For Christmas, my parents requested four table covers for the occasional tables in their living room. They have really nice handcrafted mission-style furniture and wanted handmade table covers for them. I wanted to stick with the arts-and-crafts-movement theme of their living room, so I spent hours on the interwebs researching stained glass designs by prairie school architects.

I managed to finish three before Christmas, the fourth and largest one will have to wait until after New Year’s. Each piece is made to fit a specific table. This first one is a 10.5″ square, it’s the simplest and completely covers the top of a fern stand.

The second one is a 14.5″ square for a small occasional table.

Details of the second piece.

The third is for a side table that will hold a beautiful stained glass lamp and some knick-knacks.

Apologies for the photo quality… I spent so much time sewing these that I did not have time to take proper pictures before they were gifted. I’ll take better photos of the fourth piece, I promise.

I didn’t keep close track, but I think these three pieces took about 100 hours and $75 in materials. The gold batik is one solid piece, the binding and “lead” are both made out of bias tape. For the lead I used a Clover 3/8″ bias tape maker. I used fusible interfacing to iron the lead and red accent pieces to the gold batik. Once the design was fused in place, I made a “quilt sandwich” with the top, batting and back. For the first two pieces, I machine-basted along a few of the bias tape lines before quilting. This did not seem to help much, the backing still bunched a little bit. For the third piece, I started quilting at the bottom left side and worked my way up and over, and that turned out much better. After the quilting was done, I buried all the ends on the front and back of the pieces. I was afraid if  just trimmed the ends they might start to unravel in time. The binding is hand-sewn for the first piece and machine-sewn for the second and third.

I’m incredibly happy with how the second and third pieces turned out. I feel like the first piece is a bit plain in comparison. I’m looking forward to starting the fourth piece, about 22×40″ for a coffee table, after New Years. I already have a design sketched. My parents were thrilled with the table covers and have already requested more.

I’m not sure how I feel about this pattern. It is ridiculously large and holds a ridiculously small amount of stuff. I like the idea of pocketbooks, but the shape for this one seems so awkward. I tried to make it accommodate more stuff by adding darts in the lower corners, but the darts ended up being so small (due to me not taking seam allowance into consideration when drafting the pattern) that they barely expand the bag at all.

Pattern: From In Stitches, by Amy Butler

I finished a Koolhaas hat this weekend – cast on Thursday, done on Saturday

Yarn: Cascade 220

Needles US6 and US8 circs, US8 DPNs

Modifications: Added 2 rounds of ribbing for a slightly longer hat.

With the weather cooling down I’m doing less bike commuting and more bus commuting. Bus commuting = reading time. I wanted to take better care of the paperback books I read on the bus, especially the ones I am borrowing, so I devised a book cover:

I love it. It’s thick enough that it protects the book from getting bent up and bruised in my purse, but it only adds a few millimeters to the bulk of the book. And the inter-office mailing envelope type closure means it will fit books of almost any thickness.  As long as the books are of the same format. I learned there are, unfortunately, three different formats for paperback  books:

A Format paperbacks are 110 mm x 178mm (4.33″ x 7.01″)in size,
B Format paperbacks are 130 mm x 198mm (5.12″ x 7.8″),
C Format (trade paperbacks) are 135 mm x 216mm (5.32″ x 8.51″)

Doh! Guess I’ll be making 3 different sized paperback book covers.

Alternate title: Covering up your mistakes with bias tape

A couple weeks ago I made the Heather Bailey Marlo Bloom purse. I spent an hour at Joann fabrics looking for 2 coordinating fabrics for the project. My requirements were 1) not cutesy 2) in a dark color and 3) had a pattern repeat less than 24 inches. This was all I could find. I’m not a fan of the color red so I spent a long time looking for something anything else… but I eventually settled on this.  I’m actually really happy with the fabric now, it’s grown on me.

My purse handles are edged with bias tape. This was not part of the pattern instructions. The pattern instructions did say to line two timtex handles up back-to-back and perfect the shape so that each pair of handles was exactly matching. I was not as meticulous about this step as I should have been. After I ironed fabric to the handles with fusible interfacing I realized that my handles are not at all the same shape. Even being just a millimeter off makes a big difference. When the pattern says perfect, it means perfect.

Also, fusible interfacing and me just do not get along. Even if my handles had been the perfect shape, I did a really bad job of folding the fabric around the handles and fusing it to the backside (or inside) of the handles. The edges of my handles were a mess, already starting to fray, and had globs of fusible interfacing melted all over.

I had two options:  I could start over and try to make new, better handles.  Or I could try to cover up my mistakes with bias tape. This was a tough call, since after 8+ years of sewing a lot I have never been able to use fusible interfacing or bias tape properly.  I opted for the bias tape since it seemed more likely to yield a durable end-product and you can rip out and re-sew bias tape if you make a mistakes. There is really no undoing and redoing mistakes with fusible interfacing. I made a lot of mistakes with the bias tape. Like 2 hours worth of mistakes. But I eventually got it right.

I finally have a yarn swift! I couldn’t bring myself to pay $60+ for a fancy schmancy umbrella yarn swift so I made do without one. Then I found a great Instructables tutorial for making a yarn swift. My husband made this one for about $18. It rocks. I wound every hank of yarn I own into a center pull ball last weekend.

Action shot. Whee!

I went to Peru this summer and all I came back with were these balls of yarn:

Ok, that’s not really all I came back with. I came back with a ton of pictures, great memories, an Inca Cola tshirt and possibly the swine flu. But this is all the yarn I came back with. It was surprisingly hard to find yarn in Peru. I ended up finding these yarns at the Pisac market at the very beginning of our two week trip. I thought surely if I am finding yarn this early on in the trip, I will find even more of it later. Wrong-o! This was it. Oh well. Really this is all I needed – some sport weight yarn for mittens and some lace weight yarn for a scarf or shawl.

Look what I’ve been working on:

Yarn : Tahki Yarns Cotton Classic

Pattern : Hexacomb Cardigan, Interweave Knits Spring 2008

I’ve been working on this f-o-r-e-v-e-r. I really don’t like purling because it takes me 4 times longer to purl than it does to knit. For that reason I really do not enjoy working on sweaters that are not knit in the round. But I really enjoy wearing cardigans. So I am slowly, slowly working on this cardigan.