Knit Meter

Sunday, February 28, 2021

A Finished Quilt

What I wrote at the beginning of my last post still holds true. I have been working away on projects but nothing to show. But that is going to change as this post has a finished quilt and future posts will show two finished yarn projects.

I am (very) slowly working through this book  by Jenni Dobson. The patterns are labeled from beginner to advanced. The first one I made from left over fabric from my mother-in-law, but I liked the colour of the next quilt so much I had to purchase similar colours. In 2009! I don’t know when I cut the pieces for the quilt but it was sometime after 2013 and sometime after that for sewing them altogether. But I do know when I sandwiched the quilt as there is a record on this blog.

In the meantime I started the next quilt and now it is waiting for quilting. Although I said at the beginning of the year that would be the one to be finished next, I still have to find the right backing fabric for it. But don’t worry, I have purchased the fabric for the next quilt.

Finally my desire to have the quilt overrode the “I’m not good enough” thoughts in my head. And I’m so happy with it. I don’t mind that the pieces aren’t perfectly square; the quilting stitches are not even; the fabric on the back is not completely smooth. Nobody will be looking at it that closely.

 



Tuesday, February 9, 2021

Just Some Photos of Socks In Progress

I haven’t posted on here for a while as there hasn’t really been anything to show. But I have been working through new and old projects.

At the beginning of the year I said that I was going to finish the smaller quilt first but I need backing fabric for it and I haven’t found what I want to use yet so rather than hold off on sewing I picked up the large quilt. My sewing arrangements have changed this year. Furniture was rearranged when we decorated the house at Christmas and after everything was put away, I left the furniture in the new positions so that I could leave my sewing machine out. This has definitely made a difference in my sewing as I can just sit down and sew when I want and not have to bring the sewing machine downstairs to the dining room everytime and put it away every time. My sewing cabinet is fine for clothes sewing but not large quilts which need a table to hold them.

I decided to fit the darning foot and quilt in random circular patterns on the black fabric. The great thing about that is that you have to get really close to see the quilting and from a normal distance it looks quite good. My one disappointment is that the fabric on the back of the quilt is not completely flat.

The quilting is completely finished and the quilt just needs to be bound. I do not want to turn the backing fabric to the right side as I did on my last large quilt as I used two fabrics for the backing. And I was thinking it was going to take me longer to decide on the binding than to actually attach it to the quilt. So you can imagine my joy when I was checking my left over fabric from this quilt and found binding strips already cut. All I have to do is join them.

I’m really looking forward to this quilt being finished because I do like it and it is a good lesson in finished is better than perfect and prevarication lasts longer than the time to actually do something.

On the knitting front I have been working a few rows every day on my old projects. I have not been so lucky on my new projects. Vertices Unite is an easy project and the first section is garter stitch in two rows each of two colours. The first half is increases and the second half is decreases. Last week I had reached the end of the section and decided to check my knitting before cutting yarn and noticed right at the start of the decrease section that I had knit four rows of one colour. I could have left it as it would have been unnoticeable in the finished item but I knew it was there. So I undid 160 rows and most of my knitting this week was getting this project back to where it was. And, yes, I still managed to knit four rows of one colour instead of two. But at least this time the most I pulled out was 20 rows.

I worked the next section of my Advent socks. It is the first colourwork section and a quick knit. Also, as we are in a new month I started a new project. I decided to take part in the Sock Knitters challenge, knitting a pattern from one of the featured designers as I had yarn that I thought would be perfect.

Here’s a picture of the leg. The pattern is Brown Eyed Girl by Louise Roberts and the yarn is from SpaceCadet.

 

And here is a picture of the next section of the Advent socks.