Monday, February 7, 2011

Mini Double Wedding Ring

I bought a pattern for this mini Double Wedding Ring (the finished top is 29" square) at the Rosemont Quilt Show last year only to realize that I hate paper piecing.  Fortunately, my mom came to the rescue and offered to piece the top for me with the scraps from my Wright's Window quilt (bottom photo). 


Here it is, ready to quilt.  I started drawing some circle chalk lines on it thinking that was how I was going to quilt it, but I'm not so sure I like them.  I am also not sure when I will be able to finish quilting it, but hopefully some day soon.


When it's finished it will hang above my bed and hopefully be a nice compliment to my quilt. 

Friday, February 4, 2011

Physical Planning class


One of my classes this semester is basically about hand drawing urban design site plans.  Later we'll be combining our renderings with some computer programs to make them look professional.  In the meantime, the first couple assignments were just to get us warmed up and actually drawing.  


Both of these were drawn from pictures I already had.  The top one was taken in Lubeck, Germany, probably in 1997.  The second was taken on Chicago's north side at the corner of Clark and Halsted.  Both are ink on paper.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

An Update on Life and Projects


A couple weeks ago I decided I would crochet a blanket for my son that would use up all of my worsted weight scrap yarn.  Here is where I am at with it so far.

Lately, school has been pretty intense and it looks like it will remain that way through this semester.  Originally I planned on basically closing down the blog until May, but I think for now I will leave it up.  I just don't have the time to craft like I would like, but that said I do have projects in the works and things to share.  I just won't be able to post quite as often and will have to rely on scheduled posts and older projects I haven't shared.  And I also expect that finished projects will be few and far between over the next few months.


At any rate, this is a nice low maintenance project that is a great use of yarn that wasn't going anywhere.  The pattern from an old Leisure Arts crochet pattern book of mine called Afghans on the Double.  All of the patterns in the book are based on using two balls of yarn at the same time.  For this afghan I am just using one at a time because I don't need it to be super big.  The pattern is called "Fireside Throw."

I have one other Leisure Arts crochet book and they are basically how I taught myself to crochet when I was in college.  The back of each book has detailed pictures explaining each stitch which made it super easy to teach myself.

By the way, the reason I have time to post today is because most of Chicago looks something like this...



Even adults enjoy a good old fashioned snow day once in a while...