Annies Crazy World

I made the pink thumb pin cushion at Nowra Crazy Quilt Retreat and have had a couple of requests for the pattern, today I have got around to writing the instructions… I had to remember/work out how to make it and got the size of the square wrong on my first attempt, the gold one, and it is on the tight fit side…

I also realized that to illustrate it clearly I needed a fabric with a right and wrong side, that is when I chose the fabric that matches the work box I showed last night.

To make your own start with a 4 inch square of an even weave fabric.

Turn one corner to the wrong side as per the photo.

Fold the square, right sides together, diagonally with the turned under corner at one end.

Starting at the turned under corner, use a 1/4 inch seam to stitch 2 edges of the triangle, stopping a 1/2 inch before the end.

Clip the point to reduce bulk.

In the middle of the fold cut a 1 inch slit along the fold.

Turn right side out through the hole, pushing the unturned corner all the way through.

Stuff the central portion until it is firm.

Turn the edges of the slit in and whip stitch to close the hole… This is a little finddly and you may find that it puckers a bit as you stith it, Don’t stress if is not real neat as this seam is on the inside of the finished ring.

Wrap the long points around your thumb and use a pin to mark the overlap.

Poke the raw point into the turned under corner pin and test size…adjust until it is a comfortable fit…Stitch the ends together.

Happy Stitching.

This is a Work Box and Accessories that I made as a gift in 1987…I have picked it to show tonight because it has a follow up in tomorrow nights post.

This year I am aiming at cleaning up and putting everything I have used for a project away before pulling out another…I am also looking for the next pattern I want which requires excursions into unsorted boxes from the past…while I am working towards this aim I will take the opportunity to share another heart from the past, this one made in 1997 is 5.5 inches wide and keeps the embroidery very simple so that it forms a nice background for the featured flower trail and silk ribbon butterfly.

This is the finished Pink Album Cover.

Instructions for making removeable book covers are available as internet lessons, contact me for details email annie@loopylace.com

The pink fabric I am useing for the Album cover is more slippery than I had expected, and after having to unpick and baste before restitching the first couple of seams I have basted all the others before taking it near the sewing machine and although I feel as if I have spent half my day basting it is worth the time and trouble because it helps make for a neat finish…I now have it ready to stitch the lining on.

Tonight I went to a crazy quilters meeting and it was lovely to catch up with everyone after the christmas break….the fabrics on the right are from the grab bag, I don’t need anymore fabric but sometimes they just jump out of the bag into my hands.

A couple of weeks ago a friend told me I was brave for making the Pink block before I had purchased the album..Not brave I replied, I now what size the albums are, the first border will be an inch wide and the second border will be as wide as it needs to be…

Not brave, more like st****, I didn’t now what size the albums were, I thought that they where 14 inches square, It IS 14 inches wide but only 12.75 inches high which means that the top and bottom borders would be to narrow…A change of plan needed…what it I make the first border a 1/4 wide, a shame not to show off what a beautiful fabric that I have and the side borders will be much wider than the top and bottom borders…If I move the block off centre so that the right side border is the same as the top and bottom and make the pink border on the left the same, I can then use the first pink border fabric for the spine where the pattern in the fabric will be shown off and I think the the darker spine will give it a nice old fashion photo album look, that will work but…

Narrow borders are hard to get even at the best of times, almost impossible with slippery fabric, I have been procrastinating about stitching the borders on because both the border fabrics are slippery…light bulb moment, I used light weight iron on interfacing to stabalize the fabrics and the borders are stitched on.

Next problem…the pink fabric was a dress, bought at a thrift shop because it was the right colour for this album…Unfortunatly it was also the right colour for a cartoon character costum that my nephew wanted, we made the costume and now I don’t have enough fabric and have been joining smaller pieces together to make the lining and inside flaps.

I have now refined my Design…To Link my post cards I need something that I can blend into each design without it controling or distracting from the designs, I have decided on 2 black lines, one wider than the other, running down the left hand side.

To finish my design I need a colour scheme…intially I rejected sharon’s suggested colours for January because they are not ‘My Colours’ but when I came to add colour to my design it seemed obvious to me that I should take the challenge and use the January colours…So my feature word ‘Friends’ will be written in Black with the background being the lightest of the 5 colours with the other 4 colours used to write the qualities that I admire.

Probably influenced by having done a jigsaw puzzle, that a friend lent me recently, I started thinking of how life is like a jigsaw puzzle, that nomatter how oddly shaped the pieces are they do fit and the puzzle needs them all, also thinking along the lines that each piece could represent a friend.

Time for some quick experiments…I have some jig saw puzzle pieces left over from an old puzzle I used for an altered book page…I put together a corner of the puzzle that was mostly sky background and cut out a post card sized piece, along the cut edges I glued the smaller pieces around the edges to the nearest full piece to make new edge pieces.

Next I glued a small section of joined pieces into my visual journal and gathered together a variety of pens and paint to see how they would mark the surface of the puzzle.

I was happy with how well the pens drew on the puzzle but when I came to the actual altered jig saw puzzle I opted to stick with black for the writing because at this size it is an easy jigsaw puzzle and if all the smaller words were done in different colours matching them up would make it even easier, making them all black means some thought has to be put into doing the puzzle.

I am not going to use this as my January post card but It will go in my altered book, making another interactive page which also links to “>other pages in the book…I put the puzzle on a cardboard back in a cellephane bag which slips into a pocket made from pages sewen together in the book.

Now that I have got a gist of the concept, the next thing that I need to do is decide on the format that I am going to use…The main criteria for my format is that it be of a small size so that doing one per month is an achievable goal…another criteria is that I want to use the same format for all the designs so that I can display them together.

I am opting not to use crazy quilting for these designs, I think that on one hand, my experience would make it to easy, on the other hand the crazy quilting would take over and distract me from the designing and I think that crazy would restrict the variety of ideas that I could explore.

I considered doing Altered Book pages, they are small enough but again I think that the actual altered book techniques could distract me from the process of exploring the design.

My other option is to do Post Card sized pieces…Post Cards give me a blank canvas with no distrations…so Post cards it is…and the postcards will be stitched or tied together so that they hang one under the other or concentinaed into a book for storage.

At this stage I plan to use fabric collage techniques to interperet my Designs but will remain flexable and let my designs dictate what techniques I do use.

Back to My Visual Journal I drew around a post card and started writing words down the left hand side and in a larger font I wrote the words for the questions I was answering…

At this point I was trying to sus out what information I wanted to include as well as possabilities for layout…For the layout I am looking for an element that I can run through all the postcards that will link them together when displayed one under the other, as and example of what I mean see sketch on the left side of page, imagine my curved lines as quilting lines that I do as continues lines through the cards after I join them, The 2 parallel lines on the left side of the main card are another idea, without knowing what is to come in the future months it is hard to know what can be kept the same…more thought required on this one…

In the meantime I started to link the words that I had written with Arrows and then adding offshoot thoughts…sketching down the right hand side I started distilling the thoughts down till I got to the single important word being “Friends”…I then question does a single word constitute a design?….I haven’t answered that question yet but do remind myself that design does not mean complex!!!

I have had a bit of difficulty describing my thoughts that went into this visual journal page because I was jumping from one thing to another and back again, in the end I just wrote it as it came because the jumping around is how my brain works when I am exploring ideas…

Make My Day Award Update…More Make My Day tags…Thank you fellow bloggers.

Maureen and Ira

Following on from my first thoughts for this challenge, My next step in trying to get my head around what it ‘is’ that I am designing, was to take the Dictionary to bed, together with my visual journal where I wrote the words and key words from their definition as I looked them up in the dictionary.

Refering to dictionary has confirmed that admire means what I thought it did…and it has given me a list of words to work with.