TARDIS Quilt Completed!

It’s done! With twelve hours to spare!

I call this the TARDIS quilt because its what I imagine the view out of a window in the TARDIS would look like. This idea is actually why I chose the navy blue for the border and back, and quilted it only by outlining the squares and snowballs. This quilting causes the plain blue back to subtly echo the paneling of the big blue box.

My quilting wasnt perfect though. I have many places where I strayed from stitching in the ditch and dipped visibly into the pale gray or the colorful bits of the windowpanes. Worse, despite my best efforts, I ended up with terrible puckers in the backing. See?  

I don’t want anyone to be too impressed with me. This is a novice’s quilt, I didn’t have quite the right tools, and it really shows. I’m trying hard not to let the puckers bother me. They’re almost all at the foot, so they won’t show much. And it will keep GeekBaby warm all the same, so I shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I guess. It burns, though.  
 
 
Acknowledgments:  
The quilt pattern is called Stars Through The Window that I stumbled across online during my quest to find the end of the Internet. It’s a baby quilt, but doubling the block size and adding a 3″ border produces a perfectly sized twin bed quilt. 
The planetary fabric is Large Planets from Joann’s. All other fabric is kona cotton. The pale gray I had to dye myself, because kona cotton inexplicably doesn’t come in pale gray.  
The binding was cut from the navy kona, created and applied (badly) using the instructions on YouTube by Connecting Threads.  
And I’d like to thank my wonderful and generous mother in law for giving me her old Bernina.  

My First Quilt!

I pieced the top of my son’s quilt today. Start to finish, it took twelve hours… And in that time I also tended the minion, went out for more thread, baked bread, cooked dinner, went outside to play, ate dinner, and took sundry rests.  
 
Whew, I’m tired. But this was fun. I wish I’d picked up quilting sooner.  
 
The picture doesn’t do it justice. You can stand over this and feel like you might fall through it and into outer space. It’s gorgeous.  
 
It needs a border still, and I’m unsure of the color. I’m afraid my creative vision only specified the space fabric, in this particular pattern, and nothing more. I had to consult Mad Mo to find the right colors for the leading. The border is still a mystery to me, although I’m leaning towards TARDIS blue.  
 
I also need to figure out how I’m going to quilt this puppy. My MIL’s old Bernina didn’t come with a walking foot.  
 
 

Another Baptismal Gown

Clearing out my unposted backlog of embroidery projects, here’s the baptismal gown I made for my college roommate’s baby last December.

Baby boys these days are expected to wear these really hideous little white suit things. The girls get gowns, but they can be incredibly foofy, with sequins and beading and other ridiculous features. (Go on, ask me how I really feel about them…) For my son, I made a pattern designed to be more unisex than the traditional, delicate christening gown.

And so I offered to make my former roommate one with whatever embroidery she wanted. She opted for a simple Celtic cross on the breast. I used Irish handkerchief linen for the dress, and silk floss for the embroidery. This linen flows more nicely than the stiffer fabric I used for my own son.

One of the useful things about this gown, especially in Texas, is how customizable it is for warmth. Baby won’t swelter when it’s hot, and if it’s cold, add a plain white onesie beneath it. I really love the overall design, and I’ve considered making them (blank of course) and selling them on Etsy. But I don’t know that anyone would want them.

Cross Stitched Lorica

I realized during the reorganization that I never posted a picture of my completed Lorica of Saint Patrick that I worked for my goddaughter as a baptism gift. I started it in 2007, and, by a Herculean effort of diligence, had it completed, washed, stretched, and framed by mid 2009. Without further ado…

Gorgeous, isn’t it? See all that red in the border? You’ve gotta stitch it with two strands of red floss and one of crimson blending filament. I had to look all over Houston to find that shade of blending filament. Both tones of gold got the same treatment with gold blending filament, but you can find gold pretty much anywhere. That is a lot of blending filament. It’s an exercise in self mortification, doing that much work with it because it snags something awful. And then there was the beading… It’s not a technically challenging bit of embroidery, but it does require a certain amount of stamina.

The results were completely worth it.

This pattern has two options for a border, and I chose the smaller version. The larger has another thin red border with backstitched knot work between them, and decorative corner caps. One day I will stitch the whole Lorica with the double border in this style as a bell pull. One day… But not soon, I’m afraid.

Halloween 2010

We’re all sick, so I’m going to be brief. GeekBaby was a wee highlander this year.

Total cost ended up being under $10. We got a yard or so of plaid, a spool of thread, and some hook and eyes. The drape is attached to his tee shirt with a safety pin. He already had the white undershirt and wooden sword.

I have the McCall’s men’s highlander pattern, and used that to start. But instead I ended up relying a lot on Wikipedia for maybe a more traditional kilt. I don’t really know. I measured GeekBaby from hip bone to hip bone around the back and front to see how much pleated distance I needed, and from hip to opposing shoulder to see how much I needed to drape over the shoulder. Then I made one pleat and measured the finished pleat size. Dividing the back hip to hip measurement by the pleat size gave the number of pleats I needed. Then I unfolded the pleat, and measured how much fabric went into it. Multiply this by the number of pleats to get the total length of fabric needed for the pleated section. To that measurement, I added the front hip to hip measurement on either side of the pleated section for the flat front panels, and on top of that a good yard on one end for the shoulder drape. I had to join two panels to get a long enough piece, but if you do this carefully, you can bury the seams inside a pleat. The pleated part and front panels had the top folded down to make a crude waistband. All other rough edges were trimmed neatly, stitched at 1/8 inch and then fringed. Took me an afternoon and evening to make the whole thing, so it was relatively short.

If you want to do a kilt costume or a plaid skirt for young kids, I highly recommend using shirting flannel. The plaid is smaller in the shirting and looks better than the larger plaids did.