A color story

Thank you to all those who sent me compliments on the ESW, both via the blog and privately.

Yesterday I finished the quilt my mother started. I had picked it up from the lady who quilted it on Saturday and finally found the time to trim the batting and backing and hem the edging. Here is a photo of the completed quilt on my father's bed. As you can see, it fits the bed perfectly as an accent. It is a twin sized quilt on a queen-sized bed, as a point of reference.This photo shows the quilt folded over to show the backing. It is a burgundy color with a dappled/marbled effect. This post is about the color of the backing. At the quilt store, I went through about a dozen colors. My first thought was that with all the colors in the quilt, almost any color would work. We , the quilt store owner and I, knew that the backing needed to be folded over to create the binding so the backing color was very important. We started with black and navy (both solid and these mottled/marbled fabrics). Both of them dulled the colors. We then moved on to browns - from taupe to a deep chocolate. Same effect. We tried greens - deep natural greens. Same problem. We tried other blues. No luck. We started to have more luck as we moved into purples/violets, teal, burgundy and rust. The secondary colors enhanced the colors in the quilt. The rust and the burgundy were the finalists and I felt the burgundy made the whole effect much richer than the rust did. So that won out. The entire experience was a great lesson in color theory and practice.
My original plan was to press out the seam allowance on the last set of blocks and then attach a binding as usual. However, when I went to press out the seam allowance, I found that in a large number of cases, the seam allowance was caught in the seams attaching the blocks to each other. Since they were hand-pieced around a paper template, it was easy to catch the allowance in the stitches. That plan, therefore, went out the window. I decided to leave the seam allowance folded down and fold over the backing to create a binding. I trimmed the batting to an inch and the backing to 1.5" beyond the quilt edge. Then I folded over the backing and doubled up the batting and hemmed the backing onto the squares overlapping by 1/16". I am pretty sure our eyes can't see that missing 1/16" on the last set of squares around the perimeter. But I leave that to you to judge from the closeup of the binding below.
I folded over the batting because it creates a nice rolled, corded edge. One thing that happens with batting, especially on the edge, is that it gets compressed over time. I'm hoping that this corded edge will stay plump and fluffy. This is a closeup of the quilting. The quilter did a great job of the quilting although it is a very simple meander to keep the focus on the colors and patterns.It is a relief to me to finish this because I've felt that it was something my mother entrusted to me to finish. I wanted to do justice to the work she put into it and initially I felt that meant finishing it by hand. Once I came to terms with the fact that she would have wanted it used, rather than sitting mouldering in my closet, it was a task that needed to be completed. I have never hired someone to sew something and finding the right person was a bit of a challenge. I was lucky in that I found two wonderful people. Kathie who owns the Quilt Basket, and Debbie Brown, the quilter, both took a personal interest in the quilt and gave me sound advice. I am very grateful to both of them for their assistance.

Not a good knitting week

I meant to post on Thursday night but I didn't. I didn't do much of anything in the evenings this week. I am supposed to be over the jet-lag, because you make up an hour a day or so they say, and I've been back for more than a week now. But while I'm sleeping till 6 am each morning, I'm going to bed at 8:30 or 9 pm. That does not leave much time for knitting or anything else. I stayed up on Halloween to hand out candy but that is pretty much it.

Anyway, I do have pictures. These are the socks I finished while I was traveling. The orange and black ones on the left are the Schmetterling or Butterfly colorway, just in time for Halloween. The ones on the right are the Frog or Frosch colorway. I also have one sock done in the Peacock colorway and am past the heel on the second. These are all knit toe up so there is only the leg and cuff to do. I find that there is a distinct difference between my yarn preference s for knitting socks and for wearing them. Sock I love knitting are not necessarily the ones I love wearing. For example, I really didn't like knitting the Frog socks. Too boring. But I know they will get a lot of use because the colors are ones that match a lot of my outfits. Ditto on the Peacock. But the Butterfly was a fun knit because the colors change so often. I will probably wear them too but not as often as the others. The other fiberly thing I did was to get a quilt ready for quilting. My mother had hand-pieced a quilt together from sewing scraps. It is like looking through a memory book because I can identify clothing I had made for myself. I started that quilt one summer as a teenager and my mother continued it and worked on it till she died a few years ago. I had put it aside thinking I wanted to finish it by hand but I realized a few months ago that this is not likely in the near term. I found a local quilter who will quilt it for me and then I need to do the hand sewing on the edging.My mother had paper pieced it so there were little card templates on the inside of the edges. The first step was to remove these and the basting that held them together. I couldn't steam open the seam allowance on the edges as the hand sewing had caught them in many cases. I would have to open up the seams and re-do them. So I am going to turn the backing under and hand sew it to the pieces on the front to finish. The next step was to baste the seam allowance in place so that it would stay under during the quilting. I picked out a lovely rusty marbled fabric for the backing/binding and a wool batting.The quilt top consists of 2x2" squares, alternating plain and printed fabrics. The prints are mostly clothing I made and wore. The plain ones are my mother's cholis. Looking at this close-up, the brown with white polka dots; the black stripes with the red and white flowers; the purple with the white geometric design; the really bright swirls of pink, green , brown and turquoise; and the yellow with the purple pin dots and flowers are all shirts I made for myself. The mauve and white gingham near the bottom is the base for a dresser set I embroidered in counted cross-stitch. It really brings back my teenage years. My color preferences don't appear to have changed much.

I ran today. I've been good about exercising this past week after being really spotty for months. I listened to two episodes of Lime and Violet while walking/running and they are just too long for me. Each was an hour and something and I find that splitting them over multiple days just doesn't work. But the good news is that I think I'm getting the mind over body thing. I find that I can run for short intervals but once I get to 3-4 mins I just get bored and stop. Today I ran for 5 mins at a stretch, but the real victory was that I wasn't checking the watch every few seconds. I was able to veg out and run. This is going to be the key to my actually running for 30 mins at a stretch, because you can't run for that long while looking at your watch every few seconds. While walking, I veg out but running for some reason never allowed me to do that even when I am not out of breath. But I love the way I feel after running even for a short time.