Mermaid Earrings and Feather Bookmark

I recently ran another round of Bead Soup Swap over on Craftster.  Part of the swap involves creating 1 or 2 small-to-medium crafted items for your partner.  I created these mermaid earrings based on another pair of cluster style earrings on my partner's Pinterest.  She also had a silver ring with two mermaids holding up a pearl on there, so I decided to combine the two.  I switched the color scheme to an analogous purple, blue, teal and green set, made up of faceted fire polished glass beads, tipped with silver spacers.

After finishing them, I decided to make her a matching bookmark.  It was done in the same style, and with a similar color scheme, but with larger crystal and cut glass beads, on a feather shaped bookmark.

And a shot of the bookmark at work.  I love how the cluster of beads trails down the spine of the book.

Scrappy Rainbow Quilt

I have an unplanned quilt in the works!  A few months ago Jim & I started attending the Unitarian Universalist Church here and have enjoyed it a great deal.  One of the members is in her second battle with breast cancer and the church is holding a silent auction to raise money for her medical bills. Since I can't afford to bid on anything at the auction, I decided to whip up a super fast quilt for it.  The whole front came out of my scrap bins.  I only bought the border/backing fabric and the batting.

This is the front, pre-quilting:

I managed to quilt the layers today, with a lovely pearl grey thread.  Now I just have to bind it tomorrow before dropping it off on Friday.  I can't decide if I should bind it in black, or if I should do a pieced rainbow binding.  Hopefully the ladies on Craftster will help me figure out the answer.  Here it is with just the black borders.

And here it is with the rainbow strips laying around it.

Belated update on the Scrappy Rainbow Quilt....  When I brought it to the UU church, the Minister was concerned about having it in the auction, because all of the other items being auctioned off were smaller things, like restaurant gift cards or movie tickets.  He asked if I would mind if he kept it back from the auction, waited a few weeks, then shared it with the congregation and opened it up for silent bidding all on its own.  After about 30 minutes of fast and furious bidding (in which the minister and a particular parishioner kept trying to outbid one another), it went to the parishioner for several hundred dollars!  Here I am with the winner, who seemed genuinely thrilled with his new quilt.

Progress on Carol's Quilt

Progress on the quilt for Carol & Dan's wee baby nerdlet!  I have cut all the strips, sewed the 4-patch strips, and recut them to be assembled into blocks.  Hopefully I can get those sewn this afternoon and this evening.

Parasol Protectorate Charm Bracelet - Now with better pictures!

I have been eagerly awaiting/deeply dreading the upcoming fifth installment of the Parasol Protectorate book series (aka the Soulless series by Gail Carriger).  Eagerly awaiting because Miss Carriger's books are BRILLIANT fun, but deeply dreading as it will be the end of the series, and I don't wish to see it go.  In a spirit of holding on, I created a new charm bracelet based on her Steampunky stories of tea, dirigibles, and werewolves.

The bracelet contains 19 pewter charms, and a plethora of beautiful beads including river shell, agate, dyed jade, moonstone, Czech glass, and crystal in shades of black, white, clear, and bright pink.  The color scheme comes directly from the cover of the first book in the series (Soulless), and the charms were chosen to correspond to all the main characters and events in the book.


The clasp is a pewter Victorian style toggle clasp which I found on Chubby Chico Charms.

The charms include (in order)
Parasol - for Alexia Tarabotti, our tea-loving, skull-cracking heroine
Teacup - as Alexia is *always* in the mood for a good cup of tea
Wolf - for her love, Conal Maccon, Alpha Werewolf of the Woolsey Pack
Gears - for all the fun Steampunk contraptions mentioned in the series
Book - for Prof. Lyall, Lord Maccon's rather scholarly Beta
Ladybug - a memorable adversary of dear Alexia's

Ankh - Egyptian symbol of everlasting life
Thistle - symbol of Scotland, Lord Maccon's home, and setting of Changeless (Book 2)
Handlebar Mustache - for Madame Lefoux, inventor-for-hire
Top Hat - an accessory that a proper gentleman should never be without
Gloves - an accessory that a proper lady should never be without
Full Moon - which incapacitates Alexia's husband all too often
Comedy & Tragedy - for Tunstell, Ivy's forbidden love & Conal's thespian clavinger
Hat - for Ivy Hisslepenny, Alexia's best friend, who has rather awful taste in hats

Manacles - made of silver, to keep the Wolves at bay
Crown - for Queen Victoria and her Shadow Council
Octopus - for the Order of the Brass Octopus
Fangs - for Lord Akeldama, Alexia's very dear friend and source of all gossip in London
Mummy - brought back from Egypt by the Kingair Wolf Pack, which has unforseen effects on the Supernatural set

Pom Certainly is Wonderful

Started a batch of Pomegranate Liqueur yesterday afternoon.  How am I going to wait two whole months for it to infuse?!?

New Quilts in the Works...

I was trying to get excited about making some quilts this year, but to be honest, I was having a hard time.  I sometimes have what I call "Quilter's Block".  My favorite quilts, and the ones that make the greatest impact with people, are those that I'm really inspired to make for them.  But so many people seem to expect to get a quilt from me for a special event, that the list goes on and on.  The more I'm tied to the list, the less interesting and exciting my quilts are.  It's something I have learned I can't force.  It just has to happen.  

Fortunately I had one of those moments of inspiration today!  My friend Carol and her boyfriend are having their first baby and between the two of them, they are sure to produce a tiny nerdlet.  

#1. for 2012: Alien Nerdlet Quilt for Carol's son.  It started when I found the cutest/dorkiest fabric full of aliens and space ships to base it around.  Then after doing a "find this color" search on Equilter.com, I was able to pick out really cute coordinates that included circuit boards, stars, and gears.  Here are the fabrics:

Galaxy Visa by Michael Miller. 

Simple Circuitry in Emerald

Nuts & Bolts in Sunflower

Freedom Studded Sky in Red

I was so excited by the idea, I even rendered it in Photoshop!

#2. Surprise quilted project for Pinkleo, as a belated 12 Days of Christmas project.  - 50% Completed!  (Can't reveal the project till I ship it to her.)

#3. Split Decision wall quilt with leftover Sandy Gervais Grande Finale fabrics

#4. Mason Jar blocks for my own quilt

October Wedding Quilt

I've gotten way behind in posting here.  Between my Etsy, my regular job, and teaching a class this past semester, I never seemed to have any time to quilt.  I had hoped to get my sister-in-law Jennifer's wedding quilt done in time for her actual wedding in October, but it just didn't happen.  Instead she and her new husband Jeremy got it for Christmas.

Here it is finished.  I began working on it just after the start of Winter Break, and my goal was to have it quilted, but not bound, before leaving for Illinois.  But the pattern didn't seem to want to cooperate...  The pattern was Scrappy Trails by Carlene Westberg on Etsy.  It's clearly a simple Log Cabin block that I certainly could have figured out on my own, but I was wanting to try to save time by using pre-cut fabrics, and the pattern was labeled as being for charm packs and jelly rolls.  It listed the requirements as 1 charm pack & 1 jelly roll, but didn't give a number of squares or strips.
I found the Grand Finale line by Sandy Gervais, available reasonably priced from another Etsy seller, Quilted Thimble Cottage.  Was VERY pleased with her service.
As for the pattern, it was kind of a nightmare.  It started off by having you cut down all the charm squares into 4.5" blocks, instead of the 5" they already were.  Then I realized that I needed exactly 40 strips from the jelly roll, but both the roll and the charm back came with a color set of fabrics that just did NOT match the rest of the fabrics.  (Most were yellow, orange, brown & avacado, but a few were purple and teal.)  Long story short, I needed to resize the blocks in order to get a whole set out of each of the 30 matching strips.  This made the quilt several inches smaller all the way around, and led to two days of fabric cutting.  By the end of day two I had the blocks together, and nothing else.  Ended up piecing the front, quilting, and binding at my mother-in-law's dining room table.