Sir Jack Angelfoot & Library Kittens

Yesterday Jack took his Knight's Trial for the Order of Argon Dreth, a Dagorhir Order of Knighthood. We drove out to Pennsylvania to the Battle of Badon Hill event hosted by Rome and Wargar so that he could take his trial this year. He passed the trial with flying colors and this photo was taken afterwards.

Rrucio, Trist, Laithe, Jack, and Krovax

Laithe was Jack's Knight. Trist is another squire of Laithe's and was completely amazing during the trial, making sure that Jack stayed hydrated and helped with weapon matching, in addition to helping me keep count of the number of battles Jack fought and what type of battles. I forget the exact count but there were more than a hundred and the trial took 3-4 hours followed by a 5 hour vigil in the rain.

Rrucio and Liz drove more than seven hours to support Jack and also gave me someone to hang out with while Jack was busy. Krovax is injured but showed up anyway and insisted on fighting in the trial after being awake for more than 24 hours. These guys are good people.

I'll have more photos to show soon I hope. My phone was dead all weekend but Rrucio and Liz took hundreds of photos and I'll share them when I can.

We spent about 11 hours in the car ourselves this weekend so I was able to make some progress on Library Kittens. I had hoped to finished up the orange kitten but I didn't quite make it.

Before

After

Now that were are home, the car unloaded, and I have verified that we both have clean clothes to wear to work tomorrow, I think I'll spend the rest of the evening playing video games.

September YOTA & Slow Sunday Stitching

I'm late, as usual, posting this update for YOTA but here it is. Also linking up to Slow Sunday Stitching@Kathy's Quilts

I keep finding myself getting back to Fall Fairy. I might flirt with other cross stitch projects on occasion, but this is my main squeeze ;)

Fall Fairy by Dimensions

Before

As of 09/12/15

I plan to continue to work on this today after church and lunch. I'm creeping towards a page finish, even though I've branched out into other pages.


P.S. Drop in on YOTA and Slow Sunday Stitching and check out all the other beautiful work out there.

Kaleidoscope Quilt

Last weekend we made a trip up to Frankenmuth and the Michigan Ren Fest, which apart from being fun and spawning a conversation about how Luke Evans would make the perfect Harry Dresden if we could convince the movie people to reboot as a series of movies instead of the TV show 

(a concept I was pretty geeked about but couldn't convey the excitement to my non-Dresden-fan friends sadly)

Anyway, I got sidetracked there. Apart from casting our favorite movie stars into the Characters from the Dresden novels, we talked A LOT about what projects we wanted to complete for Dagorhir and our garb kits, which of course brought up a slew of projects that I hadn't finished yet.

Which brings me to my first kaleidoscope quilt, one that was mostly pieced but never bordered or finished.

On Labor Day I took the time to start adding borders. 

I still need to add the striped border on three sides and another final round of black but I've made a very good start so far. Working on this quilt highlights a lot of the early mistakes I made quilting, and I am fairly certain it won't quite lay flat when it comes to quilting time. We will just muddle through, I still love this quilt and am anxious to finish.

There was also my dresden plate quilt. For you non-quilty people, it unfortunately has nothing to do with the Jim Butcher series but is instead a time honored classic quilt block.

This was my concept design:

This is where the project has led so far, 6.5" blocks with four petal fans in opposite corners.

I'm still considering thin borders between each colored square.

As far as garb projects in the future, I think I'd like to see this green dress with an added brown corset, either under bust or waist cincher. I'd also like to make a water bottle carrier that coordinates with my dress. 

Other projects that I want to get moving on are a couple bags to hold my essential oils and a t shirt that I was supposed to embroider eight months ago and never quite got around to doing. As you can tell, I have many ideas and little time to execute them.

Most of these ideas would make good fall/winter projects if my busy schedule will allow. Let us see where the rest of the year takes us, shall we?

Marine Corp Quilt

I had a recent question about the Marine Corp quilt that I started a couple years ago. (Denise J, I could not contact you because you are a no-reply commenter so I hope you see this.)

 This quilt is still in its barely there phases.

It was supposed to be a graduation gift for my brother when he finished basic training for the Marine Corp. Unfortunately, there were complications and he was given a medical discharge before completing his training, something which was quite devastating to him. I did ask him once if he wanted me to finish the quilt and I received a non-committal reply, which I took to mean that he didn't want it but was worried about hurting my feelings and so I stuck the quilt in a box, attempted to remove all references to it from my blog, and it has sat there for more than two years completely untouched.

It uses a block called Crossroads which involves half square triangles and strip piecing.

To make an eight inch block, you will need eight strip-pieced units and eight half square triangle units.

Strip-pieced Units: Cut strips of navy blue and gold 1.5 inches wide and stitch together. Press. Cut the strip into 2.5 inch squares and these are your strip units.

Half square triangle units: Make units that are 2.5 inches in size using your favorite method. Here is a nifty website that has several methods and tables: Blossom Heart Quilts. I like to make my HST units a little bigger than needed and trim them to the correct size.

If you would like exact measurements, here are the rotary cutting instructions generated by EQ7. The document is in PDF format.

This picture kind of shows how the units go together to make the block.

So I hope that was helpful. If needed, I can put together a more thorough tutorial after the Labor Day Holiday.

Finally, I will probably never finish this quilt, so I am going to offer it up for free to anyone interested in completing it for an American military service member. I will cover shipping to anywhere in the continental US. There should be enough fabric included (although this is not guaranteed as I purchased the materials early in my quilting hobby) to make the center of the quilt shown above. I'm going to offer Denise J first crack at it, but if she doesn't want it, I'll do a random drawing from everyone who expresses an interest.

EDIT: Denise has happily agreed to finish this quilt. Denise, please contact me directly at kaelynscreativestudio@gmail.com with your mailing address and I will get it in the mail right after Labor Day.

WIP Wednesday

It's WIP Wednesday @ Freshly Pieced

Also linking up to MOP Monday@tweloquilting

I am still swimming away at the pebbling on the baby quilt. It's slow but beautiful. I hope to be 25% done by the end of the evening.

Also, "Scattered" is starting to come together slowly. I've been a little ADD about stitching, finding it hard to focus on one thing for too long so these things are taking a while. This one is also about 25% together.

Finally, I don't think I ever had a chance to post this finish, completed way before Ragnarok. Here I am, rocking my Akron uniform, Confessor boots, and new medic belt flag.

 It was relatively simple to make. I just took a dress pattern that fit, quartered it, and then stitched it together with enough wiggle room that I didn't need to add a zipper. To give it enough space, I added rattail loops in the side seams for lacing.

Happy Stitching!