And more socks.

I also finished the cable-and-leaf-lace socks over break. This was a fun pattern to knit because you have the satisfaction of seeing it develop as you go.



And Dream in Color's "Smooshy," as much as I dislike the name, is a very nice sock yarn to work with - it feels good, knits up well, and it's sort of multicolored without being so wildly multicolored that it fights with a fancy stitch pattern. (This color - "Butter Peeps" - is mostly a soft yellow with a few random bits of pink or peach in it).

I'm also working some on quilts. My goal this summer is to finish the quilt in the frame, get another quilt partly quilted, piece some more tops (to use up some of the accumulated stash). Also, to bind a couple of quilts I have finished but never bound.

I dug out the Sparkling Gemstones quilt I had - I think this was quilted like a year ago, it was the last quilt that I had the quilter I used to use do (I think she's gone out of business; at least, her sign is gone, and twice I called her with no response). I had tucked it away, then gotten busy with other things, and never got around to binding it.

(Doing the binding on a quilt is one of the steps I find most tedious. First, you have to cut bunches of 2 1/2" strips - at least, for how I do bindings - and then sew them all together, then press the seams, fold the giant long strip in half, iron a crease into it, pin the raw edges around the outside of the quilt, and then maneuver the whole, big quilt under the presser foot to sew the binding on. Then, once that's done, you have to fold the binding over to the back (this covers all the raw edges) and stitch down the folded edge to the back of the quilt. I always do that part by hand - I know some people who machine stitch it but it's hard for me to get that kind of thing done neatly, so I just do it by hand. Which takes a long time but is still less tedious and frustrating than maneuvering the quilt under the machine to get the first stitching-on of the binding done.)

So I cut and made the binding for the Gemstones quilt yesterday, and got it machine-sewn on, but didn't get around to hand-stitching it down. Maybe tonight, or maybe this weekend.

I'm also cutting pieces for a simple rather "graphic" quilt, the pattern is called "Citrus" because the quilt shown in the magazine was in bright greens, yellows, and oranges. I'm using some bright yellow-green (sort of that acid green) and pink fabrics from my stash. I'm not sure how it will come out - with some quilts I can visualize how they will look finished as I'm working on them, but this one I can't quite. I'm hoping all the diverse fabrics don't "fight" when I'm done.

I also pre-washed some large cuts of fabric I had gotten and never gotten around to pre-washing (with most fabrics, I like to do this - it gets the sizing and stuff out. I can't do it with Jelly Roll fabrics or the other small cuts, but I'm trusting that those won't bleed or shrink if I eventually have to wash the quilt they're made from). I have a huge chunk of white muslin for background fabrics for a quilt I've been accumulating for for a couple of years, I think it's maybe time to start it. I'm just going to use the simple Sawtooth Star block (you can see an example here. (I've seen this block called other things. I think it's sometimes also called Variable Star, but I'm also turning up more complicated blocks that go by that name).

The fabrics I've been accumulating are prints of cookies, ice cream, candies...all those kinds of novelty prints. At first I was going to go all pessimistic with the name and call it the "You Shouldn't Eat This" quilt or something like that but decided that was too negative, and besides, I thought of a name I like a lot better, because it makes me laugh. I'm going to call it the Om Nom Nom quilt. I think I'm probably going to make it full bed-quilt sized. I'm going to have to look at the particular cutting directions I have for the pieces of the block and see how large the block will be, and from there calculate how many I will need to make...I figure this is something I can pick away at, cut a few blocks then sew them up, as I feel like working on it. (Also, knowing how many blocks I need will tell me how many blocks I need to cut from each different fabric.)

I don't know. Is it weird to make an entire quilt out of cookie and ice-cream print fabrics? I'm sure some people would say yes.