Cable Knit Hat Finish and a Quilt Near Finish

I finished my cable knit hat and I'm so excited with how it turned out. This has been a long project for me and several times I was ready to give up but kept pushing. Then I switched to Addi Turbo needles and it made all the difference! With the change I was able to finish the hat in record time and mark off another finish from my Q1FAL list. This is number six. Check it out...

This is the Traveling Cable Hat pattern which can be found here for free from the Purl Bee. This was my first attempt at cables and I missed two crucial crossover stitches. One I did did a round later (because I couldn't figure out how to go backward with the cables) and the other I missed completely. Other than that it was a fairly straightforward concept and I just love the end result.

It's starting to get too warm for a hat here in Iowa but I'm willing to overlook that to show it off a bit. It looked crazy long and skinny when I was working on it but it stretched out nicely to fit pretty well in the end.

You can see the missed stitch on the bottom right. I keep telling myself it's not that bad and it's in the back. I'm still in love with the hat and super happy with my first attempt at cables.

Not only did I finish the hat but I've been on a super housewife streak lately. I've been doing my chores every day before I craft and not only is my house a much cleaner place but we're all happier too and I'm getting a ton done. Since my floor was so clean and I'd already moved the chairs to mop I quickly spray basted this quilt and then mopped again.

I'm quilting this one with straight lines every 1.5" and I'm loving how fast and easy it is after all the pebbles of my last quilt. I also adore this fabric, it is Road 15 by Sweetwater for Moda.

I've completed over half the quilt so far and should be done in time for the quarter finish linkup. This is number four on my list.

Thanks for stopping by! I'll probably post the quilt finish later this week if everything goes to plan.

Lotus Pond Quilt Finish!

I am so excited to share this finish with you! I'm so pleased with many aspects of this quilt from the fabric, to the pattern and piecing, but I'm most excited about the quilting. Also exciting is that this finish crosses off so many things. This is my goal for March with ALYoF and is #17 on my Q1FAL list. I also made this with all stash making it another finish for Sew My Stash 2015. Without further ado...

Here it is!! See, love! The fabric is Lotus Pond by Rae Hoekstra for Cloud9. I love the bold colors and prints. I picked the Vintage Quilt pattern from Camille Roskelley's book Simply Retro to show off the fabric and it did a great job.

For the quilting I did pebbles in all the white spaces with some free-motion straight lines in the border. This was my first attempt at pebbles and I'm so happy with them! I was going for a bubbles in water and made them all different sizes.

I think this is my favorite block. I adore these multi-colored snails. If you would have told me before this fabric that snails were cute I would have thought you were crazy but I love this.

I love this picture because there are so many great things to look at. You can see the fun snail backing fabric, the frog binding, my tag from yardage by Sweetwater for Moda, and how I did the borders/corners. The quilting on this one took me over three weeks of free-time but so worth it!

Now it is waiting for me in my favorite red rocker for some naptime reading. My daughter just finished this book and asked me to read it so we could talk about it together. The book is Scat by Carl Hiaasen and it's fun so far.

Quilt Stats:
Fabric: Lotus Pond by Rae Hoekstra for Cloud9
Pattern: Vintage by Camille Roskelley
Quilting: FMQ pebbles and straight lines by me.
Finished size: Twin

Thanks for stopping by! I'm linking up today with TGIFF and Fabric Frenzy Friday and Finish It Up Friday.

WiP Update and a Finish

I've been having a hard time blogging lately, especially in March. You see, about 3/4 of my traffic comes from Crazy Mom Quilts and her Finish It Up Friday linky. Without it I just don't get a ton of traffic and I take the time to work on a lot of labor intensive but little to show for it projects. Thus, the lack of posting as they would all pretty much be the same. However, you can find me fairly active on Instagram @julieschloemer.

That being said I do have some fun stuff to show you today. An eclectic collection of what I've been working on and finally another finish off my Q1FAL list.

This is number seven on my Q1FAL list. My daughter and I bought these cute wool pin cushions in October when we went to the AQS show in Des Moines. With the crazy move shortly after and getting settled down we just now got to them. Hers is finished too but she took it to school to show off so I had to go with an older shot. I love how these turned out but I know I won't be sticking any pins in them.

Another quick finish was this little pouch for my SIL who drove me all around Austin during my recent trip to Quiltcon. She was so sweet and told me how much she loved mine over and over that I thought I'd whip one up for her. The best part, it was all out of my stash, even the zip.

My SIL also got this cool crochet dragon. I made her one a long time ago but she gave it away to a sweet little boy from her class that ended up in the hospital. She teaches third grade in Texas. I think this one turned out even better than the first one so her generosity turned out well.

In other news I finished quilting my Lotus Pond quilt. This isn't the best picture but it has been raining and cloudy ever since this and it's the best I have right now. I did pebbles in all the white areas and a piano key-esque thing in the border. I love it and can't wait to show it off!

I'm really big into swaps on Instagram right now. Currently I'm enrolled in seven. This project is for the Cotton and Steel mini swap. My partner isn't very active on Instagram and has said nothing on any of my posts or, for what I can tell, anyone else in the hashtag. I hope she love it because I do!

I'm also finally putting my Miss Kate fat quarter bundle to use making a giant swoon. I'm doing 16 blocks instead of the usual nine. To help keep me motivated but not overwhelmed I joined up with the #swoonalong2015 and am making 2 blocks a month. I missed February with all the quiltcon and other craziness so here I am all caught up.

My knit cable hat is going so much better now. I was doing it on some bamboo needles and it was frustratingly slow. I switched to some Addi Turbo needles I grabbed off Amazon and I'm loving this project now and might actually have it finished this quarter!

I'm putting the binding on my Lotus Pond quilt and I'm so excited! This is my ALYoF goal for March and I totally think I can finish in time!

Here's a little peek of what is coming in the future. I either got these in the mail or picked them up at my new favorite LQS. The top left three are going to be Sailor Tops for me, my first ever attempt at a top. The others are for commissions, stash, or swaps.

Thanks for stopping by! I hope to get back into a more regular blogging groove soon but my smallest one is going to have her tonsils removed the beginning of April so we'll see how that goes. I'm linking up with WiP Wednesday.

Savor It: ALYoF Goal and Project Updates

My week has been crazy to say the least. There hasn't been a lot of time for crafting but what time I have had was taken up by labor intensive low-output projects which, thankfully, I'm loving right now. I've got a new motto: savor it. So often I try to rush through to start the next thing and I often find myself dissatisfied with my crafting. It's not relaxing me the way it should and it has stopped being as fun. So this week, I took the time to craft when I wanted to and otherwise playing with my kids and tried to enjoy my family. To savor it.

Here I am in my Patchwork Threads shirt with the cable hat. I think the problem is the needles. I've become used to Addi Rockets and these bamboo ones, while nice, are so much slower. I thought I'd want slow with cables because I thought it'd be hard but it's really not that bad.

I realize you can't see the hat very well in the last shot so here it is. This is the Traveling Cable Hat from the Purl Bee. I'm on my third of four repeats in the cable pattern, so basically halfway through. I want to say I've been working on this for like 6-8 months but I only started knitting in October so it can't be that long, hehe. This is what prompted my savor it movement. I want to enjoy working on this hat and, even if it takes longer, appreciate the beauty of it and the skills I'm picking up. Which brings me to my ALYoF goal...

 

This awesome quilt is my ALYoF goal for March. I'd like to have it finished by the end of the month so I can enjoy it before it gets too hot here. Ever since I bought this Lotus Pond fabric I knew I would love this quilt. I looked long and hard for a pattern I loved that would show it off. This is the Vintage pattern from Camille Roskelley's book Simply Retro. Then I waited until after my Quiltcon class to quilt it so I would be prepared to make it awesome.

Here's a shot of the quilting. I did free motion all over with straight-ish lines on the borders and then bubbles/pebbles in the triangles and squares. I am loving the whole process of this one! It's slow but I think I'm truly savoring every stitch and enjoying the view as I work. I've reached the halfway point with this one and while I'm excited to get it done I'm not rushing.

While I craft I love to listen to music, provided no one is napping. Three of my five kids were having an adorable little dance party. I adore how cute they are and how they don't even have to try to go with the flow.

Here's my last project of the week. This Fierce Little Dragon - pattern here. I asked my kids if it looks like a dragon and my eldest daughter, always the people pleaser said a hesitant yes. I told her I thought that it kind of look liked a snake. She heaved a huge audible sigh of relief and said, "I thought so too but I didn't want to hurt your feelings. It looks like a snake that swallowed something and is happy."

So that's me for the week. No finishes but a lot of progress. I think I may need to whip up a small zipper pouch so I can keep savoring my other projects and still feel a sense of accomplishment. Thanks for stopping by!

Quiltcon Related Finishes

I finished a couple of things this week that were either worked on or the materials were purchased during my Quiltcon trip. There are seven zipper pouches, my zigzag sampler, and my fair isle hat.

First up, the zipper pouches. My kids wanted me to bring them back something from my trip. They also have been asking to learn to make zipper pouches for a long time now, we even already had some cool metal zippers on hand. So I picked up these seven Cloud9 fat quarters and we got to work the day after I got home.

It was lucky that the fabrics I grabbed with them in mind went so well with the zippers we had. They look pretty neat all lined up.

Each of them helped make their own pouch, except the baby, she was napping. They pressed, helped cut, and sewed. It was a fun project to share. This was a super basic pouch. We just folded the fat quarter into fourths and then cut around the edges to make four equal rectangles. Then we sewed them to the zipper with two for the outside and two for the lining. Even my husband made one. Best souvenir ever!

While at Quiltcon I took a quilting class. We weren't able to finish our quilt sandwich there but I took mine home and worked on it a bit more. I finished it today. I am so happy with how far I've come just on this little swatch! I'm loving the bubbles and the box maze. I'm also proud of how the lines look. I'm not a fan of the paisley on the bottom but I want to love it.

Once finished I didn't know what to do with this. I didn't want to throw it away and mentioned the dilemma to my kids. They said it would make an awesome doll/animal quilt. I keep all my binding scraps so I threw some on it and called it good.

It's already getting some love from the smallest one.

In other news I made great progress on my fair isle hat but I was to the point where I needed to switch from circulars to double points so I picked some up. When my hubby saw them and pointed out how tiny they were I told him that they come much smaller than this. He said, "what in a hundred pack labeled toothpick?" LOVE! Totally my favorite quote in recent memory.

With the help of my over-sized toothpicks - ta da! I cannot begin to tell you how much I enjoyed each and every part of this project. It is my favorite to date. I find color work to be quite easy for my brain to handle, much easier than the cable hat I'm trying to suffer through.

Even the inside looks pretty! I brought this on the plane to and from Quiltcon and several people mentioned how impressed they were with my skill and how great it looked even on the inside with the tension. I'm so glad I decided to pick up knitting and am loving it!

Here I am sporting my new hat. The color is a little off in this picture but it's fun anyway.

Thanks for stopping by! So those are my finishes for the week. I have a quilt already lined up to test my skills on the real thing and I have a zipper pouch and a few crochet projects to make. I also hope to finish my knit cable hat soon so I can move on to something else. I'm linking up with TGIFF.

Quiltcon Recap

I've thought there are many ways to do this post and sort the pictures. I could sort by classes, quilts, and purchases/swag, I could break it up into several blog posts, or I could just throw it at you in the order it happened to me. I decided to go with the last one. It's going to be a long, but hopefully fabulous, post. Because of my munchkins and my hubby's work schedule I was only able to go two days but I'm so happy with it! Excuse the photo quality on some of these. I only had my phone camera to take pictures.

Travel:

These are my babies. We had a hard time with me leaving because this is the first time I've left them overnight without having another one since March of 2006. It was -1*f feels like -22*f so we went with a photo shoot in the car.

I brought my knitting so I had something to do on the plane and in the airport. It was so fun to work on. For those that haven't been following along with my knitting I just learned in October and this is my first fair isle project. I'm in love! This hat is nearly done and I can't wait to show it off later in the week. I got into Austin around 11pm. Our flight was delayed because the connecting plane in Dallas broke.

Day 1:

My first class was the New Cathedral Windows class with Johanna Masko. It was a fun class but at this point I was wondering how it was going to all turn out. So to get here we made strips, pressed them in half, cut them into smaller sections and sewed on either side. Then we turned them inside-out and matched up the seams to make these little boat things.

So next we pressed the boats flat and they made little squares. We put the seam side down and sewed them to our background piece. It's really quite gray but I couldn't get it to read right.

Here it is with my Lotus Pond squares on top. All I need to do now is fold over the gray squares and hand stitch them down then attach the pillow back. I haven't gotten very far with this yet. Overall I like this class and the technique uses a ton less fabric than the traditional way and a lot more machine sewing. The teacher was abrasive at times but really sweet at others. It was weird and hard to process on very little sleep.

My next class was Drive By Color with Anna Maria Horner. I've just recently started to love her prints but I have always loved her use of color so I was excited but apprehensive to take this class. I found it to be amazingly helpful and it is the class that I keep thinking about over and over and it's so applicable to so many non-quilt things! So, to start out we each got a color bundle of her fabric. If you can't tell from the picture I was green.

We arranged ourselves into I think four or five color wheels and then as assigned traded fabric with those in our specific wheel. We got to pick one print and the rest were swapped with the people to our left and right in the wheel. This is what I ended up with and I'm so happy with it. It's amazing how the addition of these other colors totally changed the feel of the bundle and made it more dynamic for me.

I adore the Color Dive pattern!!! Seriously an awesome project. I've admired this on the internet so many times but it was awesome to see in person. Speaking of person, I just adore Anna Maria Horner. I'd never met her before but she's just one of those people that engages you and makes you laugh. It was a fun few hours with her and I'll happily take any classes I can from her in the future.

After my second class I did a little shopping and checking out some stuff in the vendor hall. I stayed with my sister-in-law who lived in a city nearby and she was sweet enough to drive me around. We went back to her house and I showed off all my goodies. You can see I did make a little progress on my cathedral window project but not much. It's still in this state as the knitting has been calling my name a little louder. I bought some awesome fabric from Cloud9 and I show you later in the week what I did with it. I also got a cute new shirt from Patchwork Threads that I just love! I stopped by the Massdrop booth to pick up my goodie bag and because I can't play "corn hole" very well I won this little zippy pouch from the Moda people. Totally a win as I liked this one the best anyway!

I know this isn't the best picture, silly phone camera, but imagine these in their full color glory. The lovely people of Cotton and Steel had the best booth in the show. They had scraps for us to make different things and these fabric buttons/pins were one of them. I brought one home for each of my kids as a little souvenir from my trip.

 DAY 2:

Day two was an all-day class called Zigzag Quilting Sampler with Krista Withers. We quilted on the HQ Sweet Sixteen sitdown machines and while it was new to me the technique was the same-ish. She made us these quilt sandwiches with the zigzag lines sewn on and we just had to go for it. I was not in love with the hot pink thread. We needed contrast so we could see better and learn from our mistakes but that was a bit much, hehe. She also gave us a piece of wet-erase plastic to draw on to try out quilting designs. LOVE IT! It made me so brave and I've since used it at home to try out designs on my quilts. She also mentions that plexiglass works well too and suggests to tape the edges with high-contrast tape so you don't go over the edge and ruin the quilt. This is what I ended up with at the lunch break. I'm sure you can see where I struggled and what I did well. I loved the triangles, even though I wasn't fabulous at them, and the ovals. I think I'll try the squares some more as it seems useful.

During the lunch break I check out the quilts. Benedict Cumberbatch swoon!! It so funny because when I found this there were several ladies all gathered around sighing at the quilt. I had one of them take my picture. My hubby alternately laughs and groans at my love for him.

I think this was my favorite quilt of the show. I love the colors and the idea. I love the piecing and the quilting. I adore the newspaper boat. It's all just amazing!

Check this one out! I love all the circles and the colors were pretty awesome too.

However, this put it over-the-top into amazing for me. Check out that curved pieced binding!! Seriously, this is awesome and also why I can't do shows. I'd never be that cool to come up with that kind of thing or pull it off that well.

I liked this one because of the colors and the Texas-ness of it all. It seemed fitting for Quiltcon in Austin, TX. I know my SILs would love this.

The pattern and colors both on this one spoke to me. I love the way they create a secondary pattern too. The low volume grays for the background added a layer of interest for me too.

This one stopped me in my tracks. I adore blues and greens and I love the gradation of it all.

This quilt in general was kind of blah for me but I do adore the quilting. I've been into dense and slightly complex but also organic quilting lately.

I've loved this pattern for a while now. The interesting blocks with all the negative space so it doesn't get overwhelming.

It was made even more awesome by the quilting!! Check it out how it extends from the points and has the cool other fill. LOVE! Complex yet not overwhelming and added interest with the change in pattern/texture.

Between quilt photos I made the time to do a little fabric shopping. I was so impressed by my AMH class and how awesome her fabrics looked when combined in cool ways that I went and grabbed some more fat quarters. These are mostly Folk Song with a few Honor Roll mixed in, I think. I used to think this much color and print were overwhelming but seeing them in person and in a few different quilts I was amazed at how I loved it and how different it was from what I've been doing. I decided to run with it before I changed my mind.

So, I adore Elizabeth Hartman patterns. I just finished a Fancy Fox top and cut into a Hazel Hedgehog quilt. I also have all the stuff for an Aviatrix and a Preppy the Whale mini. As it happens her class this day was right across from mine so I was able to meet her and snag these buttons. Woohoo!

Back in the class Krista had us all gather around with our samples and talk about what we did and didn't like about them. With her little plastic and pen she showed us some fixes for what we had problems with and it was super helpful! This was one of my favorite bits of the whole class.

She also showed us cool ways to use feathers and how to make them look more modern. So fun!

So here's what I tried in the afternoon. We switched thread so it wasn't so in your face but that makes it harder to show here. I love the cool diamonds with the tiny fill to make them pop but that was so hard! The stripe is only 1" from top to bottom. I think it would be a little easier slightly bigger but loved the look. This was also my first attempt at circles. I love how they turned out and am already planning on putting them into a quilt this week. So fun!

This super-blurry picture is me with Vanessa of V. and Co. I seriously adore her work but I love her even more as a person. We hung out during our breaks and had a nice lunch together. She lives so close to me in my new house so hopefully we'll get to hang out more. Vanessa has some awesome things coming up like the color books that are just coming out. She's made one for each color in the rainbow and they are quite impressive. The red is out now and orange is coming soon.

I woke up at 4:30am on Saturday to come home to my people in snowy Iowa and had a nice pair of flights. I even got the exit row which was nice for my super-long legs and complex knitting. The baby was especially excited to see me home.

Well there you have it. A crazy long post on my lovely time at Quiltcon. I don't know when I'll be able to go again but I'd love to every year! I'm so grateful to my wonderful hubby for taking the five kids and for all the people involved in my Quiltcon experience.