Quilting AND Knitting Again!

Oh my goodness...I've moved many, many times in my life.  But our short, local move that started one week before school started and extended three weeks into the start of school was TOUGH!  And, totally worth it.

I spent the week after we closed on our first home painting rooms and installing shelving.  Five fully painted rooms later, we started building IKEA wardrobes, then shortly thereafter the furniture was moved in.  We did everything except for major furniture ourselves--and in short, my husband is my hero...he did so much of the heavy lifting while I was packing, unpacking, or painting.

Meanwhile, I started my second year teaching at the Sci and Tech Governor's School where I teach Biology.  I may have set myself up with too ambitious a plan for the year--I've decided to "flip" the classroom by creating online lessons that are annotated with voice recordings so that we can do more Q&A, activities, and review in class.  Our pace is ridiculous since I basically am teaching AP Bio and Research/Stats to high school freshmen!...and they are awesome...and we all work really, really hard--which generally leads to AMAZING results.

All that is to say that I haven't really been generating a whole lot of crafty things lately.

During the first few weeks of school I did try to finish up my "Entropy" sign for my desk.  I picked it up one morning before work--and boy, did I show how LONG it had been since I quilted.  I needed to add a few inches to the binding, so I cut and ironed one more bias strip and sewed it on--at a 90 degree angle.  I didn't even rip the stitches...just cut off the seam and tried again to remember how to attach strips together so that they form a straight line.   I should've stopped there.

I started decorative stitches along the seams to attach the binding and reached the point where the binding needed to be joined.  And I joined it twisted!

That was it for me for the day, although I'm happy to report I did finish it later that week.  My students love it--nerds that we all are, they love to knock one corner down so that it hangs crooked (entropy is the law that says the world descends into random chaos, after all).

The whole episode also gave my mom and I something to laugh hysterically at over the phone since I used FaceTime to show her my sad, twisted binding.

After a few really LONG, hard weeks I've reached some sort of equilibrium.  During their first test I knit to my heart's content (I can look up while knitting in the round--allowing both test monitoring and sock/sweater knitting!)  I got most of the foot of this sock done and reached a point on what felt like an ENDLESS sweater where I could put the stitches on scrap yarn for the sleeves.  I'm almost ready for waist decreases because I can also knit and read technical articles on my Kindle app.  Life for me is GOOD when I can both knit and read :)

Yesterday was my first "free" day in a long time.  So I pulled out the charm packs of Aspen Frost by Moda and started setting up for the Lil Twister tool by sewing squares together.  Have you used the Twister tool line?  So much shrinkage!  But so cute.

The fabric scraps are also quite extensive.  Ideas for dealing with bias scraps anyone?

The pattern is Stocking Sweet Stocking by Bean Counter Quilts.

Now I'm back to making a lesson on macromolecules.