CogKnition

Knittin’, and Sewin’, and Thinkin’: Crochetin’?

April 10th, 2010 | View Comments

I’m suffering from a case of multicraftual startitis. This is what happens when you commit to too many knitting projects in advance and then…oooh, shiny!

Since finishing the Tangled Yoke Cardigan, I’ve started another sweater. Behold:

Vintage Blue Cardigan

It’s the Vintage Pink Cardigan that I first blogged about 2.5 years ago. I figured I’d get a jump start on it and try to finish it by January. Which is when it gets “cold” here.

I’ve also started some things destined to be gifts:

Which Came First?

It’s Which Came First? from Mochimochi Land, because every child needs a little existential angst. Also, I can’t read. For some reason I thought this toy would be actual egg-sized. And it is, if you mostly hang around ostriches.

And finally, I had to scratch the sewing itch. I’ve wanted to learn how to do patchwork and quilting for so long, but was frankly procrastinating out of fear. Fear that, try as I might, I would never be able to achieve the precision required to make beautiful pieces. But the fabric stash wasn’t getting any smaller (which wouldn’t be a problem except our apartment isn’t getting any bigger either), so last night I decided to bite the bullet.

I bought a copy of Super Simple Quilts, No. 1 last week and went rummaging around in my fabric stash for coordinating prints. Upon discovering that I didn’t really have large enough amounts of anything to make the patterns in the book (my collection consists mostly of fat quarters), I set about designing my own crib-sized quilt pattern.

After a hearty brunch of herb-baked eggs, I set about cutting, pinning,

Pinned pieces

…and piecing.

Chain-pieced fabric

Turns out chain-piecing is not a Dark Art. You really do just feed the next set of squares in right after you finish the other and they all come out in one nice long strip that you can just cut apart.

After about three hours*, I’d gone from a pile of rumpled fabric to this:

Focal panel, baby quilt

This will be the focal panel for the quilt top. Now I need to figure out how to fill in the rest of it.

There’s a little time left in the day yet…think I should start a crochet project too?

*It almost seems unfair. After three hours of knitting I’d have…a big gauge swatch. Or a baby bootie. This is when I remarked to my husband, “Wow, sewing is so fast!” and he responded with, “…what? Have you gone back to the 17th century?”

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CogKnition posted this on April 10th, 2010 @ 4:30pm in Quilting, Sewing, Unfinished Objects | Permalink to "Knittin’, and Sewin’, and Thinkin’: Crochetin’?"

3 Comments

  1. Swapna says:

    So funny, I was just thinking the same thing about the relative speeds of making a fabric knitting or sewing. I was considering my options with regard to making something protective for my daughter to wear as she just learns to crawl: Knit/crochet kneepads or sew them?

  2. carrollb says:

    Great job! Nice fabric… (rubs hands together and laughs an evil little laugh)