a birch tree quilt, but after doing nothing on Tuesday related to the challenge, I thought I better scale my idea down.

 I kept thinking about the 12 different fabric scraps we were to use, and I thought it would be fun to make something relating to the 12 months of the year. When we did the yellow challenge I kept thinking about candles, and I decided that I would do candles to represent the months of the year and then write family birthdays on each candle. On Wednesday while I was digging for scraps I came across some old taffeta, satin, velvet, and dress lining fabric that I had saved from the "Great Stash Purchase of 2010". For some unknown reason I thought this fabric would make great candles, maybe because it was shades of pink?

I love little pink striped birthday candles and these pinks, grays and ivory fabrics were just perfect...until I started sewing them. They frayed, they were stiff, the velvet kept crumbling, I almost SCRAPED the SCRAPS but since I had a vision and didn't want to dig for different fabric, I was determined to "make it work".

I found a fun piece of fabric left from a flower girls dress I had made a few years ago and decided that I would use that to make a cake for the candles. Then I took a scrap of ombre' fabric left from a baby quilt I made last year and cut strips to create the background for my candles. By this time I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to paint any names or dates on my satin & taffeta candles so I made my background long with the idea that I would paint the names above the candles.

I added flames to the candles using a scrap of yellow batik and then I set the whole thing aside until I could decide what I was going to do next!

Saturday morning I realized that the days might be longer but the week wasn't going to be, and if I was going to have something to enter this week I had better get it quilted. I had just taken a quilt off the longarm machine next door  and decided that quilting it that way was going to be faster than using my sewing machine and I would be able to write the names and dates in thread and I wouldn't have to mess with painting them on.

I dug through my stash and found a piece of fabric that had envelopes on it, which made me think of birthday cards and I used that for my backing fabric. I added an extra piece of batting to the birthday cake so that it would stand out more and then I started quilting! I had tension problems when I changed bobbins and had to pick out one name, then I only misspelled one of the months and put the wrong date on one birthday so I only had those 3 mistakes I had to redo. Which is a miracle since I really couldn't see what I was doing very well in the oranger parts of the fabric!

I quilted the candle flames, our family names, birth dates and the months of the year, in a bright orange thread, then quilted details on the candles in pink and a dark grey for the wicks. Then forgetting that the satin fabric was NOT fun to work with, I decided to bind the whole thing with a piece of pink satin & added a decorative stitch to hide the fact that it was a mess!

ugh....I should have tossed the whole pile of scraps away, but instead I tucked it into a drawer for the next time I decided I want to drive myself crazy trying to quilt with slinky fabric!

The finished quilt is 10 X 25 inches. I keep looking at it and just have to say...what was I thinking? LOL

It's 9:05 A Stitchin' Time

Wow! It's hard to believe we are already in the second week of March & that we are now almost done with the 5th challenge of Project Quilting Season 9. One challenge left to go before the season is over for the year. 

I have noticed a connection between the release of the challenges and stormy winter weather here in South Dakota and this challenge was no different. Our snow was almost gone & as soon as the challenge was announced the snows started again! LOL 

The weekend was our calm before the storm, so we fed the livestock extra rations, got the generators ready, picked up extra groceries, & I picked through my stash & moved some supplies down to the basement where I could work in warmth if the power went out. 

The challenge for the week was released at noon Sunday, "A Stitch In Time" but I wasn't in any big hurry to think about what I was going to do, I was counting on at least one blizzard day to stay home and work on it, maybe more if we had the 8-12 inches of snow predicted dumped on us! 

The first rule of the challenge was 1. Your project must literally or figuratively interpret the idiom "a stitch in time saves nine"

How better to start a challenge about a saying that some sources say is about procrastination than to actually procrastinate! I did spend some time on Sunday thinking about what I was going to do and researching to get some ideas, but not very enthusiastically. All I could think of was MICE, which made no sense & had nothing to do with procrastination or stitching anything.

I knew there was something I wasn't remembering about mice & sewing so I googled 
sewing mice & there it was! The Beatrix Potter story of the Tailor of Gloucester. For those of you who don't know the story, 

The Tailor of Gloucester is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter, privately printed by the author in 1902. The story is about a tailor whose work on a waistcoat is finished by the grateful mice he rescues from his cat and was based on a real world incident involving a tailor and his assistants.

A tailor in Gloucester sends his cat Simpkin to buy food and a twist of cherry-coloured silk to complete a waistcoat commissioned by the mayor for his wedding on Christmas morning. Whilst Simpkin is gone, the tailor finds mice the cat has imprisoned under teacups. The mice are released and scamper away. When Simpkin returns and finds his mice gone, he hides the twist in anger.

The tailor falls ill and is unable to complete the waistcoat, but, upon returning to his shop, he is surprised to find the waistcoat finished. The work has been done by the grateful mice. However, one buttonhole remains unfinished because there was "no more twist!" Simpkin gives the tailor the twist to complete the work and the success of the waistcoat makes the tailor's fortune.

So MICE it was going to be! But this was going to be a different story....

Remember every fall when we would head back to school & our teachers would ask us to write an essay about "What I did on my summer vacation"? 

Well this past year my summer vacation consisted of rescuing wild barn kittens, 16 of them to be exact. Rescuing them from the evil jaws of a little killing machine named Cookie. Poor Cookie, she doesn't know any better because her father was a Jack Russell & killing things is in her blood. She kills muskrats, raccoons, rabbits, snakes, prairie dogs, pheasants, last winter she tried to kill a buck deer, she sometimes forgets her mother was a corgi so even though her fighting spirit is very large, her legs are very short! 

After finding too many murdered kittens over the past few years, I decided this year I wasn't going to stand for it, we love Cookie too much to get rid of her, spankings don't work & she isn't going to change her evil ways. But I knew if I could find the kittens when they were small enough I could save them & give them away or at least grow them big enough to defend themselves! 

So that is what we did, the grand kids & I crawled through hay bales & hunted cats all summer long, we were able to capture a couple batches, move them to the porch & tamed them down enough to give them all away. But the old black momma cat had her kittens high up in the hay & she kept them there. We wanted those kittens, they were so beautiful! 5 little black tuxedo cats, with strange markings & inquisitive personalities. They looked like little scarecrows, or a straight flush in a poker hand.

We finally were able to catch one & moved him to the quilt shop, where we named him Squidward & got so attached to him, he is still there. The other 4 have now grown enough to defend themselves against the dogs & hold court on the quilt shop deck. So instead of 4 barn cats we now have 9 but one of them is .5 of the time a house cat LOL 

Squid & his cousin Shadow

Squidward 

So back to Project Quilting 9.5! I started thinking about those cats, and what hunters they are, we very seldom see mice & in the past have been overrun by cottontails, but not anymore, we have 9 very capable mouse hunters who some days we will see hunting way out on the prairie for birds and voles.

Then I thought about all those poor little mice who have to hide for their lives from the evil barn cats & I decided I would do my quilt story about them. So I painted 9 little mice, sewing little cat masks that they could wear when they had to venture out of their nests & trick the cats into thinking they were  just another one of the many barn cats! 

There is just something about little creatures doing people things, that I love, my favorite books growing up were "The Wind in the Willows",  "The Chronicles of Narnia" & all the Beatrix Potter books. I don't know if it was the actual stories I loved or the images of the little creatures dressed in people clothes, brandishing swords & going on adventures! 

                        My favorite mouse is the one brandishing the needle!

I didn't add clothes to my mice because I wanted the masks to be the subject of the story, I always think of Mardi Gras when I think of masks so I added little green sequins and black beads to the eyes on the masks.

I also added a teacup to reference the story of the "Tailor of Gloucester" since I had taken the sewing mice idea from that story. I also added a clock & set the time at 9:05 to represent the number of the challenge.

Then of course last but not least, I added an evil green eyed tuxedo cat peeking 

through a knot hole while the mice frantically sew their masks! 

 I thought I had a piece of mouse fabric in my stash that I wanted to use on the border of the quilt, but while I was digging for it, I found this fun green piece that I thought looked like the cat eyes. So when I quilted it I sort of haphazardly quilted the shape of eyes. The finished quilt is 19 X 13.

Since we didn't have school & it was a raging blizzard outside, I had no where else to go but to the couch in front of the fire & the TV so I spent all day Monday painting my little project.  On Tuesday evening I added my borders, quilted & added the binding. I couldn't believe I had the entire project done by Tuesday night, and if I hadn't procrastinated :) on Sunday I would have actually had it all done on Monday night!
We have one more challenge after this one. I hope the weather patterns change & we have nothing but warm days & spring rains from now on! We start calving the week the next challenge goes up & we don't need a raging blizzard or baby calves in the basement! 

 

As for all those crazy barn cats, I am going to capture them one by one & they are going to go to the vet to get fixed. Although we loved every minute of it, & there is nothing sweeter than watching kids play with kittens, I am done with kitten adventures for a few years!

Mellow Yellow....Project Quilting Week 4

Mellow Yellow is the theme for this weeks challenge. Of course once again I was stumped, how was I going to be inspired by yellow? I didn't even think I had any yellow fabric in my stash & my goal is to use up my stash & not purchase more fabric. This week was going to be hard.

I recently read the book All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, and when the Mellow Yellow Challenge came out, I thought about colors and light and how we actually see colors.

Did you know that the human eye can see 7,000,000 colors?  The way our eyes see colors will affect our eyes differently, some colors can be irritants, cause headaches, some can be soothing.

Yellow is often associated with warmth, happiness, fun, caution and electricity. In many countries is considered a sacred color, the color of gods and deities.

Yellow is a primary color along with red and blue. Without going into great detail because I'm writing a quilting challenge post not a scientific journal, in the world of color mixing...to get the color yellow you use red and green...if you want to know more about how that works...google it. :)

But did you know that yellow is also the most fatiguing color and an eye irritant? Because more light is reflected by bright colors, it results in excessive stimulation of the eyes. Yellow is also the color that the human eye notices first. Our eyes see yellow because the color yellow is reflected off the surface of an object, while the other colors are absorbed into the object.  Look around you and see what things jump out at you in a room, you will be surprised that it is the yellow objects that you will notice first!
Of course once I started looking for YELLOW inspiration, it was everywhere!

I found a neat poem by Carl Sandburg about Yellow and thought maybe that could be the inspiration for a fun quilt...but with a raging snow storm outside it was really hard to get enthusiastic about pumpkins in the fall.

Theme in Yellow 

by Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills

With yellow balls in autumn.

I light the prairie cornfields 

 Orange and tawny gold clusters 

And I am called pumpkins.

On the last of October

When dusk is fallen

Children join hands

And circle round me

Singing ghost songs

And love to the harvest moon;

I am a jack-o'-lantern

With terrible teeth

And the children know

I am fooling. 

I still wasn't sure I had very much yellow fabric in my stash since yellow is not typically a color I would purchase unless I specifically needed it for something. I decided I would dye some fabric and maybe find a way to use that in my project, so I dyed a couple of pieces of cotton, one with some different silk dye yellows and the other one with turmeric. I didn't like the way the silk dyes turned out after they were steamed,  but I was in love with the deep gold color that was created by the turmeric.  The silk dyes are on the left and the turmeric is on the right.

Since each of these squares of fabric were only about 9 x 9, and I had already decided I wasn't going  to use one of them,  I realized that I was going to have to dig into the stash and get serious about finding some yellow fabrics! I was surprised that I had as many different yellows as I did. But what to do with them all? I thought about making something with a golden elephant or Buddha on it and then creating a pillow of some sort. But the Olympics are on this week and I just want to sit in front of the fire and watch snowboarding, skiing & ice skating until I fall asleep in the warmth!

I was working on a customer quilt next door during the day and my nights were consumed by gold medal dreams!

On Wednesday we had Kat Perkins (Semi Finalist from Season 6 of the Voice) speak to the students at school about her journey, about Kindness, being Fearless, Brave and following your dreams...this would have been great inspiration for the last challenge! :) She is amazing & if you ever have a chance to hear her speak or sing, you will not be disappointed! I went home feeling inspired and thinking about the lyrics to her song Fearless..."What would you do if you weren't afraid? What crazy chances would you take?...What if you lived your life out loud? Not in the silence of your doubt....

When I got home from work that evening I decided that I wasn't going to win any gold medals sitting in front of the TV, my fabric wasn't going to sew itself together, and time was running out for doing anything overly fantastic. I needed to be fearless, stop doubting myself, and get busy!

Sometimes I find it very therapeutic to just cut fabric up with no rhyme or reason, then sew it back together, chop it up again, then repeat. So that is what I did with all the yellow fabric I had found, I cut a few strips of each yellow and went to town! I cut the turmeric fabric into a 2 inch strip because I wanted that beautiful gold to stand out from the rest.
This is what I had when I finally decided that I had chopped & sewn enough for the night!

I took it next door that next morning & put it on the quilting machine, I then just quilted random wavy patterns, lines and checkerboard designs on it. I thought it was quite fitting that while I was quilting it, Emmy Lou Harris was singing "Gold" on the CD player...."No matter how bright I glittered, baby, I could never be gold."

After I had it quilted I added some fun green thread designs with my sewing machine. Now what? I still didn't have an idea and thought it really wasn't something I wanted to put binding on and call a wall hanging. I finally decided that I would fold it in half and make a bag, of course this required adding a zipper and a liner. I found an old golden orange zipper and a fun green fabric to use as a lining. The zipper was tricky because it was 8 inches longer than the bag and I had to cut it down to size, plus I had cut off my selvage edges when I was done quilting it so I had to figure out how to attach it to the quilted fabric without it getting too bulky. There is the right way to do things, and then there is my way. My way works but it isn't always the most accurate. I was surprised that the zipper actually closed when I finally had it attached!

Close up of the green stitching.













The other side of the bag.










                                     



The green lining fabric.



The finished bag with a tassel I made for the zipper pull.


It was fun making something different this week! It will be even more fun when I learn how to move photos and text around in this blog! 😂 I am quilting from Western South Dakota where this last week it was again -0 with a couple of days of new snow. We are ready for warmer days and the warmth of the sun!