A Few Pillows

It’s been awhile, guys, but I’ve been crafting away! Here are a few of the things I’ve been working on. I made a new SHIELD pillow (round and very fluffy) in honor of Season 3 (which, holy crap, guys, holy crap, Season 3). I tried to take just the circle bits of an orange peel and make a 20″ circle out of that, but the first time I tried it it was like 18″. I re-did it, but then I had a random giant orange peel. The office manager at work has been after me for months to make her an Alabama pillow and that seemed like a perfect use of both my orphan orange peel and the extra bits of dead body pillow that I had lying around. Mostly, check out those eagle claws! Applique booooss.

Now, of course, I’ve got three pillow requests in from coworkers and have insisted on charging for materials, if not labor. I don’t like these people enough to keep doing crafts for them!

Trust Cap: Completed!!

It took six months and more hours of actual work than I’d care to count, but my Trust Cap quilt is done! I’m super-proud of it. I’ve spent the past week working on it from the time I got off work until the wee hours of the morning, but it’s been worth it.

And now, to wrap up in it like a burrito and get down to my Agents of SHIELD re-watch.

Here are some detail shots. Sorry about the lighting—my apartment is not the best on sunlight. There are a lot more photos from various states of completion in the project tag.

Giant Fluffy Cap Shield

So, my chair at work is possessed by Satan. Or a poltergeist. Or something. It is one of the most uncomfortable chairs I’ve ever had to sit in for 8 hours straight. The “ergonomic” shape is some kind of torture device disguised as a chair, and the arms are just straight up hard metal with no kind of covering. I squirm a lot. I don’t sit in a chair like a normal human being. This situation was untenable. I made the Dodgers pillow to try and fix some of that, and my Marvel logo TV Hugger has ended up as my “save my wrist from irreversible carpal tunnel damage” desk pillow. But that damn chair was still trying to murder me. I needed something giant, fluffy, and not designated for my TV emotions. That is, I needed something new.

I loved the wheel pattern I made for Cap’s shield in my Trust Cap quilt so I figured I’d give a round pillow a try. Behold, Cap’s shield! Saving my body from a slow death one fluffy hour at a time. Sidenote: my work chair is now 100% covered in pillows. I also got the star way better on this one than on the one from Trust Cap. Live and learn.

Trust Cap: You Guys, It’s Quilting Time

Soooo, if you spend literally 12 straight hours embroidering with six strands of embroidery floss on fabric, when you wake up the next morning your hands will be swollen and you’ll feel like you’ve done weight-lifting reps. Fun times! Not recommended. The problem is when I get focused on something I don’t quit until it’s done and I really wanted this done. So I present to you, not only the embroidered fine print, but the completed top and the whole basted quilt sandwich. Next up, hand quilting! Perhaps when my hands are a normal size again.

Also, re: the embroidery, the original poster had the whole fine print line centered, but I centered the SHIELD logo instead. Because we all know I how I feel about SHIELD. I thought centering it would make it more balanced.

Done deal!

I was like “hey I’m almost done!” And then I realized I had to embroider the entire SHIELD official name. Not so “almost.”

The other half.

Basted and ready!

Trust Cap: Top of Top Done!

First! My friends! I have finally acquired a full-time position! I start in three weeks! Ah! Tomorrow I’m driving down (four hours) to apartment hunt and then driving back (another four hours.) Fun stuff! All the apartments are expensive! At this point I’m just glad to fiiinally have a job!

So, basically, that kicked my ass into gear on my various WiPs. Working on this, I split it into the top square with the Cap graphic and the bottom rectangle with the propaganda words. Today I finished appliqueing the flying geese white lines with the stars, then I appliqued Cap down and finally the shield (which I had pinned on there the entire time to use as a reference point, and the pins kept stabbing me.) Here’s my lovely man with all the washable marker still on his face. I have since thrown it in the washing machine on super-ultra-gentle-handwash and all the mess came off without reducing all my hard work to a pile of string. Score! (Why do my quilts always come out so lumpy. Luckily, that tends to “quilt out” as they say.) I also embroidered on his facial features and the lines of his fingers sometime last week.

Then I cut out the letters for the bottom bit and got their placement right. For this I pretty much just up-sized the bottom part of the actual graphic, printed it off, cut out the paper letters, and traced them onto my white fabric. I contemplated making the big letters some kind of quilt motif but I’ve pretty much done them all (seriously) and the white-on-white is fine. Look how gorgeous, agh! I really really love this poster (obviously), and the Cap part was cool to see come together, but it didn’t strike me just how much I love this thing until I got the letters pinned on. The whole reason this project exists in the first place is because (I wanted this poster and it’s been sold out for three years) I sometimesfrequently get overcome with how much I love Marvel/the MCU/Captain America and making things feels like a productive outlet for all that affection. This one has the added bonus of being able to wrap around my body like a cocoon. (I shudder to think what would happen if I got my hands on a FitzSimmons propaganda poster. Lawd. And trust me, my own brain is working on it as we speak. Science! Adventure! Spies!)

I’ll update you on my travels! I’m always mildly convinced I’m going to die on the highway on long trips so here’s hoping that a.) I live long enough to complete this thing, b.) I live long enough to watch Agents of SHIELD on Tuesday, c.) I live long enough to use that Thursday night ticket I bought for Avengers: Age of Ultron, and d.) I find an apartment. Busy week!

Jewelry: FitzSimmons Bracelet Experiment (Yes, that FitzSimmons)

You ever get weird ideas for projects at random times and then compulsively come back to them for weeks until you finally just do them so they leave you alone? I have (as previously mentioned in great detail) a very large love for Agents of SHIELD. My particular favorites were instantaneously FitzSimmons way the hell back at the beginning of this roller coaster ride when it was actually awful. They’re the whole reason I stuck around. Without writing you the dissertation length explanation, I have a thing for both scientist/savvy/researchy characters and for every single facet of their relationship with each other. If I have a favorite quirk, trope, or sore spot they make sure they stick their fingers right into it. The only characters I’ve ever loved as much as Fitz and Simmons are Dean Winchester, Arya Stark, and Buffy Summers, who are in a whole different category in my personal pantheon.

Please note it is astonishingly hard to take a picture of your own dominant hand with a dSLR.

For some reason I wanted to proclaim this love very loudly on my body. I remembered those bent wire word jewelry tutorials (my favorite was a ring that said, simply, “fuck”) and something in my brain said this was necessary. And then the idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

So, today, I took a coupon, went out and bought some 18 gauge wire, and came back to experiment. About an hour, one short length of mutilated wire, a lot of scotch taped pliers, and a rather sore thumb later, this is my lovely result. Not as permanent as a tattoo. Slightly elegant while still being inexcusably nerdy. Sounds right. I didn’t have any chain or anything so I just cut a second length of wire and made a loop on each end to hook into the ends of the cursive. I also might dot Simmons’ “i” with a bead, but I haven’t decided yet.

(I had fully intended to practice a little more on the word “fuck” but the “f” I made was so pretty I just went for it. I’ve got plenty of wire for cuss words later.)

UPDATE: Okay, I’ve been wearing this for about ten minutes and I feel like it’s channeled my otherwise overwhelming affection for and anticipation of Agents of SHIELD into something tangible. This was a good idea. Even if it does mean I’ll have to figure out some way to explain it without terrifying people.

ETA: My mother (who should not follow this blog and is henceforth expelled) has gotten onto me about Simmons’s “m’s” not having a line in front. All I can say is: my fingers were sad and didn’t want to do the extra hard bends in the wire, and I can’t “fix” it now so *shrug.* Looks fine to me.

ETA Again: She angered me. Revised with all the extra bumps, and my fingers will be bruised tomorrow:

Trust Cap: And Now For the Fun Stuff

Y’all, today was so chocked full of crafts that I’m not actually sure how I’m upright. For one thing: in forcing the house to watch Agents of SHIELD my rewatch started season 2 today. Season 2 of Agents of SHIELD will be my actual downfall. I flip shit over it every time I watch it, and at this point I’ve seen it so many times (the eps that exist so far, anyway) I have literally lost count. So, to channel that energy into something but to also let me watch every single second, I pulled out my current oldest knitting WiP and frantically seed stitched on pullover sleeves. While, I might add, hugging the bejesus out of my SHIELD pillow (as is its function) which, let me tell you, knitting and stress-hugging at the same time is a feat in and of itself.

When we hit the daily episode quota (I managed to get it up to five episodes, ahem), I re-focused all that manic, obsessive, addicted energy into working on my Trust Cap quilt. I got all the curved seams in my drunkard’s path blocks sewn, now I just need to sew the squares together. Some of them are really great, and some of them are pinched and puckered all to hell. Well, you’ve gotta learn the hard stuff sometime!

Since AoS makes me freak out (ask my former roommate. or my friends. or anyone, really; ask anyone) I still wasn’t rid of all that mania so I printed and cut out all the applique templates for the huge Captain America that goes on this sucker. The pieces are so big that EQ7 crashed every single time I tried to modify the printout or move the bits around, so it ended up being 33 pages worth of very poorly arranged templates. Yeesh! I taped them all together, cut them up, and this is what I got.

After that, it was so close to being something that I couldn’t help myself and had to cut out the big bright blue piece. And a few more besides. I still need to make the eight-pointed stars for the darker blue sections, but this is what it looks like laid out so far (ignoring the fact that Cap’s chin is jutting like Gaston in this layout.)

When I trimmed off the excess on the bottom left, I sewed it under the block next to it so it would cover the whole template and so I didn’t have to make any extra blocks.

This might shape up into something rad! As my mother said this afternoon: “I know what you’re doing. You Jim Shore‘d Cap. I’ve never seen anyone do an actual Jim Shore quilt before.” I mean if you’re gonna make a quilt go all out and make it a quilt, you know?

Oh, another fun thing I have to do: I need to tea-dye some of the peach skin tone color so that it’s like one shade darker for shadows. I had some “shadow” fabric but it was so intense it looked like Band-Aids were stuck on his face.

Trust Cap: A Shield In Progress

I still need to applique the rings to the center, but check it out. This officially eclipses my SHIELD pillow as the coolest thing I’ve ever made and it’s just a part of my quilt. Appliqueing it together sounds like a job for when I force the house to continue with Agents of SHIELD tomorrow, y/n?

I had to design the wheel part of this in EQ7 myself, and then I had a major math disaster regarding the center star. I worked out the math perfectly (I thought) but it was about two inches too big when I got the wheel done! So I had to basically guess what the proper size of the block should be to get the correct size star. (The original block in EQ7 is square, with the star at a weird angle in the center and not touching any edges. You try figuring out how to measure the damn thing.) I went through five different sizes before I got to this! And it’s still a bit small, but it looks fine so I’m over it. I had sewn the star all nice first thing this morning, and then I had to pull it out, trim down the pieces, and sew it again this evening!

Next up: the drunkard’s path and eight-pointed stars to cut the other applique pieces out of. This is either going to be the coolest thing in existence or a complete disaster. We’ll see.

Paper Piecing Pattern: Strategic Scientific Reserve (aka: I Love Peggy Carter)

All right, my lovelies! I’ve prepared, for your enjoyment (or despair, we shall see) the SSR paper piecing pattern I concocted a few weeks ago. This PDF is scaled to make a 10″ block, so I would like to note that I made a 20″ block while testing this and at 10″ some of the pieces can get tiny. Also, this is the modified version of my original tester. I fixed a bit on the left wing that bothered me, and I re-did the piece grouping on the head. In theory, this should all work but I have not personally tested this version. So if you find any issues please let me know!

Please make sure to set “Page Scaling” in Adobe Reader to “None” when printing! This will likely cut off the page numbers but shouldn’t cut off anything else. (I couldn’t get this right for some reason.)

You can download the PDF here!

This is what the tester of my first version looked like, if you’re curious:And I quilted on the “Strategic Scientific Reserve” words later:Best huggy pillow ever, by the by.

TV Huggers: Literally the Last One, I Swear

I planned to make Liljabs Marvel logo as a travel-sized TV Hugger, but I didn’t plan to do it today! Something in my brain was nagging me that if I just sewed the damn thing, I could mark this project on my crafts spreadsheet as completed. So here it is. (Don’t judge. I know you all have crafts spreadsheets too.)

Literally the last one, I swear. I have other crap I need to do.The quilting is an Avengers logo, Fantastic Four logo, and X-Men logo with spider webs in the background. It looks really cool, but it’s also so subtle that unless you’re looking for it you lose it entirely. Ah well, can’t win ’em all.

I stuffed the pillow so much that I could probably beat someone to death with it. I used the leftover pillow bits from my previous recycling adventure. As a hugger, it’s not nearly as satisfying as the big pillows, but it would get the job done if necessary. As an accent for the “what have you done to your bed, Dana??” tableau it’s pretty cool.This project is officially done. I will now shut up about it.