Dreaming under the Blue Ocean

As promised, here is the finally completed Blue Ocean Hawaiian Quilt.   The idea to make this quilt germinated in April 2008 on a trip to Kauai with the family.  I found a cool pattern and some great fabric on the island, then the whole thing languished in my closet for a couple of years. 

I found a couple of great YouTube tutorials by Leah Day on sewing the binding by machine (I guess "serious" quilters frown upon this and hand sew, but as mentioned before my philosophy is why do something by hand that can be done faster and probably better by machine).  Luckily I had enough of the applique fabric (dark blue) left over to make the binding.

sew across diagonally to join strips of binding

using a walking foot to attach the binding to the back of the quilt was very easy.

making sure to stop sewing 1/4 from the edge

Getting the binding turned over to the right side nicely to make the mitered corners was a bit trickier, the first one is a little wonky, but with practice and patience the rest came out OK.

Ready to turn over, using a machine blanket stitch on right side to "stitch in the ditch" and catch the back

I don't have any close up pictures of the completed mitered corners because they are only OK from the perspective of holding the edges together squarely and looking OK from distances greater than 2 feet, but they are not really ready for a prime time close up.

Now, it's done and hanging in a position of pride on the wall behind our bed.

Notice Misha in the picture, she insisted on being in the photo, she felt Tex was getting too much media attention and it was her turn to play the star  : )

Blue Ocean beckons

This was a very productive weekend.  I attended another training session at the local library for adult literacy tutoring, learned how to hook up the trailer by myself, practiced backing into a parking space with the trailer (no easy task I might say) AND finally, at long last, finished the Hawaiian Quilt, hereafter to be know as "Blue Ocean".

Now that Craig is working nights, going to school during the day and sleeping any other time he can, I often find myself the only one awake in the house (the dogs sleep all night with me and then all day with Craig, lazy mutts).This has been strangely liberating, don't get me wrong I love spending time doing just about anything with Craig, but now I must ask only my own self how I want to occupy my time, rather than "what would we both enjoy doing together?"

I have started volunteering at the library doing one on one tutoring with a nice lady who wants to improve her basic English skills.  I was very nervous about taking on this responsibility, worried that I wouldn't know what or how to teach English or really any subject at all, let's just say I'm not known for patience.  But the Solano County Library has an awesome Literacy program and they really take a lot of time and effort to help tutors put together appropriate materials and provide lots of information and techniques for working with adult learners.  We meet twice a week for 1.5 hours at the library in a quiet study room.  It's been about 6 weeks now, I'm not sure if my learner and I have made much progress yet, but we are getting to know one another better and communicating in English.

I am also becoming quite obsessed with the idea of working with hot glass to make marbles, beads, wine stoppers and other small glass objects.  The last post showed way too many pictures of my first ever marble (and the only one) made at a 2 day course in Lampworking, which I attended last month at Public Glass.  This is the perfect combination of working with fire and glass. It's done with a torch that is mounted on a bench, so it's possible to set up your own "studio" in the garage. This technique is great for making small solid or nearly solid stuff like beads, marbles, etc and can be also be used for making larger hollow items like goblets. I have been researching like mad on everything to do with this and how to safely set up my very own studio.  The big deal items to take care of first are creating a safe and well ventilated work area.  Then the fun can begin in getting the torch, tools and melting glass.  Here's a picture of someone doing lampwork:

but first, I have soberly committed to renting some more time on the equipment at Public Glass before investing in this seriously. My first rental time is next weekend, which brings me to "the practicing with trailer" part of this past weekend.  As the glass place is in San Francisco and any newly created glass objects will need to be annealed before coming home, the torch rental also implies an overnight stay nearby. 

In my quest to keep the challenge level high, I rashly decided to make this my first solo jaunt with our travel trailer (affectionately named Shelly, for obvious reasons). I'm not sure what the heck I was thinking when deciding that my first solo should be through one of the busiest cities in the WHOLE WORLD!  Craig, bless him, stayed up late (for me early morning) to patiently explain the whys and wherefores of hooking the truck to the trailer, while stopping frequently for me to take photos, ask dumb questions, etc.  Then we drove off to the local Camping World Store, which oddly enough had none of the items we wanted.  No rear brake bulbs, no hitch helper flags (I hope the ones I ordered online from Garage Toys get here in time), but of course they had plenty of brand new, shiny RV's which they were not shy about telling us about ad nauseam. 

We escaped from the showroom and then I tried my hand at backing up the trailer.  I thought I had scouted a nice empty area in back of the Camping World parking lot to practice in, but it turns out I needed A LOT MORE space than I thought so the whole thing was kind of stressful; Craig trying his best to explain the physics of backing a trailer on a pivot point while I nervously under and then over corrected while keeping a wary eye on the very, very expensive RV's parked all around us in the lot.  We finally bailed out of the lot, both of us silently, but fervently hoping the RV park in Pacifica has pull through spaces.

must stop now, hand cramping, next post I'll show you the completed Blue Ocean Hawaiian quilt.

Sewing isn't for sissies

The Hawaiian quilt is coming along. I have made it through several nerve-wracking steps.  As I get further along, the stakes for messing up get higher.  The progress to date now represents hours of precious time. I constantly have to remind myself to just keep going, that if it gets messed up, SO WHAT! Every success, but more importantly, every failure is a learning opportunity.
It took a few tries to figure out how to cut away the turtles shell pieces after the main body was all sewn down.

The quilting kit instructions were basically incomprehensible on how to cut out the little pieces before any quilting was actually holding things together and appeared to be written for hand applique.  I am simply against hand sewing on principle, I mean this is the whole reason sewing machines were invented anyway, to free us from the tedium of hand sewing.  So, left to my own devices to make this work for machine sewing, I first copied the pattern and traced over it again, eliminating the seam allowances.

 then I tried copying the design onto water-soluble Solvy (looks sort of like Sarah Wrap), and free motion sewing over the cut lines onto the turtle.  This turned out terrible, the Solvy just didn't have enough body to stay exactly in place and the stitch lines distorted everything as I was sewing.  Note: just now in my quest to find the hyperlink to Solvy I actually read the directions for use, which suggested putting everything in an embroidery hoop, maybe next time.

Next, I created a little template, sort of a reverse stencil, of what would be the cut out portions, laid this over each turtle and traced with a chalk pencil.

and now for one of the "not for sissies" parts, actual cutting.  Slowly, slowly, ever so carefully feeling underneath the fabric to make sure I wasn't going all the way through and thus make a BIG HOLE in my lovely work, of much lesser concern in my concentration was taking care not to cut off my own fingertip as I gripped the fabric, but couldn't see through the fabric to exactly where my finger was in relation to the scissors.

Whew, made it through with the quilting backing AND all my fingers intact.

And now onto the basting step, I just love this Quilting Basting Gun from Dritz, it puts little plastic T-bar tacks through the fabric, very similar to how store tags are attached.  This is a real time saver over putting in safety pins or heaven forbid, hand basting.

there is a small drawback to this unit, the tip of the gun is a rather large, hollow needle and to properly set the tag you have to really press the whole fabric sandwich (top fabric, batting and backing fabric) up against the nose of the gun or you get misfires. Misfires are no big deal, you just clear the jam and keep going, but it's a waste of tacks and time, so it pays to be careful to really press the fabric up to the nose of the gun from the bottom.

 Yet another operation that involves sharp objects above and invisible fingers below.  This time my finger didn't remain unscathed, and in true hobbyist fashion my first thought was "oh no, I hope I didn't get any blood on the fabric". Luckily, no blood stains and only a really minor injury, but this proves my point that sewing isn't for sissies.

Life's too short to use bent pins

Now that I've got my sewing mojo back on, another project has been released from purgatory (AKA the sewing room closet).

I picked this pattern and fabric up in the lovely tropical paradise of Kauai at the Kapaia Stitchery in 2008.  The store was great, in a little red schoolhouse type building.  It was an explosion of colors inside with lots of beautiful examples of Hawaiian quilts.  Craig didn't find the store quite as interesting as I did....

It's sort of weird that quilting is popular enough in Hawaii that it would have even developed it's own style.  They are typically symmetrical applique patterns with echo quilting (sewing around the appliques so has a "ripple in the pond" effect).

Cutting out the intricate shapes brought back fond memories of Arts & Crafts projects in elementary school. Remember the nervous excitement the first time you get to use the blunt-tip safety scissors to white knuckle the pattern from the folded construction paper?  The pure wonder and delight of opening the paper to reveal that long chain of dolls holding hands.  So here is today's chain of turtles and dolphins holding flippers and fins.

Literally hundreds of pins later (and several annoying bent ones I finally threw away), it's ready for the next step, the slightly more nerve-wracking step of actually sewing these 2 enormous doilies onto the backing without bunches and creases.  Lunch might be in order first.