After all that paper yesterday, I came home and had to have some HOF (hands on fabric) time. ITMan and I each received a slick new iPod Touch as a late Christmas present. We got them free because I took some programming classes in November and December. Great freebies! Not that we needed new iPods, but we do love our techie gizmos…

So now comes the inevitable search for just the right cases for the things. I’ve really never had cases for my other iPods, because I generally don’t take them out of the house. I connect them to players and speaker systems just to make it easier to have more music at my fingertips in whatever room I’m in without burning cd’s constantly. ITMan has a case for his iPod Video from DLO, but it’s really trash, since the case itself put scratches and permanent marks on the face of the iPod after long term use. Isn’t that what cases are supposed to prevent? Obviously, we won’t be buying cases from them again.

When I decided I had to have some sort of case for my newer iPod nano that I got last Christmas, I made a little quilted sleeve from fabric and thin batting. I just wanted something to protect it when I sling it into my purse on trips or something, and this way, there’s nothing inside the case to scratch the finish on the iPod. Perfect. So when ITMan and I were contemplating cases for the iTouch, he mentioned that some sort of a sleeve would be all that was really needed, so I whipped up two cases with that in mind:

Soft on the inside, cool looking on the outside. I was going to say “pretty,” but ITMan probably doesn’t do “pretty.” He did spend quite a bit of time picking out his own fabric for his case though, finally settling on the red silk dupioni. The purple silk dupioni was a close second, but in the end he liked the way the red silk shimmered. I chose a couple of coordinating cotton fat quarters for mine, and made the front from one fabric and the back (which also acts as the flap to enclose the iTouch with a bit of Velcro) out of the other.

I left the seam allowances on the outside and used the serger to finish, because I didn’t want the seams on the inside causing lumpy bulk. There’s nothing on the inside but batting, and I think it was Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 Black, or maybe it was Dream Cotton in black. Either way, it’s the perfect thickness and very soft and didn’t cause any problems with the machine when I quilted it to the top fabric with no backing.

Now I’m looking at mine and thinking how cool it would be to add some embellishments, like beads, embroidery, crystals, buttons, etc., etc.! Or I could make another and embroider and embellish before assembly. Hmmm, I could get totally sidetracked making these. It would be like making fabric postcards, but making something useful (I’ve never done the postcard thing. What do you do with them besides send them away to someone else, and then what do they do with them??) I’m not sure I have time to get involved in making more of these, but I might not be able to resist this temptation…

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Creativity takes many forms around here, and it’s not always quilting. Today LittleOne and I spent most of the day scrapbooking and making cards at the Gussy Goose. Beside the two pages for her scrapbook featuring some pictures from Girl Scout Camp, she made these cards so that she could write thank you notes to family for Christmas gifts:

I made some of my own, with some bits of papers and lace I already had, and the only piece of really cool floral paisley paper with glitter that the store had left:

I could have made more (I should hope, since we were there for five+ hours!) but I did help LittleOne a bit with her cards, and I’ve also come to a conclusion about this scrapbooking/cardmaking thing: It’s just about the same as quilting in a certain way, when it gets right down to it. Quilters have huge stashes of fabric and other supplies at home (at least all the ones I know anyway), and I have a feeling scrappers are the same with their papers.

I’ve never been able to walk into any quilt shop and purchase all the fabrics for a quilt all at once, because the shops never have all the fabrics I need all at the same time. Whether this is because I’ve never lived anywhere that had a quilt shop that constantly carried an enormous number of bolts of fabric (thinking of 7,000 to 10,000 bolts as enormous here), or whether it’s just because Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been feeling a bit overloaded and distracted lately, with this nagging, but just out of reach feeling that I’m not quite doing what I should be or really want to be doing. Sometimes it’s easy to get completely sidetracked by minutiae that in the scheme of things means (or will mean) absolutely nothing, and just serves to take attention from the real goals.

I received two quilting magazines in Wednesday’s mail, the final 2007 issue of $100,000 Quilting Challenge, and the January issue of American Quilter. As a perfect example of how distracted and distanced from quilting I’ve let myself become, I put those two magazines aside to read “later.” Later could have been next week or next month, which is sad, considering how good most things quilting related are for my mental state.

After a rather bad day Thursday that started with waking up to a huge, borderline migraine headache and a critical, unconstructive, snotty email from someone who has absolutely no right to be so, I decided that what I really needed to do to destress for a bit was quilt. Just quilt, and ignore the rest, because it’ll either go away without intervention and/or thought on my part, or it’ll all still be there when I get back to it.

So I shoved everything else on the back burner and quilted The Misery Quilt for a good chunk of time on Thursday evening. Friday I grabbed those two quilting mags that I’d set aside and flipped through while I ate my lunch, and finally realized that I’ve been spending too much time on stupid things that I shouldn’t even need to care about, and not enough time quilting and working toward my goals: making that prizewinning quilt, growing in my art, and nurturing my creative side. Read the rest of this entry »

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