Weekend of Fun Projects

It’s Sunday and this weekend I decided to take a break from the usual and dig into several materials I’ve wanted to play with for awhile. It started on Saturday morning when I plopped down in my rocking chair and spun art yarn for the first time all summer:

Two spools of gorgeous blue became one spool (around 34 yards) of super chunky art yarn:

It’s so funny how people react to art yarn. I showed off my creation to both Josh and my Father-in-law and both were kind of like “Hmm…What is that? What in the world are you going to do with it?”

I’m planning to make a lot more of this and then knit it up into this Super Bulky Winter Vest. It’s really neat to be able to make the yarn and then knit it up into a garment. Later this fall I plan to shoot a video on spinning art yarn to use as embellishments for a quilt so this was good practice and I learned a lot about spinning weird stuff on my espinner.

Getting on the spinning wheel reminded me of the lathe I’ve had out in the barn for more than a year. Last week I set up the dust collector so I finally felt confident that everything was set up and ready to go.

I realized in the intervening week that the main reason I wasn’t trying out this new craft wasn’t for lack of tools or correct setup, but a lack of confidence. I was afraid of messing something up or getting hurt.

After recognizing the fears holding me back, I sent myself out to the barn and declared it an open practice session. I ended up turning this piece of cherry:

I’m not really sure what it is…I might turn it into a crochet hook or spindle. In any case, it could also be a handy vampire stake. Ha!

While I was out in the barn, I noticed the two packs of stepping stone mix I picked up way back in May. That’s a project I definitely wanted done before the end of the summer so James and I rolled up our sleeves and got dirty making two stepping stones.

This one had set up quite a bit before we got to it, but we managed to get a solid impression of James’s hand and foot. His 6 year old self will be immortalized forever! Then we followed up with the cats:

My old cat Shy Guy probably won’t be around for much longer so I’m really happy we made this. He wasn’t super happy with me, but an extra scoop of food sorted out his bad attitude.

Back inside this morning, I tackled several videos and quilted a good bit on Duchess Reigns. Then it was time to play! James was wanting an adventure too so I pulled out bottles of a new product I ran across this week called deColourant.

Basically from the bottle and website, this is a non-toxic paint that when heat set removes the color of the fabric and replaces it with the color of the paint. I was a bit skeptical about using it with James, after all the only decolorant I knew of before was bleach, and that’s certainly not something we play with.

To my delight, deColourant turns out to be some pretty cool stuff! It looks and feels just like paint, and it smells slightly citrusy. James and I got started with some simple shapes cut out with the Accu Quilt Go in freezer paper and ironed onto black layer cake squares:

I set up James to paint the negative space inside the bats while I filled up the outer space. After painting, we left the blocks to dry:

Then we sort of got carried away! I kept cutting more freezer paper to make temporary stencils and James would paint for a bit, then wash hands, run off to play, then come back wanting to paint some more.

We ended up with 9 blocks:

I’m looking forward to pressing these after dinner to see how the deColourant works! I’m hoping this will be a nice start to a fall / Halloween themed quilt!

Whew! It’s been quite a weekend! I’m looking forward to seeing how all these projects pan out, but right now I’m just so happy to be able to play with so many cool things in one weekend.

Let’s go quilt!

Leah Day