Moms - All they do for us and all we do for them.

This post is a very late homage to mothers that was due last May when all of this crafting took place, but will be delivered with the 'better late than never'
mindset. ;)

This quilt was designed by Sheri's son, Asher, who spent last year traveling the world before heading off to college this past fall. He took a quilting class in high school (ASFA) and made this amazing quilt with his T-shirt collection. He finished the quilt top and quilted it before leaving to travel, but didn't quite get it finished. It still needed binding, and that's where his mom came in... She asked around the holidays last year if I would help her finish the quilt, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Her thought was that Asher would be so busy with the minimal and very overscheduled time he would have in between traveling and going to college that he wouldn't have time to finish the quilt, so she would finish it and have it ready for him to pack into his college things.

The next wave of brilliance came when Sheri was sorting through some of his things and came across all of his old karate belts. She declared that we should use the belts for the binding. Amazing idea! Neither one of us knows much about karate, but we knew the black belts were the most special, so we put those aside and dug into the orange and blue and yellow and green - all colors that were also in the quilt, so it seemed perfect. We calculated how many belts we would need, then divvied them up to rip out all of the seams and the layer of batting inside the belts. This was a little time-consuming, since there are multiple seams sewn into those karate belts - at least six from what I recall!

Then, we sewed together the belts into one long strip of binding and applied it to the quilt. We did have to trim up the edges of the quilt before this step to give the binding an even application edge. It was great! I finished most of this sewing, but ran out of time, so left Sheri on her own to finish up, and she did an incredible job. This pic is her posing with the mostly finished quilt before I left that night. She had it laid out on his bed as a surprise when he came home and he loved it (of course). ;) I really love the T-shirt quilt idea and originally heard of doing this from Sara Leah, who has a ton of band T-shirts and always planned to make a quilt with them. Such a fun project and a way to keep the old T-shirts that mean a lot to you, but aren't worn much anymore.


This should probably be a separate post, since it was such an event, but I'll keep with the mom theme and move along to my mom's 60th birthday that past May. I made the above placemats for her using the trusty pattern from Amy Karol's Bend the Rules Sewing book - they are just like the robot placemats Ang and I made for Sara Leah and Jim in '08. I really heart these placemats - love the colors and the clean, bright look. The placemat creation involves a LOT of cutting, so it was much nicer this time to use a mat and rotary cutter to get several layers of fabric cut at once. Thanks to Asher for lending me his mat and rotary cutter - I'll keep it safe for you while you're away at college! :)

My sisters and I planned a big birthday extravaganza for my mom's 60th. We all came out to Oregon to climb Mt. St. Helens with mom on her birthday. I came out several days early and we did a ton of great hikes in the Columbia River Gorge area, hit some favorite Portland and Hood River eating and drinking spots, and checked out some new ones. It was a really kickass vacation and so fun to spend this special birthday with such a special lady who is known to rock the hiking, snowboarding, and cross-country skiing like nobody's business. For this birthday, we set out on a challenging adventure that tested her determination, but she made it and impressed the hell out of the other hikers and skiiers at the top (she also impressed her daughters!). By the time we hopped off the summit to glissade down the mountain, she had quite the fan club. :-)

That's my mom. She's fun to design crafty gifts for and even more fun to explore the outdoors with. Happy uber-belated mothers' day to all the moms out there! It's never really a bad time to celebrate our moms and our friends who are moms.

More Knitted Hats.

I have regrettably been out of the blogging loop for some time now and have a ton of projects to get posted in the next few weeks to catch up with all of our crafting. These pics are from last winter. I swear I remember working on these just after Thanksgiving, so these are ridiculously old, but never posted as far as I can tell.

So, let the catching up begin!

I love knitting hats. They're relatively quick and the pattern possibilities are endless.

The hat with all of the "bobbles" was gifted to Angela. It was a great pattern and seemed perfect for her. The sizing didn't turn out right because I'm sure I was lazy with the swatch, but whatever the reason, it was much too big. We ended up seaming it up along the back, sewing a section out to make it fit better, then just cut out the excess knitted fabric. That tactic worked surprisingly well, but I will know next time to be more vigilant with the swatching. This pattern was from a magazine, so I don't have a pattern to link. I'm sure I could find the mag if anyone wants the pattern.

It's funny that with a standard hat pattern, I've gotten fairly good at testing the size as I go and knitting without a pattern. There are standard diameters to reference for hat sizes, so a normal pattern is easy to adjust for a good fit. I knitted this cabled hat for myself and intentionally went for a loose fit, but once again was a little off with the size and it's a bit larger than desired. I still love it, though - LOVE the yarn and the colors, and it was my first time to work with full-fledged cables. The hat I knitted for my step-dad (also last winter) was a pattern with a play on cables in a nice green cotton yarn - kinda mini-cables, but only in one direction, so more like ripples than cables. I apologize that I don't have this pattern either, but for this one, I just googled for a cable hat pattern, then adjusted it as needed to get the rim and top look I wanted.

For hats, it's just a little math to get the stitch counts to work out for the size you want - for example, if the rows are multiples of 9, plus 3, round up or down based on the number of stitches needed to make the diameter - based on the test swatch that tells you how many stitches you will knit per inch. So, if you have 4 stitches per inch (from the swatch), and want a 20" hat in diameter (at the ears), you want around 80 stitches, so you could either choose to start a little on the smaller size and have the stitch pattern repeated 8 times to start (9*8+3 = 75) or could round up to repeat 9 times (9*9+3 = 84). Then, for most of the hat patterns you'll see a series of decreases once the hat is knitted straight up from the ears to the crown of the head - really you will learn to decrease as aggressively as you want to suit your own personal preference (more baggy or more fitted look), but you basically do a series of decreases every other row until you get to a minimum number of stitches - usually in the neighborhood of 8 - then, draw the yarn through all the remaining stiches into the hat, turn hat inside out to finish, cinch the opening closed, knot, and weave in all the ends. For cables, there's one more layer of complexity, since it looks much nicer to gradually reduce the size of the overall cables, decreasing the number of stitches involved in the cable over a certain number of rows. By the end, for a full cable with both left and right leaning twists, you'll only want one stitch twisted on each side (this is at the very top).

Anyway, noone necessarily wants to know all that, but if you'd like to get into designing your own hats, that's the basic formula - no formal pattern needed! :)

Up next - crafting from spring '09.