I Can Make That!: November 2010

First the quilt, then the story!

You can't see the fabric well, but the green has large leaf patterns, the yellow has tiny leaf and vine patterns.

It isn’t very often that I embark on a completely new adventure, but when I do, I dive in head first! This is my journey into quilting, a road that I hope will be long and satisfying. I will TRY to keep up with other projects, but I fear, dear friends, that this will likely become more of a quilting blog over the next year. It’s that serious! I am in love!

About a year ago, I went to the fabric store and saw a special quilting kit that was a farm scene made up of tiny long triangles of fabric which results in shading in the proper places (think taking a photograph on a sunny day and trying to reproduce it using nothing but fabric, but in triangle mosaic!). It was beautiful, and I came so close to buying it, but I think I thought it was expensive at the time (compared to other kits I’ve come across recently, it was dirt cheap!).

Several months ago, the Jones Creek Library had a quilt show and display. I had seen a small quilt in the same style as the kit at the fabric store, but there was only the one of its kind amongst those displayed. It turns out that this is the same person who designed the farm scene quilt kit. I was inspired to look through some quilting books to see if this technique had a specific name, but alas, no luck. However, in looking through the books, I became inspired to make a quilt based on one of my favorite book series. I won’t mention which one, because I have looked and NOT seen anything like it online, so I’ll keep it under wraps until I am ready to design and create it (probably with a little advice from one or two people)!

At this point, Halloween is coming up, and I start to form decorating ideas and collecting items to accomplish my vision. I got the idea to make “witch jars” from an email sent to me by a friend several years ago. I was going to turn my mantle into this crazy jar display! One problem…my walls are blue! Works REALLY well with my Christmas decorations, but not so much with Halloween. That’s when I came up with the idea to create a creepy “window” to hide the blue, as though the mantle was an actual shelf in a potion shop or a witch’s house. I had thought of making it with paper, but then I had seen the quilts at the library, looked at the triangle mosaic (that is what I am calling it from now on, whether it is correct or not), and got the idea to quilt the “window” instead! I even went so far as to buy the PERFECT fabric for some decrepit-looking shutters. But I had so much else to do that I resigned myself to admitting it would be next year at least before I could learn enough to make it the way I picture it. So to the back burner it went!

THEN a friend of mine posted that she was thinking of joining a quilting bee! PERFECT opportunity! So she sends me the information, and it turns out to be…the library people! I look into joining myself, but it turns out it isn’t the right kind of club for me, for various reasons (lack of experience on my part being one, the fact that the meetings are more about showing projects than learning being another big one), nor is it for my friend, as she didn’t join either. So we band together and form our OWN quilting bee, currently of only two! But it works.

My first quilting challenge was to find a pattern that would give me experience, use a minimum amount of supplies (in case I ended up not liking quilting after all). Unfortunately, most of the quilts in the books are either very much not my style or have a MINIMUM of 5 fabric colors! I needed something that would be relatively easy and relatively cheap. Luckily I came across a pattern posted on the library people’s blog, and it looked easy and had only 2 colors. Perfect! I had one color already, I just needed a second. I wasn’t terribly excited about this pattern, but for a first quilt, it was the learning experience I needed it to be, and it was alright to make mistakes since there just wasn’t going to be the emotional investment in it that I planned for others. Here is the pattern I used: http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/feathered-star-productions-inc/Web01.pdf.

So here are my lessons learned. 1. Unless you have a rotary cutter and accompanying cutting mat, it is better to fold your fabric lengthwise until it is a relatively short width, then MARK it, and use the line as a cutting guide (I was using the straight edge of a table, and my strips looked quite wavy in places). 2. Invest in a special clear quilter’s ruler that is well marked (mine is in 1/16^th inch increments); even ones for only $5 make a WORLD of difference! 3. Colored chalk works WAY better than fabric-marking pencils and are so much cheaper (this is a tip directly from my quilting partner, which I chose to ignore the first time she suggested it; ignoring it turned out to be a ”costly” mistake, as I bought a $3 pencil that doesn’t even show up on my fabrics!). The chalk may not be as accurate (no sharp little points), but it is close enough, and compensating is easy enough. 4. If you are using a sewing machine, your fabric edges better be STRAIGHT! 5. And lastly, if one square seems smaller than the others, just cut a new square rather than cutting down all the others to make them match the one! That’s just plain lazy! However, lack of emotional investment made this excusable THIS time, but never again!

The end result of this project is that I ended up with something that, despite all my protests of this “lacking any emotional investment,” I ended up really liking and am very proud of! I also know what to expect with other quilting projects, how to avoid mistakes, and that quilting is something that is likely to be an enduring passion for me. I have since looked up patterns and pictures, and in one afternoon, I found at least 50 quilts that I would like to make, some of them not even for myself! This will be a very fun adventure!

"Don't be ridiculous. Martha Stewart isn't a demon. She's a witch. Nobody could do that much decoupage without calling on the powers of darkness." – Anya, “Wrecked,” Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Six

I may not have been blogging lately, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been super busy with crafting! Also, I’ve been a bit lazy. Life-long habit of mine! ;-) Since last time I’ve blogged, I have learned how to quilt, joined a quilting group, started up a yarn crafts group (crochet and knitting), started up a social dinner group with a very specific group of friends from our college days, collected bottles and papier mache materials for next year’s Halloween decorations (and hopefully a HUGE party), and baked and decorated two birthday cakes, two Halloween cakes, and planning baby shower and wedding cakes, as well as sampler cakes! Whew! I also had a SUPER FUN craft night with a friend who wanted to make a fall wreath (all I did was fix mine, which was falling apart). Hers turned out TOTALLY amazing, and as usual, I am so jealous! She even cooked for me! Yummy, amazing fish tacos and fish tortilla soup! Thanks for indulging me on that one! ;-) If I’d had a normal stomach, I’d have wolfed down so much of that stuff she’d have thought I was nuts!

So now that Halloween has come and gone, here is an update of Halloween-specific crafts I’ve been up to.

So I step into Hobby Lobby one day, and I saw a Martha Stewart Halloween magazine-book, so naturally I HAD to look through it. I immediately saw two decorating projects that would be relatively cheap, easy, and quick that I could do THIS YEAR!

The first was to make spider egg sacks. This involved wrapping batting (in my case, polyester fiber filling) around an egg shape (Martha used Styrofoam, I used paper mache eggs because they were cheaper), then stuffing the whole thing down into the toe of a white stocking, then adding spiders on the inside, and hot gluing a few in place on the outside. Each one is hung up in an appropriately creepy place.

The second project, which I also found on her website as well as her book, involved cutting black plastic garbage bags (the large ones) into strips (still attached at the fused end), and then stretching sections of them at 2 inch intervals to make alternating wide and thin sections. This created a nifty spooky effect, and the strips flow in even the slightest breeze, making it even BETTER! I think her instructions say to cut the bags so they are a single layer, but I left mine so that I had a double layer of strips, since I used the cheap Dollar Tree bags. I’d recommend investing in the name brand heavy duty kind, though. The cheap ones tore frequently.

I hung both of these projects on the overhang above my door, and with the Glitter Skull Wreath I made, it looked like a pretty cool scene!

And here is the result of that bit of crafting fun:

Creepy Curtain Doorway

Egg Sacks!

I also found some cheap (very cheap K) “cemetery” fence, and since I had some Dollar Tree Styrofoam tombstones from last year, I made a small cemetery, and hung a small lantern (a garage sale find) with a battery-operated tea light from a plant hook I got from my mom, and the effect was very cute!

Then there are the cakes! I saw this idea on the Wilton website (http://www.wilton.com/idea/Halloween-Homebodies-Cake), which is a haunted house made with their Color Flow technique. I just HAD to do this for work, and when I got invited to a party where everyone brought snacks, I decided that it was just as easy to make two as it was one. After many mishaps and a HUGE learning curve (now I know why my instructor and the lesson books say to make SURE that all utensils are grease [i.e. butter and shortening] free!), I finally got all of my pieces made, some better than others (there was a point at which I was ready to give up, so my work got sloppy and rushed).

Templates and Supplies gathered

Fun little bats! I love these!

The Showpiece

Trees that didn't get used (had to remake them)

Fence posts (I was relieved when I FINALLY got them to not break!)

I’ve been trying to find a truly amazing chocolate cake recipe (I made the BEST chocolate cake one year for a friend’s birthday, but when I tried the recipe I could have SWORN I used the following year, it didn’t taste the same), and many people recommended the cakes on the Swan’s Down (cake flour) website. Many have come out great. For the work cake, I tried the “America’s Favorite Chocolate Cake” recipe, but it tasted exactly like the unsweetened cocoa I used, and was very dry. I suspect this was in part because I made 10 inch cake rounds, so I had to cook them for a long time, and the cooked parts dried out before the middle cooked fully. Even using moistening syrup didn’t work. Since I didn’t make both cakes at the same time, I decided to try a different recipe on the Swan’s Down site, the “Ultimate Chocolate Birthday Cake” recipe, which calls for less flour and incorporates sour cream. This was by far a superior recipe and was not even the slightest dry! “America’s Favorite” is NOT mine!

The reaction at work was astonishing, and that is understating it. Masses of people flocked by just to look at it before I started serving it. I can’t tell you how many times I had to answer the questions, “how long did it take you to do all this,” “is all of this edible, “ and “how did you make this part?” It was nuts! I told people I’d be cutting it a 9:00, and there was a line when 9:00 rolled around! A 10 inch round cake is supposed to serve 48 people. I’m not sure how many people came for cake, but it was DEMOLISHED in under ten minutes. GONE! People who waited too long were picking up crumbs off the board and scraping stuff off of the serving knife! It was crazy, scary and AWESOME all at the same time! I never felt so flattered! And overwhelmed. And frightened. Fortunately, there weren’t even close to that many people at the party, so I was spared the magnitude of the work scene, but people were no less amazed, and honestly, so was I! Every once in a while, I amaze even myself! J

There were times when it was very frustrating with all the breakages and mistakes, plus I kept running out of single ingredients and ended up making trips to the store for EACH individual one, but once things fell into place, it was fun, and I remembered why I used to love making cakes, and why Albertson’s was NOT the place to ply my trade (lack of creativity).