Blogs bring the world to my laptop, but I also enjoy the local ones. I’m a regular reader of Georgia on My Mind, which features a weekly Georgia Blog Carnival, and this week it’s hosted by Marketing Through the Clutter. If you’re a Georgia Peach (international readers - it’s our state fruit), or just strive to be one, head on over and check it out. You get a great feel for what’s going on in this wonderfully diverse and culturally rich state.
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Archive for December, 2007
I’m surprised my sewing machine isn’t smoking I’ve been using it so much this December. When I need a break from quilting the UGA quilt, I’ve been making multitudes of these. They’re the QuiltSmart bags. No pattern needed, just use their interfacing and the pattern is printed right on it. On their website they show the bags without being cuffed, which makes them reversible, but the proportion of the bag doesn’t seem right to me. So I used the “rule of thirds” design rule and cuffed the bag 1/3 of its length and I think it looks much better.
These are the ones I could photograph before my boys whisked them away to school for their teachers. Two left the house without photos: a blue toile with a tan floral cuff, and a black toile with a black mini-check cuff. Both adorable.
I used a lot of Michael Miller fabrics for these. After all, what teacher wouldn’t love getting a Dick and Jane tote bag, or one with cursive writing practice on it?
Two more are in the works for my other nieces, with their Christmas gifts tucked inside. Ssshhh! It’s a secret! Not to worry . . . they are not readers of this blog. Yet.
Wow. I feel dwarfed by this quilt when I’m at my machine. It takes me, my sewing table, and a chair to hold it all. But we’re plugging along, block-by-block, and it’s almost done.
I’m spending 80% of my time wrestling, ahem, nudging, the quilt through my machine, and the other 20% actually quilting. I thought I had broken my machine when it was making a painful noise and the stitch arm was stuck in the “up” position. It was one of those classic marriage moments when my husband suggested it was the needle, but I knew better, as my machine would never make that horrible noise if it were just the needle.
It was the needle.
I couldn’t do it. I had the best of intentions, but when it came time to part with Emily’s UGA quilt top, I just knew it belonged to my hands to quilt. Not literally hand-quilting, but the quilting design and the machine quilting I wanted to do. So here it is, being basted. Normally a slow process anyway, but my younger son is home ill with a fever so it’s reaaaaally slow.
What are those things on the backing, you ask? What every resourceful girl would use when she’s out of bulldog clips: they’re clamps from my husband’s woodworking shop. Which echoes those words of wisdom from Norm Abrams:
“You can’t have too many clamps.”
He said this during an episode of New Yankee Workshop I happened to be watching with my husband eons ago. Norm was gluing together a piece of furniture, and literally the man must have had thirty clamps holding that piece together.
Batting laid out.
Safety pins? Check. Kwik-Clip? Check. I’d better pull up a chair. I’m going to be here for a while.
After months of attempting to figure out what was wrong with my blurry blog header image, Judy Perez of Painted Threads pointed me in the right direction. I had searched for the answer online extensively, and no one had ever written about this, so I’m doing it now.
Supplying your own blog image header requires that you crop your image to the correct size of your blog header. In my case, that was 950×200 pixels. I cropped image after image in Photoshop Elements, only to have the image become horribly blurry. I tried to improve the resolution, to sharpen it, and nothing worked.
Here’s the secret: You can’t use an image that was photographed at too low a resolution in the first place. You must take a photo intended for a blog header at a higher resolution than normal, since the pixel width required for a blog header image is wider. My photos taken at the 3:2 resolution setting didn’t have enough pixels to show the detail necessary when I cropped them. So I changed the setting on my camera to use a higher image size (5M) which contains a higher number of pixels. I could then crop the image and the detail was much better, with no more blur.
Note to Mac users: I use iPhoto to upload my photos, as I find it infinitely simpler than Photoshop Elements, but iPhoto does something to the image size to make it smaller so it can easily display large numbers of photos. When I open the image in Photoshop Elements, it says the photo is only 72dpi. I double the resolution, to 144, which improves it greatly and allows me to crop the image with no blur. There may be a slicker way to do this, but this worked for me and hopefully it will help you too.
Yesterday when I picked up my son from school, he asked me a question that came directly to the point: “Did you have a bad blog day?” It must have shown. Yes, in fact, I did have a terrible blog day. But it got much better, and the results are on this page.
I owe a big thank you to Judy Perez at Painted Threads who came to my rescue. I have for months been trying to improve the quality of the photos you see in my blog header. No matter what I did, they were blurry, even when the original photo itself was crystal clear. I subscribe to Judy’s blog and admired her blog header, so I asked for her help, which she graciously offered. And now I have a nice, sharp, blog header photo, and can thank Judy for it. She was a lifesaver!
I’ve been keeping a blog now for over a year, since October of last year. I’ve found it to be an extremely rewarding endeavor. I’ve been able to share and connect with quilters worldwide, which I could never have imagined when I began blogging.
I’ve also found developing a blog to be extremely challenging. I love technology, as I was a Computer Science minor in college, and made my living being a technical writer and courseware developer. I have seven published books on software applications, several of which won prestigious awards. I lived and breathed hi-tech. Since having children and staying home to raise them, the hi-tech world has changed at an even faster pace, and I struggle to keep up with it and my busy family life. Blogs were a new development, and I was fascinated at the ability to connect with so many other like-minded quilters and artists, especially since I live in a remote area. I was excited to embark on the blogging adventure allowing me to combine my writing, hi-tech skills, art and quilting. One year later, I’m bowled over that people as far away as South Korea, Brazil, Japan, and Israel read this blog.
I’ve learned so much from other bloggers, about quilting, blogging, and art. It’s a generous community that puts in so much time into what really amounts to a labor of love.
The elves have been busy here. Playing Christmas tunes on the keyboard. Putting up the artificial tree, which husband curses every year. Decorating the mantel with the snow family and string-pieced stockings.
Gearing up for the much-anticipated event around here:
The annual making of the Gingerbread house. I used to do these from scratch and cut out the pieces by hand. Then I wised up, or my sister did, and she gave me a Pampered Chef mold for Christmas one year (unfortunately they don’t sell it anymore). This is one of my boys’ absolute favorite traditions. I save the Halloween candy they don’t want and use it up on the Gingerbread house. Messy, sticky, and lots of giggles.
I’m finally getting close to completing Emily’s UGA dorm quilt. Red and black, of course. This quilt will be handed down to all the Peagler children who attend UGA, so the trick was to select fabrics that wouldn’t be either too feminine or masculine. I realized how many quilting fabrics are florals, with the alternative being checks, plaids, stripes or some horrible novelty print. Selecting fabrics for this quilt really was a challenge.
The blocks for this are truly gigantic: 23 inches. Why? Because I abhor making 45-50 small blocks for a bed quilt. I think a large quilt needs blocks of similar proportion, so I made grand-sized log cabin blocks, and alternated their placement with red and black center squares alternating.
I’m planning to send this to a long-arm quilter in my guild to be quilted. I’ve never sent a quilt off to be quilted, especially since the quilting is one of my absolute favorite parts of the process. But I’m afraid this quilt is long overdue, and I have other gifts to make this Christmas season. Can you tell I’m trying to rationalize this and not feel guilty?
Voila! In no time, here’s my finished apron! I love the fabrics, and this Threads pattern is so easy to whip up. Living in a house with all men, it’s a treat to get to make something feminine once in a while. So I went with pink florals and polka-dots!
The bottom pocket is really two pockets, as I sewed a dividing line about 2/3rds of the way across so it would be more usable. This apron is reversible, and here’s side two:
I don’t think the men in my home will be borrowing this anytime soon. One of my favorite features of this apron is the bottom: no hemming required, as the selvedges make the bottom. You can see that here in my original version:
That little bit of white peeking out on the bottom is the Alexander Henry label on the selvedge bottom. The opposite side of this apron has matching jalapeno pockets so my husband can wear it when he’s grilling outdoors.
I’ve searched the Threads archive for the pattern, but they don’t offer it online. The article was written by John Giordano, who at the time of publication taught International Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, and apparently designed and sewed aprons for fun. What a guy!
I really did buy the Threads issue this summer with the apron pattern in it. I can’t find it for the life of me, even turning my studio upside down looking for it, so I’m going with Plan B. I’m making the classic apron that was in Threads 2005 issue and I’ve used so many times. I truly used that apron every week. I will share photos of it next week, but here’s a sneak peek of the new apron in progress:
And here go the pockets:
Janice Chesnik, a member of the Dawsonville Heart & Hand guild, was at our soiree at Sew Memorable this week and she showed this beautiful Kaleidoscope quilt:
Can you tell that Janice used to make the real thing? She and her husband made kaleidoscopes for over 25 years. And she’s friends with Paula Nadelstern, who is scheduled to be coming to the metro Atlanta (including the Dawsonville area) in January 2010.
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