Spool Skeletons and Stash Ghosts: Halloween Decor from the Sewing Room

We're counting down the minutes to Halloween - I live in a  kid-friendly town and on any given Halloween we get over 300 trick-or-treaters. It's always madness!

Think anyone will suspect a stitcher lives here? For one thing, yesterday, my daughter created these  three weird  porch ghosts by ripping up a large percentage of my white muslin stash:

 The masks are plaster, made many years ago from a mask kit.

Neither of us bothered to iron the muslin first, as you can see.

And then there are the spool skeletons that I invented many years ago - I had my own then-little kids draw (some) of the faces, and pony beads are involved.

 This one has a soul patch:

A surprising number of people recognize them as thread spools and ask if I sew! 

I love seeing the costumes kids wear, especially the (rare) handmade ones!

Swim Team Applique Tallit for a Bat Mitzvah

My client Rachel is a star - a swimming star, that is. She spends hours in the pool every day. So for her commissioned bat mitzvah tallit, naturally, she wanted her swim team logo, which looks like this:

The team colors are orange and black, but fortunately, Rachel wanted a blue-and-white tallit. So I translated the pieces onto freezer paper, and seperated the three waves from each other. I cut them out of turquoise and dark blue, and raw edge appliqued them. Rachel  also wanted stripes - specifically, one stripe per end. 

She wanted the atarah, the collar, to have her Hebrew name: 

 And here's the finished tallit, modelled not by Rachel (I'm waiting for that picture), but my local teen:

 I made a matching bag from a watery white-on-muslin print and the same blue fabrics. I put quilt batting between the layers to make it cushy.

The button has a glass star of David glued on it.
 
This was made a year ago. Now her mother tells me Rachel is on a NEW swim team and wants an updated tallit!

For more of my tallitot, commissioned and otherwise, see my webpage and my recent rock and roll tallit. For free advice on making your own, and a free pattern for a blessing atarah, go here. 

How To Keep Them on the Farm, After They've Done Improvisational Strip Piecing?

Does this line ring a bell? "How do you keep them down on the farm, after they've seen Paris?" (with Paris pronounced "pareeeeee")?

It was one of my mother's favorite things to say, relevant to so many situations.Thanks to the Intertubes, I now know it was a post-World War I hit song, in 1919, nearly a decade before my mother was born. (This song has its own Wikipedia page!)

The question came to mind because I've been doing SO much improvising lately - cutting things up and stitching them down with no fusible web and only the loosest of plans. Back in my early days of quilting, I worried that once I experienced freedom, I'd never go back to the old fashioned methods.

And as it turned out, my apprehensions were correct. Especially in the last couple of months, when I've been playing with freehand cut squares, more squares, even more squares, and marshmallows,

And most recently, mostly-solid strips left over from the squares and marshmallows.

I began this project by laying the strips  modelled after the traditional strippy courthouse steps quilt block.

I experimented with running a cut-out zig zag through it (made for and rejected from another improv project). 

Now how to glue those strips down to get them under a sewing machine?

Not brain surgery! Decided the black background needed to be larger, so I popped the whole thing on a larger square of black felt. (Can't tell where the fabric ends and the felt begins). Freemotion quilted  with a stipple in variegated thread. Move veerrry slowly or the foot might get caught under a strip (it happened a few times) and you have to cut it out. 

Tried wrapping it around a 6" square 1" deep wrapped canvas block.

Meh! I'm not feeling it.
What about sewing the two side seams together, sewing the bottom together, and boxing it, to make a vase?

Taa daaa! OK, it's not elegant, but it's the perfect size to insulate a water bottle; and with a heavy glass jar inside, it's a funky flower vase! Now if only I could get myself to Paree!

Update: Shared on Nina Marie Sayre's Off the Wall Fridays. Check it out for more art quilting!

A Quilter Walks into a Thrift Shop....(Or: How to Make a Gift Pillow with Fabric that's Trouble)

A quilter walked into a thrift shop. Have you heard this one? The ending is always different.

In this particular case, in early summer, I walked into a thrift shop and found a bunch of fabric rolls, one of which unrolled to become this:

The moment I looked at it, I knew three things: This fabric was fabulous. This fabric was trouble. And the fabric was for Maya.

Who is Maya? Maya is a  New Jersey 13-year-old who I only know well through Facebook, alas, because she lives across the country. She celebrated her bat mitzvah in March, and I was unable to attend. Does she deserve trouble? No, she does not. And the fabric was obviously trouble because it's a light organza, something I don't have a lot of experience stitching. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is that it immediately became obvious that the glitter sheds.

I mean it seriously sheds. It's like a Husky in a heat wave. Everywhere this fabric goes, glitter flies. It needs a personal roomba.

And yet. And yet. Butterflies  Maya had sent me a bat mitzvah invitation with this on it.

 Maya lost her dad on 9/11, when she was an infant. I know he is with them in spirit, symbolized by the butterfly. When I set eyes on that fabric, there was a small insistent voice - probably mine, who knows? -  saying loudly "This is PERFECT for Maya's Bat Mitzvah pillow."

So I brought the fabric home to my sewing room - bedazzling it for a long time.

Of course, I did not want to burden Maya, or her beautiful mother Karen, with excessive vacuuming. So I decided that, for the pillow's central panel, I would sew  two pieces right sides together. You can still see the butterflies from the outside though not so much in the photo.

I scanned the bat mitzvah invitation and downloaded two gorgeous photos from the event (lifted from Facebook). I printed them onto photo sheets - my favorite is EQ Printables Cotton Satin, It comes on a backing, and you simply feed it through the printer, peel it off, rinse it, and it's good to go. The quality is beautiful, and the ink becomes permanent. I stitched those photos to my inside-out organza butterfly square. Taking my cue from the bat mitzvah girl and her mother's outfits, I surrounded the panel by light and then dark blue dupioni silk. The top is 24" square.

For the bow, I made a long tube of the organza fabric, again stitching it right sides together, again, to avoid shedding. I then tied it into a bow and attached it with a discreet safety pin, in case Maya wants to remove it. 

 I decided to create the pillow back from blue quilters cotton.  using images and colors suggested by the photos. There are rocks and waters, inspired by the waterfall photo, 

Hebrew letters, gold keys on blue (another thrift shop find!),  3-D stars printed on fabric...

...and fun abstract shapes, especially on a Klimt-like fabric. The top flap panel is about 22" long, and underneath it is another underlapped blue panel flap on the bottom, about 8" high. There's fireworks fabric toward the top, and just below it, I appliqued a scan of the silver butterfly. 

I went to the fabric store and bought a pillow form to the correct size (use the 50% off coupon from JoAnn - pillowforms are pricey!); then I went to the box store and bought a 24" x 24" x 6" box. Shipped the whole thing off,,,and was gratified a few days later to get a phone call from Maya! She loved it! Yay!!!!

I still have about 3 yards of this sparkly butterfly fabric left. It's stuffed into my shelves, tied up safely in a plastic grocery bag (newly illegal in my city/state.) 

(The bag is therefore now a rare collectible and not for sale.) Can you see the 62-odd bits of glitter on my arm after I packed up that bag? Not that I'm complaining. I'll just sit here in the dark as these little metal squares dig their way into my veins and eyeballs. Has anyone ever died from a glitter overdose?

I no longer have any butterfly-related bar or bat mitzvahs on my event horizon. So if you're interested in owning some of this unique fabric, shoot me an email. If you pay postage, it's yours. With the money you save, I suggest you buy a quality vacuum cleaner. You're going to need it. 

Unhinged by Pumpkins, from Fabric Scraps or Crochet

They're orange! They've got delicious roastable seeds! Their guts smell like my childhood! Did I mention that they're orange? 

Let's name it: Pumpkin Madness.

Halloween is upon us, and has been since August, according to my supermarket, but these fabric pumpkins are so easy and quick to make that you can wait another 26 1/2 days to start. 

Look familiar? I posted how-to's last year, in this post.

26 1/2 days is also more than enough time to learn how to crochet and then make these:

Of course, the crocheted kind don't smell as good as real pumpkin guts, but any day now I predict someone will market prettified 'pumpkin-spice' scented yarn. (Kill me then, or send royalties.)  

The crocheted spider has a pin attached to its underside, so you can unpin it from the pumpkin, and wear it on yourself.

You saw the next one before.  Since then, I've added black vintage buttons.
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This one started as a spiral at the bottom:

Right side up:

The next one is tiny; the base is 2" high, with a removable 2" high lid.

Virtually all of these pumpkins are single crochet (worked in spirals), but for the next one, I did alternating 'around the post' double crochets for the central portion (the first and last couple of rounds are regular scs and dcs). For the middle rows, I alternated front post double crochet with back post dc, which gives it a bumpy, gourd-like texture (How I love bumpy pumpkins and their corresponding quilts). My local teen cut the face from felt, and hot-glued it in place.

 She also made a yarn hinge, so the cap doesn't lose the pumpkin, or vice versa.

Unhinged tops and bottoms can be mixed and matched. 

Vintage black buttons make everything better. These little baskets/amigurumi are fast enough to make as gifts, and large enough to hold a handful or two of candy. Or a small kale leaf.  

Sorry I don't have a pattern for these. I got the main concept for the yarn-wrapped ones here; and for the ridged one from Planet June's donation-ware pattern. The rest are just spheres - easy, fun, and fast gifts!