Indecision...

I'm being indecisive about two things this afternoon, so while I wait for it to stop raining before I go and check on my cells I thought I'd throw my indecision out there to the internets to see if anyone can help me with the necessary decisions.

Firstly... now I have a darning foot, work on my
little bouquet quilt can resume. However, before quilting can begin I still need/want to add leaves and I have two options regarding leaves and can't decide between them. Below you can see my two options, and close-ups of them.

Left: leaves made out of red and green tartan fabric
Right: leaves fussy cut from some fabric left over from a skirt

So what do we think? Which leaves should it be?

The second thing I'm being indecisive about is in regards to my next project(s); fabric sat begging to be made into shirts.

Firstly I have this Italian shirting fabric that I bought at Clegs last time they had a 20% off sale
I think this would make up very well into the Emily shirt on Burdastyle, but I'm more confident with getting a good fit with princess seams (as in the JJ pattern). So I see my options as:
1- Make the Emily pattern as is (with the shorter sleeves)
2- Make the JJ body with the Emily collar and sleeves - is this possible? can I mush together patterns like that?
Should I take the risk of the fit with the Emily pattern? (I could always make a muslin first to get the fit right, shock horror!) Or do I 'play it safe' and use the princess seams in the JJ?

Secondly I have this slightly stretchy fabric that I got from the $10 corner at Tessuti
But currently have no idea which pattern I'm going to use for it. Any suggestions?

While on the subject of shirts, another shirt pattern I'm just waiting to use is the Ute blouse (which Nichola has taught me the proper pronunciation.) Sadly I don't have the right fabric for that one yet.

Free Motion Quilting...

I went to the sewing machine shop on Satuday to help a friend buy a machine for her sister (a birthday gift - talk about best sister ever!) and I finally managed to pick up a darning foot for my machine.

Thus, I had a bit of a go at free motion quilting... and boy, it's HARD!!! Below are a couple of images of my attempts, and I definitely need to have some more practice before I let myself loose on anything I actually care about!

My somewhat pathetic attempt at stippling - I need to practice the whole drawing with thread thing, draw wiggly lines on sheets of paper and all that.

Some fake roses, spirals for the roses that aren't too bad, and some leaves, the first of which was TERRIBLE (I bet you can guess which one it is!) but the second and third improved. Also some more utterly pathetic stippling on this one too.

Muslin Draft 1...

I finished stitching my esprit dress muslin together today. The first thing I learnt - sewing curves is tricky! Secondly, I need to make some alterations to the pattern before making the real thing. However, for a first try both at this dress in particular and pattern altering in general I don't think it's too bad.

The Front: there is some baggy-ness around the front of the armholes, and it's a bit tight around the hips, so I need to let that out slightly so it doesn't pull across so much.
The Back: You can't quite see it here but it gapes quite a bit at the top of the centre back, and as you can see it has gathered up quite a lot by my lower back, so I need to fix that too.
To help me with these alterations I got a book from the library to help me with called "Fast Fit: Easy Pattern Alterations for Every Figure". I'm not sure what it's like or if it's even any good, but it was the only one they had on fitting patterns, so I figured I'd give it a go.

I got a few other books while I was at the library, mostly sewing ones, but also one called "A Guide to Elegance" that caught my eye on she shelf above the sewing books, which has some very entertaining passages in it. Here's one that caught my eye earlier on the topic of shopping:

"Shopping provides that same joys in the city that hunting does in the country - in both cases the huntress is rewarded by bagging the object or animal of her dreams!"

Hexacushion

I finished off something with some of my paper pieced hexagons last night:

A little cushion cover for one of the cushions we have in the living room that was looking very grubby... emphasis on the word little. I deliberately wanted it to be slightly smaller than the cushion to make it a bit more puffy, but limitations with fabric (I used the leftovers of the navy flannelette from the back of my couch quilt) meant it ended up being quite a bit smaller than the cushion, so I hacked up the cushion to make it smaller so it fit in the cover.

Quilt Mockup...

The other night while avoiding finishing tidying my room I decided to make a quilt mock-up because after not really liking my last one I really want to love this quilt I thought I'd make a mock-up of what it might look like (based on the fabrics I currently have but with the triangles completely random):

(the picture is clickable for a bigger version)

The images of the fabrics are based on 2" squares, which would allow for about 1/4 of the sequence of the gene. 1" squares would allow for the whole sequence... so I'm still pondering sizes...

Quilt Fabrics

Today I went on a little field trip to Amitie. The aim was to go and have a look at quilt fabrics to get ideas and such for my next quilt... and yes I did look at fabrics (for quite some time as I'm so indecisive), but I also ended up buying some.

This is what I bought (20cm of each), dark and light:

I also got swatches of the following to ponder over some more:

As you can probably see, I've decided to go for greens/blues for the dark triangles, and then whites and almost whites for the light triangles.

Quilt musings...

Since finishing my quilt I've known that while I don't hate it, I definitely don't love it. I love how it's been keeping me warm, but I don't love it, and for a quilt that's going to live on my bed (when it's cold enough to need one) I want to love it.

Thus, I am definitely going to make another one, and for this one I intend on specifically buying the fabrics for it rather than mushing together what I can from what I have lying around.

To this end I've been pondering colour schemes... no idea, fabric styles... not really any idea, and designs... no idea until this evening when I came across this site. Now a genome quilt... that's right up my alley! I could even make it more personal by using the sequence of beta3 integrin, the gene around which my research focuses.

I've even made a sort of mock-up of what the gene would look like as a pattern, but with colours instead of angled triangles:


Ambitious? For me, yes, more-so if I use the whole sequence of 4894 bases rather than a segment of it. Awesome in a super-geeky kind of way? Hell yeah!