Yo-yo assembly line

On these colder days I spend more time inside the house doing handwork than out in the studio sewing on my machine. Debbie Babin heads a Yahoo group, Studio Quilts-Goldilocks and Friends, and on there I mentioned an idea for making Christmas ornaments out of my stash of yo-yos (why am I making these things?), and she suggested a yo-yo ornament swap. Just what I need to do when I have all these other design ideas in my head, but I am interested, nevertheless. Now, of course, none of my previously made yo-yos are holidayish, so I am making more yo-yos with Christmas fabric.

I use two different sizes of the Clover Yo-Yo Makers (no affilation, etc.), and I find that, over all, they are faster for me than using a cardboard template, though the stitching step is slower, because you can't weave your needle in and out of the fabric while it's in the Maker. It's just needle-in-pull and needle-out-pull, or needle-down-pull and needle-up-pull, over and over. I suppose one could use the Maker to cut the circles, and since the two plastic layers mark a slight fold around the edge of the fabric, the fold could be finger pressed while stitching or iron pressed before stitching. I'll have to experiment. Laziness is the mother of efficiency.

Here are the steps I've been following for making a pile of yo-yos relatively quickly:

1. Followed Yo-yo Maker directions for making the circle.
2. Threaded a dozen needles and stitched a pile of yo-yos, keeping the needle with each yo-yo, because I still have to gather and knot the threads after pressing.
3. Pressed all the yo-yos flat (makes gathering easier). I also noticed that using thinner fabrics makes the gathering easier. I like to press them all at once, so as not to have the iron on all the time.
4. Gathered them, re-knotted the threads on the needles for the next set of yo-yos. After awhile, if your thread length has been on the long side, the thread starts unwinding its twist or may start knotting. At that point I discard it and re-thread the needle. Slightly stronger thread than usual is a good idea.
   

Now I've got to do some experimentation for making the ornaments. My plan is to attach 2 yo-yos to each other, back to back, somewhere along the line embellishing them with beads, etc.
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Fiber postcard exchange

Making and sending a fiber postcard seemed like a fun challenge, especially after seeing the box of dozens of fabulous fiber postcards my friend Marylee has collected in all the exchanges she's done. However, I begin to wonder if exchanging fiber postcards is fad that's already had it's day, since I've had such a hard time finding any group that's doing it. Without any confidence at all, since I've never made a fiber postcard before, I forged ahead and created two cards, one to trade and one to keep. This trade is one-on-one, so I'll send out the above -- to South Africa, as it turns out -- and I'll eventually get one back.

I made inchies (tiny quiltlets -- what size, do you think? You're absolutely correct!) with the scraps. I'm not sure what to do with inchies, but I suppose they can become embellishments and danglies on anything one might want to decorate.
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Great Grandma's block, round 5

Two more rounds to go!

With each month's revelation by International Friendship Quilters of the block to be added to one's quilt (one-person round robin), I've jumped right into the project and finished in a day or two. No such success this time. Fruiting, jamming, and pie-ing intervened, and then the challenges of how to do this Friendship Star round slowed me down.

I really, really, really didn't want to do the 40 star blocks I eventually ended up constructing. Repetitive measuring and cutting is just too tedious for me, and I greatly admire anyone who can make an entire quilt with little carefully-measured and cut pieces. My first idea was to make the blocks bigger, but checking it out with Photoshop fiddling revealed that they would be out of proportion with what I had already done (the giant pink flying geese blocks notwithstanding).

I spent a lot of time calculating and measuring, then forgot that the long side could not be evenly divided for the blocks, and decided to take out a red star on each side and add black spacers near the yellow stars. I cut my very last piece of black hand-dyed fabric too narrow, so that idea was kaput. I set the project aside and scoured my stove top, then was inspired to add gray spacers on both sides of the red star (much better than my first idea). All of this involved so much sewing and ripping out that I began to wonder if the fabric would survive.

I'm not sure I like that there are two red stars on the ends and one red star on the sides, even though part of my intent with this quilt is to make it not quite mirror-image. The single red star looks better than two, and if I add gray spacers on both sides of a single red star on the ends, it would improve the situation, and not be too difficult to do (after all, I spent much time yesterday picking out stitching and fixing attempts I didn't like). However, I no longer have enough of the darker gray fabric I used for spacers on the sides, so would have to use lighter gray spacers (same color as red star background) for the ends than I used on the sides.

One friend said, "Why don't you just dye more fabric?" Because it likely wouldn't turn out the same, for one thing. That's what dye lots are all about, and since I dyed these fabrics with Color by Accident procedures, nothing is exactly precise, and therefore not precisely repeatable.

So, should I leave it as it is, or change the ends from two red stars to single red stars and matching light gray spacers? Decisions, decisions...

Off to make fiber art postcards.
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