Mystery Quilt finished and some more knitting

Last Autumn I pieced a Mystery Quilt designed by Kaaren of The Painted Quilt. I knew immediately it was going to be a birthday gift for Mr K.'s best friend.

When I could climb the stairs again to my upstairs sewing room, I machine quilted it. At first I tried a special quilting thread, but every crossing over seam allowances caused giant loops of the needle thread on the reverse. Adjusting tensions didn't help so I changed to Essential Threads and unpicked the first attempts.

The birthday was this week so I can show the finished quilt.

I really like the simple houses but my favourite in this quilt are the Flying geese.

The 4-patch rows at the top and bottom are my own addition. I wanted to add some length without making the quilt any wider. I also chose a simple narrower border instead of the wide one of the original design.

There is some knitting I haven't shown you yet. There was this pretty pattern for fingerless mittens in French. Melanie and I wanted to try it. Melanie made a Google translation into English but it didn't make much sense, so I brushed the dust off my school French and found out what it really was about. After that I made an unofficial English translation I knew Melanie would understand, and so she did. Her bright red version is at the end of this blog post. My version is naturally a cheerful brownish beige, a very lovely alpaca yarn:

It is too cold to go out in these just yet, and they would be too warm worn on top of my leather gloves. In a few weeks maybe?

After finishing these I knitted two pairs as a custom order for a dear friend 

and her friend.

As you can see, the colours are from my palette, a deep coffee brown in merino wool and a pale beige in 50/50 alpaca/wool.

Then I used up some yarn ends and knitted these socks for a little boy.

Mystery Quilt top Finished

As I mentioned earlier, I was having problems with my mystery quilt dimensions. For a slim, tall man I wanted the quilt to be clearly longer than it was wide, and Kaaren's design kept the difference at 4" only. Therefore I decided to add my own row to both ends, and a 1" solid border to frame it.

I had enough 2" squares in my sorted scraps, so I made 4-patches in blues and reds with white.

After adding another thin brown border all around it was time to use the French Braid snake. It was just the required length +3"!

For the 4 ½" cornerstones I designed a tree block, and finally added a 3" border in the  same blue fabric as in the cornerstones around the houses.

I'm pleased with the size of the quilt now, and therefore I'm not going to add the 6½" final border with Prairie Points but stopping here.

I delivered the baby hats this week, and now my evening project has been knitting these just so,

and these for two little very well behaving boys

who are grandchildren to my big brother. He had a big birthday party and I gave him this Bear Paw quilt you already know from my exhibition last Spring. On his fishing trips to Alaska he has seen bears, so I thought the pattern would be perfect for him. Not to mention that I wanted to make some bear paw blocks.

This has been a good Autumn, with not too much rain and some really wonderful sunny days, like this two weeks ago

but now the same trees have shed most of their leaves, and we are having real frost of -5C on clear nights.

These trees are aspens, the birches are almost bare already. All flowers have been cut down, Ericas replace them for the winter.

French Braid

Back to working on the Mystery QAL. The French Braid was a very slow process, no chain sewing at all. I needed over 240", six meters and some.

I decided to make one huge snake so nothing gets wasted when I cut the ends straight. I'm going to add my personal touch to the quilt at this stage to make it a little longer so I don't know yet what length the braid is going to me in my quilt.

I have added some new fabrics to the mix but am still keeping my palette limited to the colours I have already used.

The Nature's palette is adding shades of yellow and brown and reducing the greens to minimum.

Ligularia Dentata. We moved these from the old garden of my FIL this Summer to replace the rose bushes which didn't like this place in the shadow of the house. Now the roses grow in front of the house and these handsome beauties obviously have found their place here.

Flying Geese, Dresden Plates and more hats for babies

After a lot of cutting and sewing, all 88 geese are flying in a nice formation around the houses of this mystery quilt I'm making after Kaaren's design.

The corners have blue Dresden Plates appliquéd on yellow table cloth (really, this was a self-made tablecloth for a Summer party some years ago).

I like trying new blocks in a small scale, like just four Dresdens. I only have made a Dresden plate block once before in my life, when I made a bag after Stephanie's pattern.

Then of course I have been knitting. The broadcast from the Vuelta is usually just a little over an hour so these baby hats are not strictly Grand Tour hats. I simply like to keep my hands busy when I'm watching something not too demanding or interesting on TV, and so there are 11 new hats for my bag to be taken to the maternity ward. I try to make them for every taste, for boys and girls, small heads and bigger ones. It is fun to try out new patterns, and I happened to develop a new one too: the white hat in the middle was going to be 2 tog, yarn over, purl 1 but I started accidentally with ssk, yarn over, purl 1 and so the zig zag pattern is softer than 

in this yellow one in the middle of the front row. Oh, I see these make together already 21, my goal for the Vuelta. I still have some yarn left, and the Vuelta ends on this coming Sunday.

Maybe 70 hats instead of the intended 63 would make a nicer number?

Building houses, knitting hats

Last month Kaaren of The Painted Quilt started a new Mystery Quilt-Along. As soon as I saw her house blocks I knew I was going to sew this quilt some day. As it happens, the new project left all nice quilts on my list behind and here I am, with steps 1 and two done and step 3 on my cutting table.

Like almost always, I'm using old shirts as my main fabrics. Here the brown sashings are unused fabric, and the red plaid of the outer border is a leftover piece of  something I have bought for a backing.

Last weekend the last of the grand cycling tours, Vuelta a Espana started, and so did the last stage of my knitting project for the maternity ward babies at the local hospital. My personal goal is to finish 63 baby hats in all by the end of the Vuelta, one for each cycling day of the three tours.

The weather is still warm but we can feel the Summer is ending. After the exceptionally cold June and not warm at all July we had some lovely warm and sunny weeks in August. Now we have thunder and rainy days, but sometimes the sun comes out too.