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Thursday, April 30, 2009

Coming soon to Etsy

My business partner Cathy thought I should have an etsy storefront. I thought I didn't have anything to sell. Until I talked to "I" of GAIN. She wanted to use the leftover jeans pockets as oven mitts yesterday and the day before. I whipped up a few, and decided that upcycling jeans into potholders would be great for etsy. Stay tuned.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Jeans Quilt

Yesterday and today, I replenished my supply of straight pins, increased my supply of safety pins, and went to three stores before finding a flat sheet at the right price point and with the right "look."

The top is currently halfway pinned to the batting and backing. I still need to buy a walking foot with the Christmas money that I have saved. I can buy one now that I have decided where to sew quilting lines. I didn't want to buy something and not use it. But now I have opened the issue with the strippy quilt --

Strippy quilts are great because they use up your scraps. They also go together quickly because there is no strict pattern to adhere to. BUT, there are no clear lines for you to sew, once the top is finished. I just figured everything in my head today.

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Jeans Quilt


Turn your head sideways for the real view. I have a LOT more sewing to do.

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Monday, April 20, 2009

Jeans Quilt


Not the last two weeks, but the weeks before have been spent keeping busy in little spaces of time at the sewing machine. This will be a strippy, scrappy quilt. Again, my goal is to not buy fabric for the quilt top if possible.

I find that a height of 8" blocks really uses up the jeans quickly. They are much larger pieces than what I needed for the crazy quilt. My sister and mother gave me old jeans to use since my supply almost ran out. I'm humored to see the kids' old jeans. They make fairly narrow strips if they are smaller than a size ten. When did they grow bigger?

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Egg Pocking


Who has the strongest egg? Which egg will survive the longest? Which egg will never compete?

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Hot Cross Buns

Made for Good Friday. I didn't get all Friar-y on the kids and make them recite a prayer in order to receive a bun. We ate these for breakfast.

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Thursday, April 9, 2009

Jeans Quilt


What I do not use.

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Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Pretzels for Lent


At least ten years ago, I would watch a show called "Donna's Day." She had great activity suggestions for kids roughly ages four through ten, including pretzel making. I decided soon after Ash Wednesday that this year I would remember to make pretzels and hot cross buns for Lent.

In my laziness (Why compose and type when you can copy and paste?), and my search for authoritative sources (On the internet? Yeah, right.), I was reading "The History of the Pretzel" here.

Here is the beginning of the text. Much more is at the website.

As early as 610AD at a monastery somewhere in Southern France or Northern Italy, where monks used scraps of dough and formed them into strips to represent a child's arms folded in prayer. The three empty holes represented the Christian Trinity. The monks offered the warm, doughy bribe to children who had memorized their Bible verses and prayers. The monks called it a Pretiola, Latin for little reward. From there, the pretzel transformed into the Italian word, Brachiola, which means little arms. The Pretiola journeyed beyond the French and Italian wine regions, hiked the Alps, wandered through Austria, and crossed into Germany, where it became known as the Bretzel or Pretzel.

We used Donna's recipe once ten years ago, and decided to use it again. Both times were very successful, so I deem it a consistently good recipe. I cannot find the recipe on her website, otherwise I would post it here.
Maria, I centered the photo, but it is rotated. :-(

After I made the dough and it rose, half of GAIN Academy and I worked the dough into pretzel shapes. It rested for ten minutes while a pot of water and baking soda
heated up to a boil. We boiled the dough once the water was ready, then baked the dough. Here is our yummy final result. "G" of GAIN modified a cheap salt grinder (upper right corner) so we could use coarse, unground salt crystals for our pretzels. The longer pieces of dough were too large to fit well on our slotted spoons, so their shape is not as nice. But the taste was still good.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009

New quilt

The We Wilsons thing didn't come next. I looked at the neat but overgrown stack of denim on my bedroom floor and thought I should work on a jeans quilt. My time would be spent more wisely reclaiming the floor space in my room than cleaning with a duster mitt. Some of the jeans were outgrown or worn out three years ago. Yes, that makes for a large pile. At least the carpet beneath will be clean.

Among the many pairs of jean, most with holes in the knees, I found a pile of 8" strips, all different widths, cut and ready to sew. I had to make more strips. Here is the trash can of scraps. Blogger nicely rotated the photo for me so I didn't need to open my photo editor :-)

I decided to aim for 60" x 98" final dimensions. A flat twin sheet is 66" x 96" and I plan on using a flannel sheet for batting and a cotton sheet for backing.

I have one 60" row of strips finished. I am not attempting any color schemes, no matching seams and blocks. The strips will just fall where they want to be. Skinny and wide strips and dark, medium, and light colored strips will all be mixed together. A few strips will be multicolored -- work that I piece together with the smallish bits of reclaimed fabric. That's my version of flair.

I'll put progress reports here as I slowly get things cut and sewn together. No plan for the final quilting process. I have to think about buying a walking foot vs. tying. The challenge in the walking foot lays in the fact that I have no pattern and no square blocks sewn in an ordered layout. They are random, so I cannot quilt diagonal lines through the blocks. I am entertaining the idea of quilting the perimeter of random strips. That would require a walking foot. And more flair.

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Thursday, April 2, 2009

Next up

New project on the radar. From We Wilsons.

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Fiber Content Test

Inspired by We Wilsons, tonight, the younger two kids (the older ones didn't seem excited by a flame) and I burned our yarn and fabric in order to learn the fiber content. I specifically had yarn from my grandmother that I wanted to identify. You'll recognize several Lion Brand yarns -- I felt I wouldn't be at a loss if they burned. Finding Lion Brand yarns and their details are very easy. Without the yarn bands, I can look up their info online. Now the expensive yarns and the hard to find yarns from local stores, I'm saving those bands and those yarns -- no burning my precious fibers.

(Don't ask me why Blogspot turns every photo the wrong way. I guess it just expects portraits.)

Like the Wilsons, we read the procedure, but weren't sure what crushable or soft ashes looked like, or vigorous burning. The Wilsons had a 100% cotton control. We had our Lion controls.

We ended up burning a lot of different fabrics for the fun of it. Cheesecloth, flannel, stretch denim, if it was in the drawer in small quantity, then we burned it until our noses grew tired of bad acrylic smells. It just overpowered the good smells.

We learned that acrylic and polyester burn differently. Polyester quits burning upon removal from the flame. Acrylic continues to burn after removal from the flame. And they both smell really, really bad. I mean really bad. "G" thought that synthetics acted like plastic when you throw it in the campfire. I have to agree. And I have to bake in order to rid our house of the smell.

Wool and cotton remind us of campfire smells, and leave different ashes from each other. We liked how cleanly they burned. The synthetics burned, then left a plastic mass stuck to the bottom of our bowls. Ash is very nice in comparison.

Synthetic fabric can also look like wet boiling water while burning. "G" of GAIN has a scrap of polar fleece in this photo. Part of it fell from the main scrap and left a long stretchy, gooey string behind as it fell. It looked a lot like cheese on a pizza. But it smelled bad. And it was black.

Overall, this could be a good test for me. I buy remnants. They have wrappers for the workers to fill in about how much yardage the remnant contains, original price, sale price, etc. Frequently I find the space for fiber content empty.

And, the yarn from Grandma is cotton.

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