I'm crafty, I'm just your type

On Friday, I met up with Carrie and picked up these six fabrics at Purl Patchwork. It's hard not to fall in love every time you go into this store. Small and special.

It reminds me of the new fabric store in Buffalo on Elmwood, if you live there instead.

Anyway, since I only got a 1/4 yd. of each fabric, the price was reasonable, too. And I had good ideas for the fabric...

It turned out to be a super crafty weekend. Friday evening I knit with all kinds of lovely folks and then took the wrong subway and walked home in the rain.

Saturday was all kinds of rainy again, and Rainy Saturdays means one of two things. I chose the second and got started on a patchwork pillow!

I was really disciplined about this project. I usually just like to cut and sew and see what happens, but this time I drew all kinds of schematics, did all kinds of proper measurements, and did all kinds of labeling and moving around of fabric and experimenting. Here are the cut out pieces.

And here are the Banana Split Pudding Brownies from Vegan with a Vengeance that I snacked on before I started sewing the pieces together. Oh my. Make it now.


And here's the pillow, finished right before we left for Stacey's party in the big NJ!

I'm ready for my close-up (click me)

The backing is fabric I bought this past thanksgiving in Buffalo.

I hadn't been on the NJ transit train in years. Yep, quite the adventure. And I discovered almost immediately that I had messed up the pattern on my sock. Nothing big, but nothing I wanted to figure out then. So no knitting on the train to and from NJ. Bah!

On Sunday I woke up way earlier than Aaron and got working on the second project -- a patchwork bag. I wanted to use the same fabrics from yesterday, and I had plenty leftover. I took the schematic for one of the squares from the pillow and used it for the bag. I like its long and skinny shape.


This ones going out in the mail today.

Both projects are kinda rough around the edges and could use more careful finishing, but I'm awful proud of them besides. And even though patchwork is slow work, I got a lot of pleasure out of simple things like ironing down my seam allowances and fitting the pieces together just so.

After I finished the bag, we went out for a great tree walk around Inwood Hill Park. I just really love this New York City Trees book to pieces.

Ton of Tuliptrees, neat Osage Orange trees, Cottonwoods, Royal Pawlonia, Sweetgum, etc. Here's AA with a large cottonwood tree and me wearing a special tuliptree hair barrette.




I have more sewing plans for this week and more trips to purl patchwork to look forward to. Another bag, a crafty kit, a skirt...

And perhaps later I'll update you on all kinds of things that happened last week.

*It took me a while to notice that the "crafty" in "She's Crafty" is not the kind of crafty that I liked to think it meant. Maybe I should pay attention to lyrics sometimes. So maybe I'm not the Beasties type, but perhaps I'm _your_ type? (wink)