A week of finishing

I have been busy this week getting up to date with a couple of projects. First a quilt I have been making as part of the online Studio11 workshops which Christine is running, having been rather scuppered by Covid. I blogged earlier about the project with Coronavirus as a theme; that is still ongoing as I've been doing too much thinking and not enough doing, which is often a failing of mine. However her "Potato Chip Quilt" project was straightforward, and took much less thinking about to achieve. There seem to be several variants with this name: one is a series of blocks with a square at the centre and a different coloured border on each square; another, similar to the one we made, consists of strips joined with a diagonal seam. The one Christine teaches comprises a pile of fabric strips of a consistent width but differing lengths and a pile of squares the same dimension as the width of strips. You make a long, long, looooooooong strip by alternately stitching strip, square, strip, square at random. The strip is then seamed and trimmed several times until you have a rectangle. Sounds very simple, but you have to get the maths right in order to know how big your quilt will be, and to make one that has sensible dimensions. 

It is all finished, 

quilted with a design I based on some of the fabric, 

 

with some hand dyed fabric as backing

 

I am really pleased with it, and have enough strips left (my poor maths!!) to make another of a similar size, though perhaps with less random and more deliberation.

Then there was my Noro jacket, started back in 2018. It too is finished, though currently awaiting a decision on buttons. 

 

You will see that I ignored the Noro "just make it random" philosophy (be "charmed by the non-uniformity, unevenness, & coarseness of nature"), I prefer to mirror the colour changes. This did involve quite a bit of reeling off from the start of the ball to get a match, but I used those bits in the back to vary the changes where no matching was needed. The yarn feels lovely knitted up and this jacket will get a lot of wear I hope, but I'll probably steer clear of any future Noro temptations. Beautiful as they are, with such a high price I don't like feeling that they are using a bit of marketing BS to cover flaws in both the yarn (which did sometimes fall apart in my hands as I was knitting) and the multiple knots and joins per ball (presumably because the yarn fell apart as it was being spun).

And yes, I am decidedly less sylphlike than the model in the pattern, but hey ho, I am somewhat older than her as well, and did once have my sylphlike moments!! The cat chaps don't mind, so long as they provide biscuits their humans can be any size they like!