Sunday Sevens: 1-25-15

Tags

bags, cats, Columbia River, cooking, Hermiston, Howard Amon Park, Oregon, recipe, Richland, sewing, Sunday Sevens, travel, Washington

So I thought I might try something a little different and start doing a Sunday Sevens post every week.  The idea–and thank you to threadsandbobbins.com for starting this–is to take a picture every day and post them together at the end of the week as a way of sharing a little bit more about your life than what you choose to write blog posts about.  I thought it would be a fun way to get some photography practice while sharing some hopefully interesting bits and pieces from life over here.

Because I’m doing this whole blogging business for fun, and rules tend to make things a bit less fun, I’m going to be flexible about the whole taking-exactly-one-picture-a-day thing.  And if the only thing I accomplish in doing this is to firmly establish how utterly boring my life is, I’ll stop doing it.

So here we go.

Early in the week, I finished the last big section of quilting on my travel bag pieces (this is the “before” shot–scroll down for the “after”).

Here’s Pooh, wiped out by a full night of sleeping on the bed with us, getting some much-needed rest on the back of the couch.  (Peeking out from under the fluff is a quilt I made several years ago from Laurel Burch flannel.)

I took my mother out for a walk on Thursday morning.  This is Howard Amon Park in Richland, WA.  Columbia River on the left.

I don’t think the best food stylist in the world could make Butter Chicken look sexy, but it sure tasted good (recipe for Butter Paneer is here; I subbed chicken breast and some veg for the cheese).

Shelby playing with one of her ten million little pieces of fabric.

On Saturday, my honey and I drove part of a cycling route he’s developing for a ride in March.  This is outside Hermiston, OR.  Look–blue sky!

The gray day has leached the green color out of my fabric, but I wanted to show the quilting on this.  This is the side of the travel bag with the zippers in.  Why do I always stress out about zippers even though they always go in just fine?

Oy, brains are troublesome things.

Have a great week, everybody.  I hope you have some sunshine wherever you are.

STH

Travel Bag Update

Tags

bags, cats, sewing

Here’s a question for you:  am I the only one who paces and talks to herself when she’s thinking through a problem?

I am?  Um . . . okay.

‘Cause this project has involved a LOT of that.  I’ve never designed anything remotely as complex as this before, and it has meant solving one knotty problem after another.  Considering that some of the pieces have pockets or handles on both sides, what order do you sew them in so that you don’t mess up any of the attachments?  How do you make the bag sturdy without including anything like webbing?  How do you quilt a bag handle made of two layers of flannel and four of batting without a walking foot?  If you want your lining to enclose all your seams, but you also want to quilt the bag pieces to give them more structure, how do you manage that?

So I’ve been solving problems, but I’m happy to report that it’s been a mostly stimulating, not frustrating, process.  Here’s what I’ve come up with:

It’s a carry-on size (14″ x 21″ x 9″) rectangular bag that completely unzips along the side so that it can lay flat, has zippered pockets on the inside and outside, and backpack straps that can be removed and put inside the bag if I need to check it.

I’ve been working on the front piece with the pockets (upper left in the drawing), and here’s what I have so far:

(That’s the outside with the two zippered pockets.)

(Inside view.  You can see the crosshatching quilting I’ve done on the right side of the picture.)

(Different view of the inside with a different photobombing cat.)

And here’s the simple continuous-line quilting I did on one of the side pieces:

That’s the side piece that will be sewn to the front.  The other side piece will have more crosshatching.  I went with that because it’s easy and because much of the quilting will be covered with pockets and things (and also because the thought of trying to match up the lines on the two side pieces–in addition to lining up the zippers and handles and everything else–gives me a headache).  Normally, I would just draw pencil or chalk lines on the fabric, but I used freezer paper for the quilting on these, as the lining fabric is a little bit loosely-woven and I couldn’t get nice, parallel lines on it.

The way I solved the problem of quilting the pieces, while still having the lining enclose the seams, was to sew a line of basting along the seam line on all the pieces to be quilted, then leaving the seam allowances unquilted.  The plan is to sew the flannel edges together, then fold down the seam allowance on the lining and hand sew it over the seam.  I’m a little worried about hand-stitching being strong enough, so I might try to hand-baste it, then use the machine to sew it down.  Actually assembling the bag will be the last thing, after all the attachments are done and sewn on, so I’ll worry about that when I get there.  😉

I hope everybody’s got interesting projects to work on and that January isn’t bumming you out too badly.  Here are some pictures to cheer you up just in case (I was trying to take pics of the flowers my honey got me and Pooh was determined to be in every shot.)

STH

My Dream Reader

Tags

Blogging 101, meta

I’m behind a bit on my Blogging 101 homework, as I didn’t feel well last week and didn’t get nearly as much done on anything as I had planned.  So I’m going to try to catch up on that this week, as well as post something on the progress I did make on my current sewing projects.

So one of our homework assignments was to write a post directed at our “dream reader.”  My first thought was that my dream reader is ME, and I’m essentially writing for the purpose of self-expression.  The thing is, though, that the reason I need this blog to express myself is that I’ve never found a place where I really feel I fit in.

I live in Washington state.  Not the Seattle-area Washington that you know from TV and movies, the cool urban hub with the pine trees and lattes and Space Needle and Jimi Hendrix.  This is the dry eastern part of the state where the wheat and corn is grown, there are a lot of churches and guns, and Republicans outnumber Democrats two to one.  White middle-aged women here are married to their high school sweethearts, bake cookies for their kids’ bake sales, get pedicures, and go shopping and watch reality TV for fun.  And here I am, a white middle-aged woman, trained as a scientist, who wears muddy hiking boots or purple clogs, goes to anti-war demonstrations, has never married or had kids, doesn’t watch TV, and lives (IN SIN) with a foreigner (!) and travels with him whenever we can, largely for the purpose of him riding his bike for hundreds of miles in (typically) awful weather.

So I write for me, and for the peer group that I know is out there somewhere, all the weird women who aren’t at all what their mothers thought they would be.  Ideally, I would like to build a little community here of interesting, thoughtful, creative people who do their own thing regardless of whether it’s cool.  And what I’d like to talk about is:  what are you making these days?  what about that is interesting to you?  how have you solved some of the problems you ran into?  what are you going to make next?

Blogging 101 Homework

Tags

Blogging 101, meta

The WordPress Blogging 101 thingie (class, I guess?) starts today with my first assignment–to write something about who I am and what my blog is about. I’m still pretty happy with what I wrote for my “About” page, so I tinkered with the formatting a bit, but left the text alone. If you haven’t read it, you can find it here.

On To January Projects!

Tags

bags, meta, sewing

Now that holiday sewing is behind us (whew!), it’s time to get back to some other projects I’ve had cooking in the back of my brain.

First is a vest for my honey.  He saw this vest in the National Geographic catalog and fell in love with the idea of a warm, lightweight boiled wool vest he could wear under jackets during our cold winters.  The closest pattern I could find to what he had in mind was the one above, and I used it to make a muslin out of a cheap flannel from the stash.  At my partner’s request, I omitted the collar and upper pocket and changed the neckline to a V-neck.

(I might mention here that he looked TOTALLY FREAKING ADORABLE in this flannel with the hippos, giraffes, and elephants on it.  I did not share this information with him, however, as he was in the middle of struggling with a bike repair and perhaps not in the mood to discuss his adorable-ness.)

So we received the boiled wool (black, since their charcoal gray boiled wool never seems to be in stock)  from Mood yesterday; a soft wool flannel lining fabric and a separating zipper are on the way.  I’ll be working on this over the weekend.

Second, I’ve been thinking for a while that I wanted to try to pack even lighter on our trip to France this summer.  Last time we went overseas, I was having serious problems with my back and a rolling carry-on seemed like the best option, but I sure got tired of lugging that thing around!  This time, I want to bring less and get it all into a smaller bag.  I might check it–we’ll have my honey’s bike with us and so will have to check at least some of our luggage–but I want to be able to carry my bag more easily when I do have it with me.

So I’m designing a travel backpack that’s based on one I found online, but that has the features I want.  The plan is to make a usable muslin using stash fabric, use that for a few trips, then modify the pattern and make the final version of the bag before our trip in August.  (My stretch goal is to also make a tote and some toiletry bags to go with the final version, but I’m trying not to get too far ahead of myself yet.)

The fabric I’m using for the outside is this seriously beautiful, plush, high-quality flannel; the leaf print cotton will be the lining.  I just love the idea of traveling with a backpack that’s as cuddly as a big teddy bear–that just seems infinitely more pleasant to me than the usual nasty nylon or polyester.

I have some denim and twill I could use, but making a bag out of that stuff is probably more than my little sewing machine can handle.  The flannel won’t be as durable, but it’ll be plenty strong enough for a muslin I can use throughout the spring.

The goal is to have this done by the time we head to Seattle in early February.  I suspect I’m going to need every bit of that time, as this is a much more complicated design than I’ve tackled before.  It is some serious mental exercise translating a drawing into pattern pieces and sewing instructions for a complex bag like this!

Finally, I’m going to be participating in the Blogging 101 class/project/whatever that WordPress is beginning on Monday.  I’m hoping that this will mean that maybe I’ll finally be able to figure out how to set things up the way I want them!  Maybe my pictures will even get better!  So there should be some changes around here, hopefully all good, right?  🙂

STH