What’s the appeal of Instagram? The squares? The fun with filters? I love it unconditionally, and now you can follow homemade city on Instagram! (I’m not being paid for this promotion–sadly). I promise you won’t see pix of my undeniably cute kids and I swear I’ll limit the cat photos: just homemade projects & objects. And yeah, maybe some roadside oddities like this Tin Man who lives in Goshen, Mass.
Scrooge or Santa’s helper? My pre-Christmas mood swings between bah-humbug and happy industry. Buying stuff can send me into ethical, financial quandries, but wrapping stuff? I can handle that. The complicated origami of neatly packaging a basketball? Bring it on.
Stamping gift tags is another merry, mindless task for me. I made these stamps (cut out of foam) years ago, and I love digging them out every year. This year, I found a date stamp (the most recent year on it is 2007)–and put that to work, too.
. . . Merry Christmas, everyone!
My 2013 resolution: make a quilt.
Check. Completed, and just under the wire.
OK, enough already. Maybe I fudged it a bit and made a teeny-tiny wee quilt. Don’t be so particular! But ain’t it cute? It only took about 15 minutes to make versus the never-endingness of its queen-size version. (If anyone’s curious, I cut 2-inch squares, pieced together, made a mini-quilt sandwich with some on-hand batting, and finito. That’s how to quilt, man.)
And to go with the little quilt and the little bed, a little cupboard that I recently found in a Concord, Mass. junk shop:
When I refer to the abbreviation WIP, I mean Work In Perpetuity. Sure, there’s progress, but it’s so slow. Who knew sewing a quilt would involve so much sewing? Maybe I should have guessed as much after dutifully cutting 278 4″ squares of fabric. Here are the squares “chain-pieced” into piles of pairs:
For newbies like me, chain-piecing means sewing two patches right side together and then just lifting the presser foot and feeding in the next pair to make a continuous chain. You cut the pairs apart later. Two other rookie things I’ve learned: there’s no backstitching in quilting, and quilters really dig a 1/4″ seam allowance (so if a pattern doesn’t give an allowance, bank on that one).
Now I’m sewing my pairs into strips. According to Alicia Paulson’s Ollalieberry Ice Cream quilt pattern, the squares should be random. Tell that to my brain! I can’t stop myself from trying to create patterns from the chaos! Order out of entropy! Here Captain Wonderpaws overlooks my work:
Nothing cheers me more than a VW bus parked on my block. This belongs to my neighbor’s son. It used to be completely green but has since evolved into something weirder–and more autumnal, don’t you think?
Kind of like this:
Autumn colors and old vehicles bring to mind two projects I want to tackle this fall. First, I’d like to try my VW bus pillow freezer paper print again, but this time on a throw pillow backed with groovy vintage fabric.
Second, I really, really need to return to my abandoned quilt project. The pretty picture below is actually not a pretty picture. I had to dust the fabric off in order to snap the photo–that’s how long these fabric squares have sat on my table.
I’m afraid that I may need to actually count each individual square to make sure I have the right number. So, stay tuned as I make myself some coffee and contemplate a whole lot of counting.
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