Knitted Rag Rug

Last summer I visited the Lower Lake School house Museum with Rosy. As part of the kitchen display, circa 1890, I saw a large basket of cotton rag balls, strips of different colored fabric sewn end to end and wound into balls, sometimes 6" in size. They looked something like this.

Picture from the Internet

What are these for? In the basket was a partially knit rag rug. (!) I was intrigued. I decided to see if I could reproduce the art.

I cut the strips 1 and 1/2" using my rotary cutter. The museum had a device mounted on the kitchen table with a hand crank that rotated a wheel against a metal platform. Could that have been their rotary cutter? I wish I'd taken a picture of the tool. There were strips of fabric there for you to experiment with. It didn't cut worth a rip!

I had noted the display used size 11 knitting needles, so I cast on, figuring how many stitches to the inch and multiplying to create a rug two feet wide. This is turning out to be a great stash buster project, I can't believe how much fabric is going into it! I'm clearing out fabric from the 80's, 90's and 00's. It's great!

What was once done out of necessity and thrift is now being done for the love of color and a refreshed fabric collection.

Oh the Humiliation

Spunky is nonstop lively. As I noted in an earlier post, she's adorable - when she's asleep. Oh she has her moments, don't get me wrong, when I can pick her up and scritch her under the chin and she nuzzles me along the jaw and we have a happy owner and pet moment. Then she wants down and lets me know in no uncertain terms! Things pretty much have be to on her terms.

But she needed another flea bath, so imagine my surprise when she became completely subdued, like - maybe if I go completely docile this won't last long.

Cats look so indignant when they're wet.

Six months

Wasn't it nice of Nathan to leave his soft black sweater out for Spunky to nap on?

Three Rail Fence

The first grand baby is due this July, so Danielle came to sew and get the top together on the baby quilt!

Here's the top before borders. We drafted it in Electric Quilt to play with color options and liked this one.

But when we went to audition border fabrics, nothing on hand looked right. If we use the same blue in the border that's in the blocks, the design gets a little lost. We were done for the day and decided to schedule another sew day and possibly a trip to the LFS to review our choices.

Orange Marmalade

Maybe it was the study in orange that lead me to want to make orange marmalade. Surely I've never made it before, I've only recently decided I *like* marmalade. It always seemed too bitter to me. Or maybe it was the corner vendor I passed day after day on my way home from work, beseeching me to buy his 5 lb bags of oranges with his up raised arms full. I don't know. But I bought some, and I read up on how-to, and got the other ingredients and made a batch.

It was fun to try something new. I've made many, many kinds of jam in the past, so it wasn't that different. The most satisfying part of canning or jamming for me is the audible *pop* the jar makes as it vacuum seals. And it tastes good too!

Featured Artist

There's a small collection of my wall quilts hanging at the Ukiah Natural Foods Co-op. We like to feature a local artist's work for a month at a time and my name came to the top of the list in January.

Jewel in the Night Sky and Russian Sunflower


Radiant Nine Patch


Merial of the Sea


Mariner's Compass


Summer's Heat - Oh look, Orange! - with yellow and green

The response has been so positive, almost overwhelming. The customers exclaim and admire. The staff ask me, "Are those YOUR quilts?!" Well yes...

In the first week I had three offers to buy Merial of the Sea, even after I put up a sign that said for Display Only. One customer was very persistent and didn't want to take no for an answer. I told her quilting isn't my day job, she said, "Well it SHOULD be, you're an ARTIST!"

The kudos are really nice and it feels good to be appreciated, but I've never been able to make my quilting pay. That's not why I quilt.

Orange Continued

Recognize this? It's the link on Blogger's sign up page.

Once I started looking for orange I began to see it everywhere. I decided to take my camera with me to work. Wow! The Natural Foods Co-op is FULL of orange! No wonder it feels fun to be there.

Acorn and Spaghetti Squash


Tangelos, Clementines and apples


Golden beets


Carrots with tops. Man that touch of purple looks good!

Orange looks really great next to green or with blue, which is it's complement on the color wheel. So look at the packaging on these products.

Supplements in the Wellness department


Tinctures


Pasta


Oils


Flavored Pasta Dinner

Someone in a marketing department somewhere must've come up with these combinations. Orange just naturally looks terrific next to green or blue. I bet it would make a great color scheme for a quilt.

Color

Rose Hughes was the guest speaker at guild yesterday. She had a fun approach to color theory and asked us all to 'study a color' this week. She said we might want to step away from our comfort colors and study one we don't work with very much in our quilts.

She asked us to look around our world and notice the color we've chosen.

Hmmm... there isn't a lot of naturally occurring orange in January.

Orange is so cheerful, I wonder why there isn't more of it around us?

From My Family to Yours

Happy New Year!

click to enlarge

These shirts were made for us by DS2, an original "Tribal art" of a lion head, silk screened in his current techniques class and gifted to each of us. What a terrific, creative idea! Thank you Hollin!

Christmas Peace

After dinner



Spunky at five months. She used to be the same size as this toy mouse.

Gifts for the Grandbaby

I knitted a cap for the grand baby, due July 12. I couldn't show it before now. I used a lovely bamboo/acrylic blend, sooo soft!

Then I thought it would be fun to give it at Christmas. I still have one of my DS1's baby blankets, so I replaced the satin binding with new and put them together under the tree for DIL.

You never saw someone so happy! It made our Christmas very merry and bright.

Black Licorice and Jelly Beans

When I started the Many Lone Star quilt I was only four blocks away from finishing BL&JB. A few weeks before Christmas I needed some no-think-um sewing, so pulled the colorful strips back out and got going.

Laid out on the design wall


Short rows sewn, thank you Lila for inspecting my work!


Before borders


That's a lot of phone book paper to remove!