Teaching

Side-Questing

by CZeitler

The world is full of amazing opportunities for crafts and self expression. Sometimes there are so many opportunities I start five things at once…okay, often I start five things at once. I have made some progress on my aunt’s quilt, right now I am using clear thread to ensure that her applique is solid on the first set of flowers. I think that the center looks good, I’ll see if I can ask my cousin when I see her at the Funeral.

I am trying to find a pattern with Celtic meaning and a lovely phrase to commemorate my Uncle that passed, I’ll make three (one for each of his kids and one for his widow…maybe one for his ex?). Mostly that is adding the elements for the design and getting them stitched out.

My library is kicking off their summer reading program in two weeks and I found out last week that we will be having ‘spirit days’ that week. I will not be at work for two of them, however I will be at the library to volunteer at a booth for one of the guilds I belong to. This means that I need at least ideas, if not projects, for each of the other five days. One of them is for a piece of art or inspiration by an artist. I am currently working on an applique design for a t-shirt I purchased. Hopefully that turns out.

I am still low-key working on my Fey piece, it is currently percolating in the back of my mind as I sort through my fabrics, tulle, lace, etc.

There have been some great sales on embroidery patterns, I sort of need to lay off of purchasing those until I have made some products and sales.

In addition to all of that I have started playing around with Notion as a way to keep my projects organized and my inventory/purchases recorded. All of this is on top of my work stuff, a class I’m teaching this weekend, the funeral, and preparing for summer reading. I’ve bitten off a lot to chew, I hope I can keep up with it.

I did take time one morning before work for an artists date to the beach. Even though it means waking up super early I love going to the beach for sunrise, I got a great photo of the moon before it set.

Remember to live life A Little More Abstract!

Crafting Bug

by CZeitler

*I managed to update the photos so they should all show up, sorry about that.*
I’m really not sure what got into me this past week, I finished so many projects and started some more. I’ll start with my quilt that I’ve been working on for a few weeks. I did finish all six types of blocks then I spent some time before work sashing the pieces and putting rows together…then once I was almost late to work (just one more row), I finished putting the top together.

This quilt is on a queen sized bed, so the entire quilt would fit on a queen sized bed without any overhang. I managed to get the quilt sandwich made, I pieced the back together and I love how that turned out. I’ve started to do the actual free motion quilting on the quilt, I’m considering the quilting something like ‘entropic chaos’. Okay, now that I’m looking at it through a camera lens it doesn’t look as bad as I thought, maybe once I wash it the quilt crinkle will hide things.

I can only do a bit of quilting at any time because of several circumstances, my hands cannot move against the natural movement of the quilt for very long and the top thread is giving me trouble by fraying often. Of course this is not enough for me. There is a new free tutorial on how to turn corners when you are sewing, those sort of internal corners that cause so many problems. This worked really well….okay so it would have worked well if I had ironed the pieces down and squared the two halves before connecting them. The new instructions were created as a masterclass be Plains and Pine, I highly recommend this! It is so simple how they have written it out!

As you can tell from my Lemoyne Star quilt I love all things spooky, so I’m playing with coffin shapes.

I also managed another kitchen towel and finger towel on my 16 shaft loom.

I did some weaving on my saori loom, two pieces have clasped weft and the rest is yardage I hope to eventually use to make a shirt.

So five projects in a week, that’s it right? No, not really. I also found a Tunisian crochet challenge, it’s supposed to be weekly but I finished the first in less than two days, it was the Tunisian Simple stitch. I had a minor problem with counting after the first row, I managed to correct it and I’m hoping to ease the extra into a seam when I put it together. I’ve started the second square which is the Tunisian Knit Stitch.

I cannot wait to see what this next week will bring me. I have 4 classes I’m teaching plus makerspace this week so I don’t know if I will have any energy for crafting, but if the rain holds off I should be able to sand my back porch some more. Until next time remember to live life A Little More Abstract!

Weaving Adventures

by CZeitler

So yesterday I taught my last planned scissor fob class, and it went very well. I had seven people take part and they all made beautiful scissor fobs. Someone did ask if I would be willing to teach another class for another organization that they belong to so if that goes through, that would be lovely. I organized and brought a lot of materials that I had created out of resin because we were going to be having a sort of garage sale event, however, no one was interested in my creations. They were mostly seconds that I had priced just for the cost of the resin and slight cost of the molds. However, since they did not, so at this point, I am probably going to either offer them through Facebook marketplace as seconds, or try to gift them to someone. Onto the very exciting parts of this post, the crafting.

so over the past couple of weeks, I have managed to get my loom, completely warped, and I have completed two towels, one of which was finished and washed. I am currently working on weaving the third towel and I love how the pattern is turning out. I’m not going to post a picture of the first towel because the warp was not accurate and there are a bunch of weird floats. I swear it took me almost halfway through the second towel to get the warps completely correct but I love how it looks now.

Yesterday I had a lovely phone call from a friend of mine that is on a very long drive back home, so we spent a wonderful six hours chatting. Since I am in capable of keeping my hands, still while talking on the phone, I managed to begin weaving, a beaded weaving project. That is something that I’ve been telling myself that I would do this entire week that I was on staycation, but it never wound up happening until yesterday. This was woven on my mirrix loom, and I spent another three hours this morning, working on it because I had another phone call from a different friend who was having trouble. It did take me about another hour or two to get a completely finished finish off the warp ends, glue everything down and put a back on it. So this less than 10 inch woven piece took me about 11 hours. That means that if I were to put this for sale just at my time at around minimum wage, I would have to sell this less than 10 inch piece for $165. That would not be taking into account the price of the loom, the thread, and the beads. I think that it’s beautiful but I don’t actually see somebody paying 165 for it.

Well, I have not just spent my entire staycation crafting. I did manage to get some things done around the house. I finally managed to get the thorn bush cut down from my side yard so I’m now working on figuring out how to get rid of the stumps so that it does not come back again. I am so excited by how much I managed to accomplish during my staycation and well I will not have another one until early September. I think that I am prepped and ready to get through August.

I hope that everyone has a great week and remember to Live Life A Little More Abstract.

We Are Warped

by CZeitler

I now have my 16 shaft table loom warped up completely and I have been weaving on it this week. A couple of threads snapped and a couple are floating rather than separating so I have to figure out what is going on with them. After I finished weaving the first towel, I decided to take each shaft off of its rail and take off the extra heddles that I had on the end. This was going very well until I reached shaft 14 and then the shaft decided to snap on me, essentially the bottom came off before the top was out of the rail, and it snapped. I was able to glue it back together using gorilla glue, however, that happened just this morning so I will not be able to put it back on until tomorrow morning.

I know that the gorilla wood glue worked because after half an hour the shaft stayed together without the clamp on. I did manage to get all of the extra heddle off and shifted where the last shaft is going to be by adding the pieces onto the other heddle. Essentially now only the 16th shaft is missing the part that keeps the heddle rods in place. Do I regret doing all of this, while the loom is completely warped up, not really. Considering how much time and effort it takes to warp up the loom, loosening the warp from the back beam and allowing the heddles to shift in place seems to be the best way to do this. That being said, I have not found out where the sticky warps are nor whether anything is shifted or twisted, so wait and see if this actually works or not. Since I am having a Weaving Guild meeting on Saturday and they asked us to bring our own place setting, I’m going to wash the towel now that I’ve hemmed it and see how it works.

There is one more aspect to this saga and that is the paper that I used to wind the back warp. Since it was not exactly the same size as the back warp beam, it wound up crinkling and wrinkling. Those crinkles and wrinkles cause the warped be held at a different tension which completely messed up my front tension. I should’ve seen this coming however, I did not. I am still debating different ways to potentially resolve this issue. The back warp reel is actually quite wide, though it isn’t 36 inches wide which is what I think the paper is.

I believe taking off the extra heddles will give me room to figure out which of my warps are crossing or doing other things that cause me to not get a clean shed. I also believe that if I can find some way to wind the warp on with even tension I will solve my loose warp problem, though I do not look forward to unrolling the entire warp just to try to roll it back on the back beam with even tension. Perhaps unrolling the back beam and pulling it through the front reed and heddles will help me figure out my threading problems, then I can concentrate on the tension problems. I hope to get both of those problems solved this week, though again it will all have to wait until tomorrow morning when I can get the last shaft fixed.

As you can probably tell, this has been my all consuming project this past week. The quilt as you go project went well, not everyone finished since I had between 16-18 (I lost count) people wanting to do the project. As a result, even though Wednesday-Sunday I’m supposed to be off, I will be coming in to work for 2 hours to set up and help everyone finish their potholders. Each person will be making 1 and I have enough supplies for 12. I’m also teaching Scissor Fobs on Saturday, so I will really have Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday off. That is alright, I will use the ‘on days’ to run other errands and take care of other chores around the house.

I think that is it for this week, so until next time remember to Live Life a Little More Abstract!

Personalized Bookcase Quilt

by CZeitler

Welcome Everyone!

I have always loved the look of bookcase quilts. I have decided to make a personalized spin on a bookcase quilt. It is one of my annual goals to try to read 100 books each year, I have recently started to allow rereads to count. Otherwise, I will never make that goal. What is more fun than combining those two goals? To do that I have started embroidering what will be the book spines with the titles and authors that I have read. I discovered that I can fit eight to ten spines on a fat quarter. I used a peel and stick wash away stabilizer so that the fabric was stable enough for the embroidery machine. I made sure that the stabilizer was on the far side of the fat quarter, so that there was plenty of room to cut the spines a part down the middle.

Since I do not like changing the thread, I decided to ensure that there were at least one or two other books in between each so that I will not have a huge chunk of the same color spines. There are a couple of series that I decided would be OK if they are the same color, so that is why all of my Shelly Laurenston books are on this fat quarter. I have decided to give myself about half an inch to an inch around each spine so I measured that out and cut each one out individually.

Since we have not even reached the halfway mark of the year, I am not going to worry about sewing the spines together quite yet. It’s probably going to be a couple of months before I do another batch of spines, so that I have enough titles to avoid embroidering a whole batch of titles right next to each other, on the same kind of fabric. When I do assemble the quilt, I plan on assembling the spines in the order that I actually read the books. I have trimmed the tops and bottoms of the spines, so that there is plenty of room just saw them together yet the books are not all the same height.

For a few of them, I have experimented with adding a different color to sort of look like fancy spines. Right now I have them in blocks 14 inches wide and I will eventually add a background color to the top so that the actual block is the same height. This is as far as I’ve gotten planning this quilt, it has been put on hold for right now, until I have read more books and until my Etsy shop is open. My Etsy shop will be opening June 2, 2023 and I hope to see everyone there.

Until next time, please remember to Live Life a Little More Abstract.