Hexagons - Making Progress and UFOs

I'm making progress on the hexagon project. It is almost squared off using the Medium Dark hexagons. There are only a few more of those on the right side of the picture. Once I'm squared off I'll be putting the very dark hexagons all around the outside edge. I've purchased a black on black fabric to mount the project on, and I've figured out how I will quilt it. The entire project went much faster than I expected, especially since I've also been knitting. So I had two hand projects going at the same time.

I've had a little upper back pain, so I'm avoiding the sewing machine right now, but I probably will be able to get back to it next week. I've got some UFOs to deal with.

I want to finish the FMQ on this project. I've done all of the larger blocks. I need to do the square in square blocks. 

The Class Project quilt, from a Craftsy course in FMQ just needs binding. I'd like to get it finished.

And then there is the Bloom Where You Are art quilt. Not totally sure what I want to do there. Some FMQ I think. But possibly some hand embroidery as well. I'm just not sure what to do with this one.

It might be time to look through all of the long term UFO projects. There are more of them hidden away. The general post I did about a month ago didn't include everything out there. In addition to actual projects there are things that never made it to the project stage. I've got equipment for a couple of different crafts, where I've never done anything with the equipment.

Take care all.

What is on my needles

I've been working on a first sock and I've hit a decision point. I have finished turning the heel and I knew I needed to try the sock on.

So here it is. It was looking huge on the table, and sure enough it was huge. I moved the sock from 3 dp needles to a large circular needle so I could try it on.

I have large feet and swollen lower legs. It almost looks like the leg portion fits in these photos, but actually even the leg is too big. The heel is literally huge.

No question that there is no reason to continue with this sock. I've got one and one half balls of the same yarn available. It would make sense to just cut the yarn off and start over with some changes. If I don't just rip the entire thing out, I'll have something to compare the new sock against the old sock.

Here are the changes.

Even on a #1 set of dp needles my gauge was 6 stitches to an inch, not the 7 that the pattern called for.  I'm going to change to zero needles to try to get the gauge down. In addition, I've always tensioned the yarn only over my forefinger. One of the problems with learning how to knit at 11 from a book is that I didn't have anyone to tell me that I needed to do certain things differently from the way I worked out. I purled "wrong" for decades. I finally found a different book that explained why most knitting directions weren't working for me. Like a lot of Continental knitters, my stitches were sitting on the needle in the wrong direction after a purl row. I got that fixed quite a while ago.  And now I'm working on using a better tension system. I can already see that my stitches are tighter. That is going to affect gauge.

It is very obvious that the knitting is too loose for a sock. Unfortunately it is almost impossible to get a double zero 40 inch circular needle. At least I've never seen one for sale online so far. I will be looking again just in case.

I am going to make a medium rather than a large. That will make the entire project smaller. I might end up with a problem in the leg area if I do that, but the foot will fit. On a circular needle I should be able to try the sock on even at the point where ribbing becomes stockinette stitch. That will help me decide how long to make the leg of the sock. If it is a bit tight, I can just make it shorter.

I'm going to make another try with Magic Loop. I was constantly dropping stitches from needles that were at rest with the dp ones. Partly because the sock had so many stitches. Partly because they were so loose. Partly just because that stuff happens with dp needles. I will do one sock at a time. I'm convinced that even an experienced knitter needs to go back to being a beginner when they are learning brand new techniques. For me Magic Loop is a brand new technique.

I am also considering another simple beginner's sock pattern. this one had the most annoying decrease instructions at the end of making the heel. I now know that being told to decrease on stitch on each row, but at different ends of the heel just drives me crazy. I never could remember if I was on round one or round two.

Take care all.

I Blog

The question at Mommy's Nap Time is:

What is one regular thing you do for yourself to keep up your creative mind? Do you go to a guild, out for coffee with a friend? Are there people / activities you do regularly or as needed?

I had to think for a minute, and the answer is I blog. I don't have a guild. My "guild" is the general crafting online community. I've had guilds in the past and this is the place where I do show and tell, and look at other people's projects and comment and receive comments.Through two different web sites I've had the classes I couldn't find locally. They are quite different concepts on how to run classes, but I've learned a lot in both Craftsy and Quilt University.

I do have a local quilting friend and we go out to lunch once a week and that is a load of fun. We do very different kinds of things, but she gets it, and so do I.

I do Morning Pages. I think that brain dump in the morning makes all the difference. I write down the things that bother me and I don't have to think about them again during the day. I plan out creative things. I wonder if I should do this kind of thing or that. I decided to start blogging on Morning Pages.

But mostly, I remember to have fun. At this point in my life, having fun makes sense.

Fabric!

I don't have a stash. Not really. But I have been buying some fabric on spec recently. For the first year I was back to quilting, and a bit more, I bought scrap bags from the local quilt shop. I like a scrappy look. Their scrap bags frequently had a lot of a single fabric cut into useable sized strips, and occasionally pieces almost the size of a fat quarter. I've used a lot of that in projects. A couple of the fabrics in the bed scarf were from the scrap bags and all of the fabric in my table scarf were from there too.


Yesterday I got a box of fabrics from JoAnn's. I've never ordered mail order but everything I bought was on sale. And a couple of the fabrics I got were things I just had to have from the photos on the web site. I decided to try the mail order because I had a good idea what kind of thing I wanted for the hexagon project and I was pretty sure I could not find what I wanted locally.

I was pretty amazed at what came out of the box. Everything was of reasonable quality. That was something I was worried about. The black fabric was exactly what I wanted. I thought it would be, and it was. One of the two had to have fabrics was just wonderful. The other was OK, but not great.

Each fabric came in a separate plastic bag. Nicely folded. Every piece of fabric had at least some additional fabric. The smallest amount extra was about 1/8th of a yard. Two of the bags were marked that they had been the end of the bolt. I got 3/4 yard extra of the black fabric, 2/3 yard extra of one of the others and 1/2 yard extra on a third.

Would I order again. Yes. In fact last night I ordered for a specific project. In this case it is possible that when I get the fabrics I'll need to tweak from my new stash, but now I actually have a stash.
 

Now that I've got the yardage organized I need to organize the larger amounts of fabric that isn't at least a yard long. I've got some fat quarters and some half yards and some of the stuff from the scrap bags are the equivalent of half a yard to a yard. I need to put those where I can actually see them and not with the smaller pieces of fabric.

The box above doesn't look full in the photo, but by the time I located and folded all of the one yard or longer pieces of fabric on pendaflex folders, it was totally full.

Take care all.

Daily Life, the Weather, Pain, and All of That

I've basically been stuck in the house all week. On Tuesday I pulled the car out of my garage thinking that it was raining, but it wasn't. It was snow.

Yes, that looks like rain, but it is actually snow. That isn't my house. It is the neighbor's across the street. I took the photo from my doorway.

Very little of it stuck. And all of it melted as the temperatures increased and the snow turned to rain.

I don't drive in questionable conditions, so I didn't go out.

It did not help that I've been in pain all week as well. I developed upper back pain on Sunday night. I'd picked up something too heavy for me. That is very easy to do. Almost everything is too heavy for me. This time it was the water bottle for the Humidifier which was heavier than usual because it was completely full.

My chiropractor helped a lot with that. It is now down to a very low grade discomfort, but only some of the time if I move just so.

On Wednesday morning it was my left leg. I have arthritis in both knees, but also in the left hip joint. I had another chiropractor's visit. He advised heat on the joint. I hadn't though about heat. It was great advice. It isn't totally better, but it is better.

I use a pedometer. And I've been forcing a few more steps than my regular number. Normal people can do 6000 steps in a day without even thinking about it. 5000 steps is pushing it. I'm pulling back on that as well.

I can knit. I can work on the hexagons, and I have. But no free motion quilting because of the back. I'm letting that get all better.

I can't wait for Spring. They say it will start getting a little warmer in a couple of days. It was a lot warmer last year during the first week in March. That isn't a given around here, but generally it becomes Spring in March.

Take care all.

Beginning to work on the heel

I've started working on the heel of the first real pair of knit socks. And I've learned a lot.

But first, that is the first photo I've tken that shows the real color of the yarn. All of the others have been too dark or too light. this photo was taken on the kitchen table and I've got a lot of light in the kitchen.

One thing I learned is how to count rows. 61 years ago I taught myself how to knit mostly from a book. I had been taught the knit stitch, Continental style, by my older sister. It never occurred to her to teach me how to purl. I learned that from a book. It wasn't until decades later that a different book explained why I was having problems with following stitch patterns. Like a lot of people who are self taught Continental style my purl stitches were done wrong resulting in them turning the wrong way. Things as easy as slip, yarn over decreases do not work right unless your stitches are sitting the correct way on a needle.

This time I finally learned the correct way to count rows. For one thing the right kind of stitch marker now exists. I haven't been doing much knitting but I'd never seen the kind of stitch marker that is sitting on the sock before this year. And I never knew were to place the marker, and I never knew to count the stitches on the needle as the last row in the count.

I'm 20 rows into knitting the flap right now. 10 more to go and then I turn the heel. I know that doing that with this method means I'm using short rows, which is another thing I've never done before.

One of the things the Internet has given me is the ability to take classes online. And I am learning a lot more than I did trying to locate those few books that can fill in the gaps of what I learned on my own over the last 6 decades. One thing I know I need to address is tensioning the yarn. There has to be a better way.

Take care all.

Everyday Life

The big project I finished this week was the taxes. I was expecting all kinds of problems because my husband died last year and I had to deal with the stuff that happens financially when one half of a couple dies. Turns out that Turbo Tax was totally able to deal with everything. As usual they just took me one step at a time. Even the problem that my federal taxes where going to be filed as married, filing jointly and the PA taxes could not be done that way was not a problem. I located a step by step tutorial on how to manage the PA tax forms in their online site. They deserve 5 stars out of 5 for how all of this was handled.

Now I've started shredding several years worth of documents that were never needed for the taxes in those years. I'd just filed some and put some into a holding space. That holding space and the filing space are filling up. Time to make some room for new stuff. This is a project that is going to take several days, or even a week or two as I locate more and more paperwork that needs shredding. I've got some downstairs in my computer room/office and I've got even more sitting in a file cabinet in the attic. ...[sigh]...

I didn't do any Free Motion Quilting while I was working on the taxes. Seems that the kind of "energy" I needed for the taxes is the same kind I now need for Free Motion Quilting. So once the taxes were done I figured back to the sewing machine. But I pulled something in my upper back, and I'm not stressing those muscles until the pain is totally gone. My chiropractor has an excellent handle on this kind of pain. I'm almost better. He told me what he did yesterday will take a couple of days. I'll see him tomorrow again, so if what he did needs a bit more tweaking, that can happen.

I have been working on the hand projects. Neither the sock nor the hexagons have gotten much further since the last time I blogged about them. Not enough that pictures would mean anything. But in both cases I can see some progress.

I'm going to be joining up with a Quilt Along at Patchwork Times. See the link here:

http://www.patchworktimes.com/2013/02/18/new-quilt-along/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PatchworkTimes+%28Patchwork+Times+by+Judy+Laquidara%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

(I need to learn how to do the "here" thing. I'm open to help on how to get that done.)

I've never joined a Quilt Along before, but they look like fun. I need to pull my fabrics together. I'll probably need to buy most of it because I do not have a yardage stash worth talking about. So there is going to be a shopping trip in person or online. Or both. Even in person I will probably change my mind about one or two fabrics once I get them home. The bed scarf was the first quilting project in decades where I bought all of the fabric for a particular project, and I replaced two of those fabrics before I started cutting, with better ones I had in the house. I'd be really shocked if that didn't happen again.

I'm going to end up with a bed sized quilt. Not totally sure what I'll be doing with a bed sized quilt or even if I'm going to be able to get it quilted on my own. I have a friend who uses a long arm quilter, so I do know of a person who does wonderful work that I feel I can trust if it turns out I can't manage it myself. But I don't really care. Sooner or later I need to make a bed sized quilt.

We are dealing with end of Winter weather here. I'm supposed to meet a group of women for lunch. But there is no way to tell if the weather that is coming today will be all rain, or if it will start with a wintery mix. I'll be playing it by ear. And there are already rumbles about something for the very end of the month that could be nothing much except a lot of rain, or could be very ugly indeed.

I am so tired of Winter!

Take care all.