Tag: sewing

In which I’m NOT subtle
Scrap-urday

In which I’m NOT subtle

Featured La Tejedora2 Comments

One of the hidden benefits of the pandemic has been what’s been available remotely. Granted, people have been pretty upset about how there have been a lot of accommodations that businesses/employers have said they couldn’t do in the before times, but now in pandemic, they are being done without issue (I’m looking at you work from home). On a less serious note in that same vein, I’ve been able to attend Stitches at Home. I’ve taken a class in each of the 2 sessions I’ve been aware of (February and March). This time (March), I took a fabulous sewing class. It’s classic quilt blocks done in a scrappy, wonky way. People who know me IRL know that I LOVE scraps.

I really, really do. I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it some more. I love being able to take something unwanted and turn it into something beautiful and appreciated. My poor Poopie thinks this is a lot of scraps. Sorry, I forgot to warn you to put down your beverage of choice. If you snorted your drink, apologies. Really, this is nothing, it’s just part of ONE paper bag. And, wonder of all wonders, it’s not all me. I love when people give me their scraps. It’s fun to me to see what they’ve been working on. And it expands my palette. So, if you have unloved scraps, you can leave them on my doorstep, and I’ll love them 🙂

Back to my class…I hadn’t heard of Shibaguyz prior to this class (https://www.designz.shibaguyz.com/). I am poorer for this. They are an incredible duo, and so much fun. I really wish this class was in person. One of the things I’ve complained about before, and I’ll complain about again and again, is how in our crafting world, we end up with crafting police. Unless you are submitting your work for competition, crafting police are completely unnecessary. These people are the ones who tell you your seams aren’t pressed flat enough. They are the ones who tell you there is only ONE way to do a specific thing. These guyz are not crafting police, and they go out of their way to reaffirm YOUR work should be what pleases YOU, in the manner that pleases YOU. Photo credit to Shibaguyz.

Crafters know that we have “go to” colors. Some people make things in shades of purple, others find every fiber they are drawn to is blue. There’s nothing wrong with that, per se. Some of us recognize we have these preferences, and go out of our way to explore other colors. We buy that orange that we don’t have any experience with, and find out that it turns out it’s the PERFECT color for a project. For me, never going outside my color comfort zone would make me sad because it’s just not as interesting to me. Sharing/swapping scraps is an easy, no fuss way of testing out different things you would normally be hesitant to try as well as getting rid of some of your stuff that you know you won’t ever finish/do. Or….you could do what I did last week while shopping for my sashing fabric, and grab some fat 1/8ths in an underrepresented color.

I still love taking classes, even though I could probably just craft away for the rest of my life with what I know. Some classes, I leave feeling like I could have learned it from a book. Other classes, I learn so much my head explodes. My favorite ones are the ones where I learn just one tiny tidbit that may or may not have anything to do with the subject matter. This, In my experience, largely depends on the instructor.

I have found with just about anything, there are certain levels of knowledge. Beginners know they don’t know anything and will ask all sorts of questions and absorb information like a sponge. Advanced beginners know how to do what they like, but have listened to too many gatekeepers (crafting police), so are unsure of themselves. Intermediates know enough to have started to believe and parrot the gatekeepers, many are nascent gatekeepers. Advanced are the gatekeepers–they have a rule for every question, they often think they are experts. Real experts, though…they are not gatekeepers. There may be legitimate safety rules, but other than that they are the epitome of the newest (to me) gen X meme: F*ck around and find out. With a beginner, they’ll say “I do it like this”…because a true beginner needs to have a direction, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only direction. With advanced beginners and intermediates, they’ll say “hmmm…I don’t know, why don’t you try that?”, or “ooh, that sounds interesting, let me know how that turns out”, and sometimes “when I’ve done that, I got this result, which didn’t work for me at that time”. A really good expert responds to advanced questions by….LOL. Trick question, gate keepers don’t actually ask questions. In classes, they are the people who’s question is a statement of their gatekeeping either with an upward inflection at the end to make you think they are asking a question, or “isn’t that right?”. If you find yourself doing this in ANY situation, apologize, lower your hand, and realize you are the equivalent of a teenage know it all. You’ll grow out of it, hopefully. Also applies if you start off any sentence with “Well, actually”. And yes, I know this is a bit of gatekeeping. I’m not claiming to be an expert blogger, or even an expert human.

If you find yourself with an advanced teacher, know that they DO know a lot. Don’t completely discount what they are saying, because those gatekeeping rules are there for a reason, they have the most consistent success rate for whatever the established success is. If that is what you are going for, great. I’ve been told it’s the Sagittarius in me that wants to know all the rules so I know when and how to break them. I listened to my fair share of gatekeeping. I’ve, unfortunately, done my share of gatekeeping (again, apologies D and C). I was well into my 30’s before I had the epiphany above about the different levels. It took some phenomenal classes and instructors in knitting and spinning for me to see the pattern, and then I realized it actually extrapolates to all of life (that I’ve experienced).

We actually talked about this in my last session of the class. Someone had said they were told an always or never (I don’t remember which). The Shibaguyz handled that perfectly. Firstly, as true experts, they highly encourage taking classes with multiple teachers. They explicitly said that other teachers have other ways that may work better for us, they also can explain things in a way that maybe wasn’t catching with us. Secondly, they encouraged us to respectfully ask why? Why is that the only way to do something? Why do we never do this other thing? There may be legitimate reasons, or maybe there are gatekeeping reasons.

Classes may not be something that is feasible for you (maybe for cost, time, or something else). If that’s the case, there are local guilds, and/or groups. Barring all else, there are online groups you can join. Even if the local group/guild isn’t really what you are wanting/expecting from your support group for your skill of choice, try them out. You may find that their orange really pops in your work. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll try out a little of your purple. If you are a bit unsure of joining a group by yourself, do what I do, and become an enabler. Rope the friends/family you can stand into your obsession of choice. D and I started a group over a decade ago. It’s had people come and go for various reasons. I can tell you that a diverse group fixes the gatekeeping problem. I can say there’s only one way to do something, but then L will stare me straight in the eye, as she’s doing it a different way. Or, I could say, “you should never do this thing”, but C will lift up the project where she did just that thing I said to never do.

I did my thesis on community, and a lot of research has been done (by people actually qualified to do research) on the effects the loss of community organizations (ie guilds) have had on our communities. Learning to deal with and work with people who are different from you is an important life skill. Hearing everyone’s voices makes a better song. I don’t think I need to expand on how this applies to all aspects of our lives. Instead, here’s a song for you to enjoy. Its about celebrating differences, in ourselves, and others. Also, look forward to seeing my wonky blocks, which are all named after musical artists.

It’s not hoarding if you use it!
Scrap-urday

It’s not hoarding if you use it!

Featured La Tejedora4 Comments

Once again, it seems that life conspires against me. I start to get into a groove, and then something comes along to shake it up. I had so many good intentions of getting at least one post done this last weekend, and finishing up/starting a couple more so future Me would have things easy. We knew we were supposed to have an ice storm last Friday, so Poopie made sure to have us all stocked up so we wouldn’t have to go anywhere over the weekend. I was going to be watching the Red Alder interviews in the evenings and while away the days doing whatever craft, and finding a new show to binge watch. I’m sure he had his plans which likely involved loud music, either listening to, or creating.

And then our power went out Friday night. There went all of my plans for the weekend. As well as the following week. We were without power for 12 hours shy of a full week, just getting it back yesterday morning.

So we come to hoarding. Or…allusions to hoarding. For over a decade, I have dealt with not so thinly veiled criticisms of me keeping things. Don’t go thinking it was just from Poopie, I also hear from other people who have no problems giving me their unsolicited opinions on my things. There are many reasons why I keep Useful Things. I mean, firstly, they are Useful Things. I have Plans for them. Yes, I have many Plans; and some do not come to fruition, but some DO! Secondly, I grew up poor enough that we couldn’t afford to throw out Useful Things. Take paper bags, they can be reused for all sorts of things: garbage sacks, and just…sacks. Book covers as well. No, I’m not old enough for that to have been a “thing”, school mates thought I was weird…of course, this was not the only evidence for their thinking that way. Paper bags also were wrapping paper. Fun fact: this year, they were again. That’s saying nothing of fabric, string, yarn, stuffing, etc…

I’ve already mentioned this, but way last March, when we needed to start wearing masks, but there weren’t enough of the disposable kind (and who wants to keep making more garbage????), I found a pattern for a relatively easy mask. I could actually make 2 out of a single fat quarter. But…why would I use up my fat quarters? I still had a ton of fabrics left over from goodness knows what else because I’ve inherited a BUNCH of fabric scraps. Friends and family all know I’ll welcome them. In fact, for one of Thing 2’s birthday parties, instead of goodie bags for the guests, she wanted purses, so I made a bunch of simple purses out of scraps I had gotten from my MIL (which included her mom’s stuff, I believe). I think she (MIL) enjoyed the memories of a skirt or dress she had made herself in school. I’ll be honest, I take a great amount of pride in making things from scraps that look like they are supposed to look that way. I love making trash into treasure, and I fancy myself good at it.

Shocking no one, I digress….back to cutting up scraps for masks. I made some for our household, for my in laws, for the households of my mom, sister, and aunt. Basically anyone who wanted them. The only thing I needed to purchase was the elastic. I did not have a hoard stash of that. I was also able to make a bunch of masks to donate to various drives. Again, with very little out of pocket. And the time spent making masks was time I didn’t spend dreading/worrying like so many others. I’ll try to talk about this “trick” of mine in another post.

When the wildfires came, and the local charities were gathering toiletries for fire refugees, all those tiny bottles of shampoos, and little wrapped hotel soaps, and who knows what else I dragged out of my linen closet were put to good use. See? Not hoard — stash. Not junk — Useful Things.

We’ve been the family way station for firewood. Got extra wood that needs burning? It ends up at our house. Anyone going on a camping trip calls up, and they end up grabbing a load of wood from us. We have a fireplace in our house, so it makes sense for us to have the wood. We don’t heat with it. My house was built in 1979, so the fireplace is more ornamental than functional. Unless our electricity is out for almost a week. It’s still more ornamental than functional, but we managed to keep the living room at 50 degrees, while the rest of the house was 40-42. This lovely picture is of Poopie restocking the wood by the front door. He’s wearing the helmet because while the temperature was warming the next morning, that just meant giant ice chunks were falling from the cedar. He said it was a good thing he was wearing the helmet considering the loud crashing he kept hearing in the helmet.

And for my final “hoarding” story….the candles from our wedding…11 years ago. I had an evening wedding in winter. Instead of flowers everywhere, there were candles. What do you do with a metric ton of 1/2 burned candles? (Actually, just one under bed sized tote) I mean, no one wants them, but I can’t just throw them away. It’s not like they’ll go bad. Well, we went through about half that tub. I was so very glad I had that hoard stash of candles. Especially since I still haven’t received the tapers I ordered online yet. Sitting in the dark, even with your spouse is depressing…I assume. I didn’t have to find out…because I was prepared with a stash of candles.

I was able to use the electricity at my local volunteer gig for my computer for my day job. But, I’d come home just as it was getting dark. So lots of candlelight. We do have electric lanterns, but they don’t really give off much more light it turns out than the candles do, and the light isn’t as nice. I was able to channel our textile fore bearers (finally! she gets to some textiles!) during our outage. I sat by the fire and spun up the last of the random fiber I had been spinning when I last chatted with you. I now need to figure out how/what to ply it with. I couldn’t before because I didn’t have enough light to be able to see, but I’m hoping to figure that out tomorrow. It wasn’t light enough for me to weave. It might have been, but I broke a warp on Saturday, and the light was never good enough for me to confidently fix it. I spent most evenings knitting on one of last year’s Knitter’s Almanac projects (more on that elsewhere).

I have been keeping my patterns on a cool app in my iPad, and working off that. That meant I wasn’t able to work on either the shawl or scarf I have on needles because I didn’t want to drain my iPad. Basically, I was hoarding conserving the power I did have. I did realize that the lighting with candles probably isn’t good enough if trying to do a project that you need to refer to a pattern for, anyway. My black out knitting was an easy peasy double knit single color. garter edge, k1, sl1wif. all the way to the garter edge, turn, repeat.

Honestly, the roughest part for me was the job portion, the computer set up going to a laptop was terrible. The desk was an ergonomic nightmare as well…my back is still super unhappy with me. At home, we were able to borrow a generator to keep our freezer running, so we lost a minimal amount of food. We have no kids at home, so the only whining was our own. Of course, if it had to go much longer, I’m not sure how sanguine I could continue to be, I was starting to feel the strain. I spent today watching Franklin Habit on YouTube which has restored my knitting zen.

The blackout knitting just wasn’t enough to rejuvenate my zen. After this year, with pandemic, wildfires, surgery, other family issues, and now this, I think it’s fairly reasonable that I was seeing cracks in my zen. The blackout knitting was definitely keeping the beasts at bay, but I am always grateful for any added assistance.

Back to my thesis. These examples show that it’s not hoarding if you use it. Sometimes, if you have the resources, it makes sense to set aside for the rainy (insert plaguey, firey, or icey) day (week, month, year). And if you find you have some good fabric or yarn that needs a home, Poopie doesn’t have access to this site’s email…just sayin’ 😉

Happy New Year
This Must Be Thursday

Happy New Year

La Tejedora5 Comments

More importantly, Good Bye to the dumpster fire that was 2020. But, then again, was it really? I mean, yeah, we all had plans. And those plans were incinerated. But, doesn’t that happen every year? No? Just me?

As an example….I had planned to complete Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Knitters Almanac. By the end of January, I knew that was a terrible plan. In January, before COVID and everything that came with, my plans were already destroyed. So, yeah, I can blame COVID, but really, it’s just life. Or, at least my life. But, see, I’m prepared for that. Since that is what I am used to, and what I prepare for, I’m OK.

I heard an interview with a couples counselor this last summer where she noticed that the person in the relationship who had been agreed to have the “problems” in the before times was now handling things well, but the person in the relationship who was “fine” in the before times is having problems coping. All I could think when listening to this interview was “Who’s coping mechanisms are unhealthy now, hunh?”

If any of you have loved ones in your life who deal with depression and/or anxiety, look back on this last year for yourself. How you have been feeling? Overwhelmed? Exhausted? Sick dread always? That weird feeling in your chest? That’s almost every single day of their lives. We are 9 months into this, and lots of people have gone beyond cracking. Imagine year in and year out. *That’s* a small sample of what they…we…deal with. This year has been what we’ve been constantly preparing for.

So, while all y ‘all were scrambling around trying to find fabric and elastic for masks at the beginning of all this, me and my fabric hoard stash were merrily sewing away. While everyone was panic buying supplies, I went through my house and gathered what I could, and we put the supplies on the shopping list so we could grab some of what was available every time we shopped. We didn’t empty shelves. There wasn’t a reason for that. But, by stocking up a bit, when the wildfires came through town, we were able to share what we had. The only down side to this is that Poopie has seen this as a sign that his choice all those years ago to put tissue packs in the piñata was a good one. He is still wrong about that. But, I will take that, since it means my “crazy” ideas of having buckets of staple supplies in the garage have been proven useful. Don’t get me wrong, I would have preferred not to have all the loss we’ve had this last year, but there is that tiniest (OK, not so tiny) part of me that is saying “See!?! Not crazy, visionary!”

Sorry if some of this is repeat, but it’s been a while since I’ve written, and I assume it’s been a while since you’ve read. I’m going to try to work myself into getting back to blogging. I imagine I’ll let you know what I’ve been up to over this time period while I’ve been away. While not necessarily exciting, you know me, I’m always busy.

Also, please note, they’ve changed the formatting for me. I can go back to the classic, but let’s see what this does for now.

Blerg! The bulk of this was written Monday/Tuesday. I’m still processing Wednesday…so, I won’t be talking about that here/now. I’ll be knitting/weaving/sewing, whatever….

This Must Be Thursday

Eff DeAnna

La Tejedora6 Comments

Have you ever lost touch with someone and not known how to reconnect? It happens to the best of us.  And trust me, I’m not even in the top 50%.  Last year sometime, I stopped blogging.  I had reasons (excuses).  Mostly surrounding time at the beginning.  Trying to figure out a time when I could sit down and write.  Prior, it had been really easy to just blog while Poopie was at practice, but his practices became more sporadic, and I wasn’t stringent on making sure I took time out myself.  Later there was motivation, some stemming from health issues, and serious depression because of those issues, some just lack of practice. While not all resolved satisfactorily, the depression isn’t debilitating anymore since I’ve had time to process and come to terms with things. I have been my usual self of not saying no nearly enough.  Plus, there were a whole slew of other aggravating things no one wants to deal with.  Frankly, I just didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to try to be upbeat here as well as in real life.

To prove how contrary I am, the pandemic, which is throwing everyone else into a tailspin, has been like a breath of fresh air for me.  Many who know me probably assume I’m getting so much knitting done.  I am not.  Knitting is how I cope with the stresses of everyday life.  Without everyday life, I don’t have those stressors, so I don’t need to knit as much.  Being pretty portable, I’m able to take knitting with me when I go to functions, board meetings, shows, etc… but now, I don’t need to worry about portability.

In addition, I am finally home to do all those projects which have been percolating in my brain.  I got 1/3 of my apple tree chopped up, which is awesome considering how terrified I am of chainsaws.  I made poor Poopie help me move 2 yards of wood chips, though I did the 1/2 yard of gravel by myself, since it needed to be done with individual buckets vs. a wheelbarrow.  I’ve torn up half my front yard trying to de thatch it, but had to stop that project because the hippy lawn seed (which involves flowers and low water/maintenance plants) isn’t available right now because of said pandemic, and I blew through my stash.

I’ve also made bunches of masks for family who needed them, and then a bunch more to donate.  I’ve been working through that stash as well, though I did have to order elastic online. And people thought I wouldn’t use my stash.  My sewing has been accompanied by Perry.  Poor Poopie has a negative visceral reaction when he hears the theme music now.  Back in the day, the seasons were apparently over 30 episodes.  I’m honestly not sure how many seasons there are.  I think I’m in season 4.  So…that math is really sad for Poopie.

I heard a phrase on one of my podcasts that really resonated with me–nostalgia bath.  During this weird time, the podcasters were talking about how they are finding themselves steeping in nostalgia–shows, movies, music.  Psychologically, this makes sense.  For people who are having a rough time with the stay at home orders, this brings them back to a more settled time.  For those of us who are having less of a rough time, it’s a familiar stay at home.  Perry Mason was always my lunchtime show when I stayed home sick from school.  Summers, I would wake up in time to see Perry Mason to start my day.  He’s familiar.  Also, I’m not weirded out about people touching each other in black and white.  Watching the color shows, I find myself wondering why the actors are so close to each other.  Once Perry is done, I’ll have to find something else to binge watch.  Thankfully, we live in the future, so that isn’t too difficult.  Poopie will be happy about that for maybe a week, and then be back to aggravated about my binge watching.

He’s having a rough time of it.  He does not like being at home, he needs to be out.  Since we are both members of the more vulnerable populations, even after restrictions are lifted, we’ll have to continue to be more vigilant.  This just means I can’t fully enjoy my quarantine because it hurts me that he’s so miserable.  And there is literally nothing I can do about it.

On to happier subjects.  The title of this post refers to an incident that occurred shortly before everything shut down.  DeAnna was bugging me about my lack of blogging, and faking that she couldn’t remember it, what was it called again? So I said F*ck you.  Someone next to us said “You have a blog called F*ck You? I’d read that!”  I clarified that it was F*ck DeAnna.  I’m not a monster, I only curse at those who deserve it.  So I’m fulfilling my promise to have a blog post named this.   You are welcome, Miss D 🙂

I’m going to try to do better blogging.  I even have built in conversations.  In January, I started trying to follow Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Almanac.  In a few years, we’ll talk about how hilarity ensued, but as I’m working through it, I have so  many feelings about the grande dame of knitting.  I’m planning on sharing!

Still alive!
Wednesday In Progress

Still alive!

La Tejedora1 Comment

I am back after an unexpected hiatus. There are many reasons for this hiatus. I had vacation, which was a mixed bag, and I’ll probably talk about it later, once enough time has passed to make it funny. We came back from vacation to find that the furnace has died. As my Gpa would say: D-E-D, dead. Our April has been colder than usual. And I had no furnace.

Those of you who have chosen to follow me on Facebook (La Tejedora Crafts) or Instagram (La Tejedora Crafts) may have seen a picture of the fire in our fireplace.20180417_090754.jpg  So, I did have *some* heat. However, one of the things I love about my house is that when we had four human sized people in the house before Things 1 and 2 moved out, the acoustics were such that it didn’t really *feel* like we were all on top of each other. Funny thing about air, whether it’s transporting heat, or transporting sound, it reacts pretty much the same. So, my house was mostly an icebox.

It wasn’t helpful that Poopie’s job is now 5 days a week from home, and I had 14 days straight working from home during this time (yes, including weekends).  Despite me waking up to the shopping list in the featured image from Poopie last month, we are both still alive. Honestly, the biggest kerfuffle we had was over fire building.

When we go camping (most often with my MIL and FIL), there are two camps (lolol puntastic!) when it comes to the philosophy of fire. It so happens, in this case, to run down gender lines, but I am unaware of it being necessary to be gendered. My FIL and Poopie like refined, restrained fires. They are very good cooking fires. What they are not, however, are good heating fires. When camping, either FIL or Poopie will get up and make some anemic little fire, and cook us yummy food, which we have to eat bundled up in 17 layers of clothes because the sun has barely made it over the horizon (I may have taken some poetic license with the imagery, but seriously, it’s freaking cold in the mornings). The rest of the day is spent with the two camps vying for control of the fire. Every time FIL and Poopie leave the camp on some adventure, MIL and I, who have stayed behind to read and relax (because—vacation!) load the fire with a bunch of wood and get warm. When FIL and Poopie return, they stifle our glorious fire and tame it. I told Poopie that it’s like they are afraid the posse will find us. Spoiler alert…there is no posse. Imagine all this playing out at home, with just Poopie and I.

The most hilarious part about these differing views of fire is that they are in direct opposition to how we tend to feel about almost everything else in life. MIL and I tend to be the more practical ones, while FIL and Poopie tend to be the wild, untamed, unrestrained ones.

So, work and dealing with furnace quotes, and deciding which furnace, and whether to add AC, and, and, and all conspired to make blogging much lower on the prioritization scale.

HOWEVER, I still took some pix, I tried to make the pages easily searchable in both Facebook and Instagram. Both are La Tejedora Crafts. So, even if I wasn’t blogging, I was still thinking of you Dear Reader. Please do check out one or both of those pages and follow me there.  You get more pictures than just the blogs.

20180417_181227.jpgToday is Wednesday. Which means Works in Progress. I have been working on three, count them, three memory quilts for forever. I finally got them done, and the recipients have them in their hot little hands.

They are my first foray into T shirt quilting, which was quite satisfying.20180417_180431.jpg I learned a whole lot about quilting doing these, so expect to see pictures in the future as I need to demonstrate future thoughts. The loved one who passed was clearly an Oregon Ducks fan, so I chose the colors accordingly. The backs are yummy minky in colors which align with the recipients. I am absolutely sure that when I was asked to do these quilts, the expectation was that I would have a simple blocked quilt with everything the same size.

I try to have my work be individual, and fabulous…one could say Santabulous. So, of course, I went overboard. It was a lot of work, and took a lot more time than I would have ideally liked, but I’m very pleased. My MIL told me they were ugly. I’m going to assume she meant the colors, and not my workmanship (she’s an Oregon Beavers fan).

Lots of little changes have been happening for me and my household during my hiatus, which will need to be accounted for. May involved another vacation, and other work related garbage. Somewhere in this hiatus, there is also Other News. Which I will get to in a later post.

I’m still working on being gentle with myself.  I think it will be a life long endeavor.  WIP’s are things that I tend to beat myself up about.  Things that I don’t get finished for whatever reason.  Falling down on the blogging “job” is also something I’m working at not beating myself up over.  This is all a learning process for me. You might say that blogging is also a WIP 🙂

Thank you for your patience. I hope it was worth it.

Quilting? Gardening? Sarcasm and wittiness?
Wednesday In Progress

Quilting? Gardening? Sarcasm and wittiness?

La TejedoraLeave a comment

When I told a friend I was thinking of starting a blog, she asked me what the blog was going to be about–Quilting? Gardening? Sarcasm and wittiness?  I said “yes”, and she said she’d read it.  That was all the encouragement I needed.  You can blame her.  That’s not true.  Like I said in my first post, a lot of big and little things conspired.  This encouragement was just the last nudge I needed.

This post will be not knitting-centric. *gasp*

Most crafters have several projects going at any given time. There are a select few who have self-control…  I’ve been told… I don’t know. I’ve never actually met one of these crafters.  If you are part of a crafting community, either online, or IRL, you probably have heard cute phrases for some of the projects languishing away wherever you hide them…usually “UFO” as in UnFinished Object.  A different friend wanted me to do something on my blog with regards to UFO’s.  But alliteration!

While I can think of some cute things to do with aliens and UFO’s, nothing was really working for me. So, I figured I’d let the idea marinate in my head for a while.  Eventually, I came across the term WIP, which stands for Work In Progress.  How wonderful!  A: it works with Wednesdays, and B: it sounds so much more intentional than UFO.  A UFO is something foreign, over which we have no control; a work in progress is something we are working on.  People also seem to use the term UFO to describe a project they’ve given up on: That’s not an afghan, that’s a UFO. WIP is just something that’s…in process.

Now, this isn’t to say that if you dug deep (or just glanced through, really) my projects “on the needle” so to speak, you wouldn’t find some items which would qualify as a UFO. I’m going to work on getting those back into a WIP state.  That being said, what I’m currently working on is a gift (or three), so I’m not going to show or talk about them much yet.

This week, the WIP I’m wanting to talk about is a shop hop!20180207_115549.jpg

I know I’ve been mostly talking about knitting. That’s because knitting has been my go to for a long time.  Like I said, though, knitting isn’t my only craft.  Several years ago, L introduced me to shop hops.  Shop hops are quilters’ trick or treating.  You show up at a store and say you are shop hopping, and they give you the fabric and instructions to make a (usually) 6” completed block.  Before you get too excited, you need to know that there needs to be a shop hop currently happening and the store needs to be participating in said shop hop.  Showing up at random stores may lead to embarrassment and confusion (if done right all that will be on the owner, not you).

There are all sorts of different types of shop hops with all sorts of parameters, but they tell you all about them at the beginning–so don’t worry. It’s a great way for the shops to show off their “style” as well as get folks through the door.  For the shop hoppers, it can be a fun day (or more) road tripping and seeing different areas.  Sometimes, I can convince Poopie to be my chauffer.

Right now, there is a shop hop in my area, and I’m in the middle of doing that. Which is why I’m calling it a WIP.  20180207_164757.jpgFull disclosure, the baggie full of goodies will likely end up on the shelf of my quilting table for a good long time  before being pulled out and put together. (side glance to the left) So….doubly WIP.

Now, we can look at all the unfinished projects and despair. I mean, I often do.  But, we can also look at how much extra enjoyment I am getting.  I enjoy the process of shop hopping.  Even when I do it alone, I enjoy the puzzle of getting the most bang for my driving.  Then I get to see all the blocks, and side projects.  I get reminded of awesome stores just outside my normal shopping zone.  Then, later, when I pull out that particular shop hop’s bag, I get to re-enjoy the squares and techniques.  I get reminded of why I love how this person writes their patterns and try out new techniques.  Then, I get to figure out a setting fabric.  *swoon*

Setting fabric is the “background” of the quilt. While there is often a theme, or feature fabric, for a shop hop, it can be difficult to find something to pull it all together.  Or, if you are like me, 6” may or may not be 6” (insert NSFW joke here).  The featured picture for this post is a blanket I made for my co-worker’s baby from a shop hop.  As you can see, while there was a featured fabric line, the color schemes were not really compatible.  Also, one block was NOT 6.5” (the size you need to get a finished 6”).  Go on, guess which one.  The setting fabric in this example is the grey and I chose a setting pattern that hid the miss-sized block.  I’m not sure the picture does it justice, but there are glitter dots in the grey.  Side note, after that quilt, grey became one of my favorite neutrals, it’s soooo much more versatile than I had thought.

I will be spotlighting different WIP’s as we go along. I’ll try to talk about why they fell by the wayside, and what I’ll do to get through whatever obstacle that is.  More importantly, I will try to remember to find the fun that I can when I can.  Taking pleasure in the little things, like finishing a shop hop.  But, in the meantime, I have to get to 16 stores, and Madrona before next weekend.  OMG MADRONA IS NEXT WEEK!!!