'Tis the Season to be Spooky, Part Tres

ALMOST DONE. All that's left to do is the little bits of embroidery, then put on the borders. I'm debating whether I want to do the scrappy pinstripe border or not, and I'm thinking this needs a tone-on-tone black border rather than just a plain solid...nothing too flashy but just enough to give it a little interest.

Here's what's together so far!

My favorite one! What can I say, that glittery fabric is awesome. 

Here's the whole kit'n'caboodle. I'm really happy with how it turned out! I'll get the embroidery done in the next couple days and get those borders on, then it'll be off to Loretta to get it quilted! She's got all kinds of really really cool halloween patterns. I'm thinking jack-o-lanterns and candy corns!



Hide yo' fabric, hide yo' patterns cuz I'm back bloggin' errything in here!

...Sorry, I relapsed and had an "If Antoine Dodson were a Quilter" moment.

Apologies. So, it's been awhile, I know. Things in my life are FINALLY starting to get back to ops norm. The carpets are torn up and the beautiful wood floor is in. It looks like a completely different house! Also, Lauren is moved in and just about settled.

...which, in related news, I've corrupted her and she's going to start sewing!! I'm starting a quilting apocalypse; it's like the zombie apocalypse we keep hearing about, only instead of turning people into zombies, I'm turning them into quilters! Bahahaahah-oh. Sorry. Got carried away. But yes, she bought her first bit of fabric and I'm going to teach her something super quick and easy to do to get her interested. I don't think quilting will be the thing for her, but I think crafty sewing will...like potholders, makeup bags etc. That kind of stuff. Yay for her!!! :D

Anyway. So since everything has been in a state of flux at home, I haven't been working on anything requiring my machine. This whole month I have sewn once. ONCE! Talk about torture!! I'm happy to have one of my best friends here, but the renovation and moving process had forced me to shove my machine into a lonely and crowded corner in the side room, and not being able to sew has, to be completely honest, sucked voraciously. I'm super behind on projects and they keep piling on...what I need is a retreat! Hm...

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In the mean time, I've been working on little hand sewing ventures and just cruising the internet longing to be sewing instead. *insert melodramatic sigh here* Okay, maybe I'm speaking a liiiiittle (only a little...) hyperbolically. I've been buried under yo-yos! Mom had a neat idea for the shop to use as a decoration (not as a sample or project) and volunteered me to make the "we'll start with 70 and see how it looks" yo-yos, since among us I'm the one that doesn't mind doing the repetitious handwork.

That being said, I'm turning my focus to yo-yo makers. I have changed my feeling on them. I've decided that I'm taking the Alton Brown approach to this sewing gadget: Brown (from Good Eats on the Food Network) talks about how unitask gadgets in the kitchen are really next to useless unless it's for a food that you make several times a week, and encourages people to seek out multitasking items instead. Yo-yo makers are unitaskers. Realistically,  they ONLY make yo-yos, and only the one size it's designed to make. If you do tons of projects using yo-yos in some form or another, and you make them all the same size and you need to be consistent at that size, then they're great! But how many of us really do that? Let's be honest with ourselves. Aside from the handful of yo-yos we may use to embellish a piece or the extremely rare occasion we think it might be cool to do a quilt made entirely of yo-yos, they just aren't a major player in most people's work. So. That thing just sits there for however many months (or years) until we make something with yo-yos and them remember what a pain in the rear it is and quit.

I admit that if I only have a couple yo-yos to do, then yes, I will use a yo-yo maker because I do have a couple. It goes relatively quickly and it's really really fool-proof. But I have to say, I prefer doing the whole process by hand. I find that I go slower using the yo-yo makers, because of having to move the needle all the way up and down through the holes in the plastic, meaning I can't load my needle with 10-15+ stitches at once. Seriously, the time I take tracing my circle/heart/oval/flower out is more than made up for with the speed I can do that single gathering stitch without using that damned plastic disk. Not to mention, I can do whatever size or shape I want using my own template, which can also be used as an applique temple in other projects, without sacrificing consistency.

That's just my humble opinion. If you're all for yo-yo makers, then all the power to you! They are a neat tool...I just used a popcorn tin lid instead!

I'm just about out of computer time here at the moment,  but I have more to say about things I've learned since I haven't been sewing much...tips and hints and a very begrudging tip of my hat to Fons and Porter.

Someone stop me before I try and embellish the wool before it's even off the sheep!

First things first. THANK YOU for all of your prayer for Carol and Randy. We love them both and we're glad Randy's surgery went well. A little love, light and positivity goes a long way.

Now onto your regularly scheduled programming...

I have to admit. I haven't been feeling too creative lately. The weather has been cruddy, I've been fighting an almost cold, MOm has the week off and I've been working my butt off. So when I get home, I march into my bedroom and do a runnign bellyflop onto the bed and do. not. get. up. I do all of my best work on my bed.

Wait a second. That came out WAY wrong. Let me rephrase.

I sit on my bed quite a lot. My bed is like most people's living room sofas. I have a TV in my room and it's in front of my bed, so why leave? I got my wool, I got my crosstitch, I got my embroidery...it's all good. That's that, and it is awesome.

So I keep trying to upload a video demo but that nonsense isn't working. lol. That's probably for the better...it had to have been the single most LAME video set up ever. I'm serious. It was on my bed (where I do all of my needle felting and crosstitch etc), on a plasic drawer, on my laptop, with my phone setting on all of the that, recording. Guh-het-toe.

Back to needle felting. It is so much fun...and I think I have a new fiber to be addicted to! Hooray texture! Here's a little trip into the basics of needle felting...and no, we do not have the tools or roving at the shop, but we DO have the hand dyed wool fabric.

The tools. From the top, the bristled square thing is a needle felting "mat." It is what catches your needle as you do the felting, and helps insure that the needle doesn't snap. The white thing is a needle holder. It's foam core...like the posterboard. Fancy stuff, very technical. At the bottom we have our needle felting needle. It is extremely sharp and brittle.

Here is a close up of the needle. Granted, the pitcure quality isn't stellar, but you can kind of see the little burrs in the tip of the needle. This is what grips the roving and pulls it through the fabric. But do you see how thin the tip of that is? Yeah, that can snap if you don't felt properly. It's very thin, so it can get through the fabric, but that also makes it brittle.

Mmm, mmm, mmm. THAT is the wool roving. I have it plastic bags because I'm just plain persnickety and I didn't want the wool sticking to each other. The colors...oh this picture doesn't do them justice.

Here's a close up of that wool roving. Yum! This I bought from a gal named Heidi... Heidi's GORGEOUS wool roving... very nice lady and she's got some wonderful stuff. This magenta with the purple? Forget about it! Lovely.

It just peels right apart and you grab as much as you need for what you're doing. A little, believe it or not, goes a loooong way.

That lump in the covers? Darwin thinks he's helping by "staying out of the way." Where was he? In my way, but being adorable cuddled by that ball of blue roving.

So how do you do it? Grab your wool fabric (cotton does NOT work with this, the weave is too tight for the roving to go through), place it on your felting mat and fanagle it into the shape you want and set it on the wool fabric. In a straight up and down motion, push your felting needle thorough the roving and the fabric until your roving sticks to the fabric.

Really, you can work this into any shape you want. That thin little line is a small piece of roving that I rolled into a line and punched in to the fabric to make it thinner.

This is the reverse side of the design. See how the roving gets pulled to the back? That's all because of the barbs on the needle. It ensure that it stays put, punchthe roving back through the front. That stuff is now "fused' to the fabric.

If you don't have roving, but you have the felting needles, you can felt 2 pieces of wool together. Punch the needle through the 2 layes, and ther eyou have it. That piece right there? Not going anywhere.And look at the nifty texture? How cute would that be to add to an accent pillow, a wall hanging, or an art quilt?

Or you can make little designs...great for applique, or if you have wool sweater or purse, you can embellish them with whatever you want!

So I'm pretty excited. It's pretty therapeutic, actually, and it's an instant result. You get to see your work pay off immediately, and who doesn't like that?

There has got to be at least ONE other person on the planet that sees this as totally normal and borderline pedestrian. There has to be. lol.

If you know me, then you know that I have an (abnormal) obsiession with all things Halloween. No, no, not the movie. Quite frankly, the movie sucks (protest away!). I mean the holiday, of course. I love all things Halloween...the monsters, the interior and exterior decor, pumpkin carving, costumes, Trick or Treating, passing out candy....seriously, from the cutesy and folksy to the creepy, bizarre and gorey...I love it all.

If I ever have children, by the way, they will go trick-or-treating in a neighborhood, NOT in a dang mall. Some of my fondest childhood memories are of getting dressed up and going trick-or-treating around our neighborhoods with my Dad. And, mark my words, one day I will be the house that at Halloween with cause a city brownout with all of my awesome lights and animatronic lawn decor. Yes, that will be a reality. And...I will certainly be the proud owner of the best haunted house EVER. Just you wait. lol.

But with Halloween comes my favorite projects. At the shop, Debi and I designed an embellishment contest for Halloween - everyone started with the same design and fabric and they had to embellish it as they saw fit. Just for shiggles, she and I did our own quilt. By the way, if you like this pattern please ask before copying or emulating. It is under copyright!

I love these kinds of projects because they force you to push your envelope and to think about non-quilting items in terms of quilting embellishments. Looking at things in a new way...that's one of the very best things about quilting, and quilting embellishing!

So this is the finished project. 15 hours of work right there. 35" x 35". Everyone had the house, grass and sky fabric. The rest was their choice.

The black/gray damask border is blinged out with Hot-Fix crystals - I had to hand quilt the spots where the crsytals would sit down so they had a flat place to be fixed to.The spider web is a textured cord couched down with Superior Mono-Poly thread. That spider, I sh!t you not, is one of those gummy spiders for kids that people give out as party favors...you know, the onces that feel all boogery that no one over the age of 10 (oh, okay, well, and me because I'm a freakin' 8 year old in a 23 year old body apparently). The fence is a cut up black wire hanger that's been couched down with blakc thread. The UFO has been fussy-cut from some outer space fabric, and it's little abducting-people-beam was drawn in with chalk pastels. The moon was painted in with a silver paint pen. The cloud is made from Angelina Fibers.

Okay, so here, the alien head in the window is fussy-cut from some alien fabric (I know, "Duh," right?) The curtains have been hand folded and sewn into the windows and are made of silk. The fog is Angelina Fibers. The ghost popping out of the chimney is first an appliqued shape, then with Angelina Fibers layed over the top to make it look all...ghosty. I'll get to the rest in the next photo... 

 From the top, the cauldron was drawn in with a black Pigma pen. The contents of the cauldron is -wait for it, because this'll make you go "Lauren, you have too much time on your hands, and while you're at it you might consider cutting down your caffeine intake" - is hot freaking glue with scrapbooking glitter poked into it while it was still hot. The grass was thread-painted to look like actual grass. The knocker on the door is one of those hook-and-eye closures for clothing. I just used the hook side, because hey, it looked like a door knocker. Also, the stone around the door wa originall just a plain textured grey. I quilted it and shaded individual stones in with a very specialized and expensive tool - a yellow No. 2 pencil. Yep. Just a plain pencil.

Another close up of the web with a squishy spider.

Right, so the boards are fussy cut from a grandfather clock piece of fabric, the coffin was fussy cut from coffin fabric ("Duhr," I can hear it through the screen!). Now get ready to go "what the..." - those bones that the (squishy-like-the-spiders) skeleton is climbing down from are SPRINKLES. Yes, they are sprinkles, as in cupcake sprinkles from Michael's. It's not that weird, I mean, I sprayed them with varnish to keep thaose rat-bastard ants away.

But there you have it. For this quilt we really had to think about how to use non-quilting items with a mind to embellish in order to get the effects we wanted. All in all, it was an absolute blast and I can't wait to do another one for spring!

And, just to show y'all...we do Halloween up at the shop right. Yes, we dress up! Debi and I were dressed to the nines, and Mom decided the fake moustache route was more her speed....she doesn't love Halloween like we do! But I spent the day creeping around people...I was the Creeper of The Cotton Patch! Can you guess which movie monster is my absolute favorite? ...lol.