Saturday, January 30, 2016

Jayne Hat

"A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything"

The story: I got a series of messages from a friend saying "Help me!" And a picture of a scary dude in a gas mask.  Weird.  Turns out she was in a knitting emergency and her boyfriend, Mr. Gas Mask, was wearing his ex's poor imitation of a Jayne Hat. Unacceptable.  So this weekend I set off to make him a proper Jayne hat in style.  About 5 rows in I ran out of yellow yarn and decided to make that one a bootleg hat for later and then to make Mr. Gas Mask a real Jayne hat out of different yarn. The results were fun and I ended up loving making Pom poms!

Jayne Hat: Carron yellow and claret red with orange from my stash, 3in pompom

Skimpy Jayne Hat: Lion Brand soft in three colors, 2in pompom

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Broken Star Quilt

When I first got into quilting, I pointed at a pattern and said, "this will be my very first bed-sized quilt!"  And then I proceeded to make 4 other quilts, none of which remotely resembled that first pattern. Well the times are a changin' because I've started working on my first broken star quilt!  I got some really nice batiks in my favorite colors and spent the weekend cutting, sewing, and avoiding ironing.  Because of the color combinations I could make it an untraditional broken star:


Or very traditional:

I'm leaning toward the untraditional version with the bursting wheel in the traditional format.  I really love how the dark blue emphasizes the multi-pink/purple in the center of the star and sends it shooting to the far reaches of the quilt.  Still a lot more work to be done here and I definitely need to get a better cream color for the background. But that comes after I finish piecing the diamonds on the bias!