Whitniffic Whatnots

I tried telling people years ago that cross stitch was cool again... and I WAS RIGHT! Pay no attention to the random pet hairs... I'm in this crazy cross stitch group on Facebook that features non-traditional subject matter, from naughty words to feminist themes to potty humor and beyond. While I don't consider it my style to be crass or subversive, I do appreciate the modern approach to a very old craft that is normally associated with "grannies" (not that there's anything wrong with that, either). This group has introduced me to a variety of interesting new project ideas, including the concept of a temperature stitch. Essentially, each day's high and low temperature are recorded in different colored stitches to provide a really interesting visual of our climate and seasons. This whole idea has my head spinning around ways to physically represent climate change in artsy-crafty form by going through the last hundred years and stitching a huge collecti...

Did you know that as of August of 2017, Kenya has banned the use of ALL single-use plastic shopping bags? I really wish the US would follow suit; I'm appalled by the amount of single-use plastics I can't avoid bringing home from the grocery store each week, despite having been using reusable shopping bags for years. While I'm in full support of eliminating plastic bags because of their terrible effect on the environment, I also understand that banning the cheapest way for people to carry their goods home from the market can take an economic toll, especially in third-world and developing countries. I am really excited that our quilting group has teamed up with another of the church's groups, a well-known non-profit called KenyaHELP . KenyaHELP was originally established to raise money to sponsor school tuition for Kenyan youth. With the advent of the plastic bag ban, however, they've added another facet that provides durable, beautiful and hand-crafted market b...

I'm excited! I finally finished a quilt FOR MYSELF! This awesome and deceptively simple quilt was inspired by Jordan Fabrics' Cutting Corners  tutorial on YouTube. This quilt is made with Robert Kaufman batik stripes, and uses simple half square triangles to achieve this cool step effect that looks way harder than it actually is. Cut... Swap! I think the hardest part of this quilt was deciding where the finished blocks should go. I ended up making a gradient from the upper left to the lower right, so it looks like a sunset. Or fire. Or something.   I brought this quilt to the NWTC Artisan Center to quilt up on the longarm as practice before taking on the custom quilting on a very important baby quilt (that remains unfinished. Ugh.). I struggled a bit with it, and I'm really disappointed in myself if I'm being honest. I didn't realize that it is best to wash batik fabrics before quilting them, since the wax residue and sizing causes issues wit...