Eleven Stitches

Quilts for My School

A week ago I was really busy quilting, but it wasn't for me.  I was working on two quilts for my school's fund raising auction. 

Unfortunately, I did not get very many pictures of the first quilt.  This one is from my during-the-day classroom, with a kite theme.  I worked on this one with the other two teachers in my classroom, and the children helped sew the buttons onto their individual kites.

The second quilt is from my After School program.  This is using the same idea as the quilt I did last year, but this time I cut out the shapes because the younger children are not as adept with the scissors yet.  Even so, the children exceeded my expectations on what they created.

 

Two days before the auction, we hung up the quilt outside so we all could admire it.  The children set up chairs right in front of the quilt, and spent quite a bit of time just looking at it.

The quilts ended up raising over a thousand dollars for the school!  The After School quilt ended up being in a bidding war, and they had to go to a second sheet of paper for the silent auction bidding.  I was so excited.  I think it's so wonderful that something I love to do ends up being so valuable to the place I work.  Yay.

March Blocks

March was a few months ago now, but with burning my fingers and then internship homework, I got a little behind on my One Shiny Bee blocks.  Today I was finally able to devote some time to personal quilting, and this is what I came up with.

The person who sent out fabric and inspiration this month asked for pinwheels.  I took the inspiration for the first two blocks from this series of tutorials.

I love this block, and the combination of the pink/red and green. 

Flying geese are such a fun quilting motif, and I like how they integrate into a pinwheel here.  I added in my own blue solid fabric since it matched so well with the blue fabric included in my packet.

I wanted to include a third block to make up for the fact that I'm 3 months (wince) late.  This was improvisationally pieced from my leftover pieces of fabric.

It was such a thrill to be back in my sewing room and making something for fun.  I'm looking forward to being back at sewing again this summer!

Pretty, Pretty

It all started with the yarn.  At the time, I was very faithfully knitting my Olympic Sweater, but I did stop in at my local yarn store.  And I saw this skein.

It was one of those skeins of yarn that I picked up and just could not put back down.  Look at all of those colors!  And they look so nice together in the skein!  The yarn is Punta Yarns Merisock Hand Painted in HP71.

In order to offset some of the guilt of buying another skein of sock yarn (I do have a lot), I decided to start the socks right away.  Or at least, right away after my Olympic sweater was done.

I began with the wavy cuff I made up for the Glacier Wave socks, and followed it up with a little 1x1 ribbing. 

And then it was stockinette all the way.  Because apparently that's what I do with socks nowadays.  As you can see in the above pictures, the colors were pooling  a little bit, so I quickly switched to 60 stitches around instead of 64.  It got rid of the pooling, and the sock probably fits a little better, too.

I really like how these came out.  It's rare that a skein this pretty translates to a pretty pair of socks, because the colors so often do something weird.  This time, they still look great.

Overall, the socks read as a kind of zazzy neutral brown. So I get to wear them with my brown outfits and feel like I've got a bit of color to go with it.  I have a ton of yarn left over.  I'm not sure how I'll use it all yet, but I did use a little bit to make a wee tiny sweater to use with one of my classroom lessons.  But that's a story for another day!

Something Cozy

Hello, blog readers.  I think I'm ready to start posting again.  April has disappeared into a haze of homework, self-doubt, reflection, homework, exhaustion, and more homework.  All of my assignments for my teacher training were due on April 29, and I turned in almost everything.  The thing about this training is not just that it required a lot of homework, but it really required me to change as a person as well.  And even though I think I'm a better person for it, the change was difficult and sometimes painful.  It's a lot to take in.

In April I worked myself to exhaustion and tears, and you might say it culminated two weeks ago with me forgetting to knit for an entire day.  I broke my three year streak and I was too tired to care!  Now that I'm on the other side of things, I'm trying to figure out who I am again, and what I like to do for fun. I know that I still like to knit, so I'll start there.

One thing that has gotten me through the past few months has been tea.  It helps my sinuses (a huge problem for me), and I've trained myself to relax while drinking tea. It also has a lot of stuff attached to it that I think is a lot of fun: flavors of tea, tea kettles, mugs, loose tea holders, honey... I realized that the one thing I was missing was a mug cozy.

My mug cozy lets me hold my tea when it is still steaming without hurting my fingers, and the bit of contact with a knitted thing is soothing to me.  I started my mug cozy with some bulky yarn that I had never figured out how to use, but then I changed my mind.  This cozy should be made with the luxury stuff, since tea is a tiny little luxury for me.

So I knitted this cozy on US 1 DPNs with some leftover Crown Mountain Farm Sock Hop yarn instead.  It's 18 stitches, garter stitch all the way with some button holes at the end. It's perfect.  Except that I did not realize how much stretch there needed to be in the cozy, and I recently ripped out about 2 inches and re-did the button holes.  Now it's really perfect!

I'm glad I had this little project to make me smile during tough times.  Now I'll get to enjoy it during happy times as well.