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Constellation Quilt

May 25, 2016/15 Comments/in Home Decor /by Jasika Nicole

I saw the pattern for this quilt on Cashmerette’s instagram last year and immediately wanted to know more. I looked up the company that makes the quilt patterns, Haptic Labs, and saw that they have lots of different designs, from maps of neighborhoods and cities to bodies of water to constellations in the sky. I loved the Brooklyn map design a lot, but I don’t live there anymore so it seemed weird for me to make it while living in Los Angeles (if I ever live there again, you better believe I’m gonna be snatching up this pattern with the quickness). Months passed and I forgot about the quilt until Christmas, when I opened one of my gifts from Claire and found a constellation lap quilt pattern! I didn’t remember even telling her about the quilt, but apparently I did, and she didn’t forget! Good job, Claire!

The quilt pattern kits are equipped with a relatively vague instruction sheet (totally fine for someone familiar with quilting and embroidery, but I wouldn’t suggest this pattern to a complete beginner) and a quilt sized piece of durable paper with the quilt design printed on it that you use to guide your embroidery stitches. Once you have your materials together and have layered your batting, quilt top and quilt back together, you safety pin all the layers with the printed paper on top. Then, starting from the center of the quilt, you use embroidery floss and quilting thread to stitch over the design on the paper. Once a section is done, you very carefully tear away the paper to expose the fabric and stitching underneath. The paper is strong to hold up to all the handling that must be done, which unfortunately means you have to work pretty hard to tear the paper off of the quilt without destroying your embroidery. The pattern maker suggests stitching very taught so that you don’t run the risk of loosening up or your stitches when you pull the paper away. The overall process was simple and methodical once I got my embroidery mojo back. The stitching was made much easier with an embroidery hoop, and although it took time to unclasp the hoop and move it to the next section every 8 inches, it definitely saved me a lot of time, since free-stitching onto a project as big as this can get a little unwieldy.

Before starting the quilt, I looked for inspiration online from others who had already completed the project, and the overwhelming majority were made with white thread on a deep blue-hued quilt top to create contrast and emulate the night sky. They were beautiful, but our home decor doesn’t have a lot of dark colors, and I prefer pastels anyways. I took a risk and went way against the standard, choosing a natural organic cotton for my quilt top and a medium-tinted aqua cotton for the back. For thread, I thought it would be cool to do the stars of the Milky Way (which show up as a smattering of french knots on the quilt itself) in yellow and the actual constellations in pink. Initially I wanted the constellations to look like an ombre gradation, so I chose a few different colors of pink floss and divided the design into three segments. I don’t think the end result reads strongly as ombre but I still love the way the colors look together- the whiteness of the fabric allows all the embroidery colors on top to pop, and the darker colored quilting thread I used grounds everything visually.

When I first started the quilt I did not plan on embroidering the names of the constellations (none of the quilts I saw online labeled them, at least not for this particular design), and I thought that was so that the quilt would be usable on both the front and back- obviously backwards writing on the underside would make it look kind of weird. But that is NOT the case. I tried so hard to keep my embroidery stitches sharp and clean and accurate so that the back would look as good as the front, but after about an hour of meticulous stitching, I realized it was either an impossible feat or simply something that was not in my wheelhouse. I had never before embroidered something that was as clean on the front side as it was on the back, but for some reason I thought that since this was a quilt with an underside that would be seen, it was possible to make the stitches look good on both sides. Once I gave in and just concentrated on making the top look beautiful, the stitching went a lot faster and I realized that I did indeed want to include the names of the constellations. I am so glad that I did! I love how the quilt looks a little like a map of the night sky with the names on it, and I am hoping that eventually I will become a bit more familiar with identifying them in the wild. As for the back of the quilt, it is of course imperfect, but it’s got it’s own unique beauty going for it, in the way that the insides of things look weird and unique and ambiguous. I like it a lot more than I thought I would.

I have made a lot of quilts in the past several years, but this is the first one I have made using a pattern, and although it certainly wasn’t the typical quilt pattern I assumed I would be working with, I’m glad this was my introduction.

I could not be happier with the end result, and I love that I have some experience with hand quilting now. For the longest time I have wanted to make a large quilt for our bed, but I have only made quilts by machine that were smaller in size, so I was stumped as to how I would stuff an entire queen sized blanket under the standard sized arm of my machine. This is slightly embarrassing to write (cover your eyes, seasoned Hand Quilters!), but it honestly never even occurred to me that I could stitch the whole quilt by hand. It would take a lot of time, for sure, but probably no more than the 4-ish months that it took to complete this constellation quilt, and this required much more intricate handiwork than a simple running stitch. So, thanks to this beautiful little pattern, I am now inspired to try(curious) my hand at something even bigger!

(and PS thank you Claire for the beautiful pictures!)

Design*Sponge Feature!

September 28, 2015/0 Comments/in DIY, Home Decor /by Jasika Nicole

An Actor and an Analysts Home- Design*Sponge

I feel REALLY lucky to have found my way into the Design*Sponge circle in the past few months. I am thrilled to announce that I will be in Grace Bonney’s new book In The Company of Women, coming out in Fall 2016. The book is comprised of interviews with a diverse group of women who are photographed in their “workspaces”, whether on sets, in lecture rooms or in offices. Grace and her team photographed me both in my craft room and in my garage, where I do most of my furniture and upholstery work (and also a lot of my shoe making since the garage offers more ventilation for toxic cement glue fumes). I wore my mint green ladybug dress since it was my most recent completed sewing project, and I had SUCH a great time; Grace is funny and thoughtful, she has a great laugh and she is and easy to be around- one of those people that makes you immediately feel comfortable no matter where you are or what you’re doing. I felt like I could hang out with her for hours. I cannot wait til the book comes out (I would be purchasing this thing even if I wasn’t in it- the caliber of women Grace interviews is really fantastic!) and I will definitely share it here on the blog when it’s ready for pre-order.

In the meantime, I am also happy to share (even though I am like a week late- sorry!) a tour of our home on the Design*Sponge website: An Actor and an Anaylist’s Home. It was a lot of work putting this together because my friends and I were filming an indie feature (#SuicideKale) at our house at the same time we were trying to keep everything super clean and tidy for the photos. FYI I do not recommend doing two projects like this at the same time. BUT! The photos came out great thanks to Claire and I am so pleased with the lovely feature that D*S put together! Design*Sponge has long been a source of inspiration for me, particularly when I was bored and rained-in for 4 years in Vancouver, living in a furnished home and obsessing over all the fun DIY projects I would tackle when we finally moved back to the states and lived in our own place. Having our home featured on such an incredible site is basically a dream come true for me, and I am very grateful to D*S for the opportunity!

Quilting! Inspired by Quilting!

September 19, 2015/4 Comments/in DIY, Sewing /by Jasika Nicole

Like most of my creative endeavors, quilting is not something that I officially learned how to do. I was living in Vancouver and feeling miserable and bored because of the endless rain when somehow or another Claire and I stumbled upon a little fabric shop called Spool of Thread. It was bright and warm inside, the staff was friendly, and they had bolts and bolts of the cheeriest, prettiest fabric ever. At the time, the bulk of their fabric was quilting cotton (though I think they might have expanded their inventory to include more apparel fabric in the past few years) and just standing in the store felt inspiring. One of my co-stars and his wife were expecting their second child during our production, so I thought that this would be a good excuse to try my hand at quilt making. I looked online for patterns and found some remarkably cool projects, but they all seemed too complicated for what I was interested in doing. I appreciate ambitious designs, but I was more interested in the simpler quilts that had less pieces and less fussiness about them (or maybe I was just lazy and wasn’t interested in following those perplexing patterns). Whatever my reasoning, I figured that I only needed one important piece of information- what a quilt is made of. That was easy to figure out online: a quilt is one layer of batting sandwiched between two layers of fabric, with one of those fabric layers usually comprised of patch worked fabric. And the “quilting” action referred to sewing those three layers together, either by hand or by machine, using a variety of different methods and machine feet.

Education= COMPLETE.

I headed back to Spool of Thread and bought small yardages of several floral prints, all in the same color family with a (surprise!) vintage aesthetic. I also bought my first rotary cutter and a small self-healing cutting mat cut because I read somewhere that those were helpful items to have for a quilter. I laid out all my fabric on the dining room table of our rented house and just started cutting out large rectangles and squares of fabric. I had drawn a very basic template of the design for the fabric pieces, and when I was happy with it, I sewed it all together. Easy peasy!

I was intrigued by the freehand sewing feet that some quilters used to achieve the pretty curvy flowy quilted look on their blankets, so I bought one and I LOVED IT! I was really sore after my stints of quilting with that foot because you have to grip the blanket with both hands firmly and guide it through the machine in whatever swirly pattern you are creating, but it was so worth it- the final look was so professional and the swirls I created looked just like my lines of drawing.

The final step of my quilt making process involved sewing bias tape onto the edges, and I learned from the Colette sewing book that you could make your own bias tape with a special bias tape making tool and a little bit of regular fabric. So I went out and bought it (this tool has become one of my absolute favorite sewing tools) and made yards and yards of my own bias tape, and then I sewed it onto the edges of the quilt. My bias tape application was REALLY raggedy at the time- I have since learned of a much cleaner, smoother way to sew bias tape which involves machine stitching it on one side and hand stitching it on the other- and I am not a perfectionist, so I don’t mind barely noticeable mistakes in my makes.

hand sewing bias tape to second side of quilt.

I was so amazed with the look of the final quilt that I wanted to keep it for myself (true sign of a great gift, no?) and my very next project was a quilt for us to keep.

In the years since, I have made several quilts as gifts for our friends having babies, and the quality has gotten better with each one. My designs have gotten more ambitious, too, although I still don’t follow patterns. I no longer draw out quilt designs beforehand, either- now I just choose arbitrary measurements for my squares/rectangles, cut out lots and lots of pieces in those sizes, and then start laying them out together in a pattern that looks good to me, adding more fabric if needed as I go. It probably takes longer than knowing exactly how many blocks I will need to cut from the beginning, but it also feels like an adventure, waiting to see how the piece will unfold as I add each piece of fabric.

Looking back, there were definitely some weird choices I made in the construction of my first few quilts because I didn’t know any better, but none of them were “mistakes” per se; as long as your finished item functions as intended, there is no such thing as a mistake, right? I have learned over the years to make smarter quilting decisions, like using 1/4″ seam allowance instead of 5/8″. As mentioned, my bias tape application has evolved considerably, and I have also played around with my quilting technique; once I used a regular straight stitch to sew lines straight across a blanket in small increments, and it gave it this stiff, mat-like quality that I really liked.

Most recently I used the “handquilt stitch” function on my Bernina to give my brother’s new baby’s quilt some old-school dimension, and it came out beautifully. To work that stitch you have to play around with the tension a bit so that the bobbin thread (which is the color that you will see on the blanket) comes through to the other side, but the clear thread that you thread through the machine is essentially invisible on the top of the quilt. It’s a little tricky because the tension has to be really tight which ends up breaking your thread a lot, so it’s time consuming, but it is still faster than free hand quilting and certainly requires a lot less muscle.

When I first learned to sew I always thought that quilting was a boring project to take on- you don’t get to wear it, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of creativity involved in it. This, like so many thoughts I had in my twenties, turned out to be wrong wrong wrong. Making quilts for people has been one of the most satisfying gifts to create because I know that it will never go out of style, and if I have designed it nicely enough, it will stay with the baby for always. A couple of times I have made baby blankets with juvenile fabrics, which came out really sweet (because who doesn’t love those light pastels?!) but now I try to use more mature fabrics in the hopes that they will be designs the baby can grow up with.

Bree’s mature baby blanket

I got really lucky with my most recent quilt I made for my brother’s baby. Claire and I stumbled upon an estate sale two blocks away from my house, and the occupant of the home had been an avid quilter with boxes and boxes of folded quilting cotton in one of her spare bedrooms. The sign said “$5 for whatever fabric you can fit in a plastic bag” so Claire and I went to town, choosing anything that fit in with a green and blue theme. When I got home I added pieces from my own stash to the mix, trying to choose fabric that had been used in some of the clothing I had made in the past. I’ve got the button down shirt I made for my brother Nick in there, the octopus fabric I used from Claire’s favorite button down, and the ladybug cotton I used for a vintage dress I made for myself a few months ago.

Declan’s Big Boy Quilt

Sometimes when I am in a sewing rut and I don’t feel inspired to make anything on my To-Do list, quilting is the best remedy. It allows me to be creative without having to engage any complicated techniques, and there is something really straightforward and therapeutic about the process, especially when it comes to the actual quilting. A quilt, from start to finish, takes a little bit of time depending on the size of your project, but by the time I am finished with one I usually feel rejuvenated and ready to tackle more advanced stuff. Ultimately, my favorite thing about making a quilt as a gift is how much I think about the recipient through every step of the process. I think about fun memories of my time with the parents and about what wonderful families they will make; I think about what the baby will look like, and I imagine them at different stages of their life with their blanket in tow. What if these quilts survived long enough to make it to the baby’s adulthood? What if they were displayed like wall hangings in their first apartments, or better yet, folded up into the crib’s of their own babies in a few decades? AHHH, THE POSSIBILITIES!!!

New year, new rack.

January 7, 2015/0 Comments/in DIY, Home Decor /by Jasika Nicole

COAT rack, that is! (ba dum ching)

When we first moved to LA, my wife and I rented a really cute house across from a beautiful, hilly cemetery and started to try and build up our pitiful collection of furniture. We had lived in furnished spaces for our previous four years in Vancouver, and everything we had kept in storage in NYC was cheap and ugly and falling apart. It was the need for a nice, big, solid dining room table and my disgust at how expensive furniture can be that inspired me to try and learn how to build it in the first place. Anyways, as you can imagine, in our first few weeks in Los Angeles making our new home, there were tons of trips to Home Depot, and just as many to the Rose Bowl flea and Ikea and World Market and Target and vintage home goods stores, where we could fill in all the holes of what we needed but could not make for ourselves. Our unfurnished rental had a large living room with a fireplace and a tall, arched ceiling, but no foyer or entryway space, so on a whim, I purchased a ridiculously (and unsurprisingly) overpriced iron coat rack from World Market.

Full disclosure, I love/hate World Market. Their aesthetic is awesome, but their quality is shitty. Sometimes I just go in there for a little inspiration and a root beer, but I complain the whole time about how we shouldn’t buy anything cause it’s just gonna break unexpectedly.
So anyways, a few months after moving to LA, we bought a house and had to move again, with all the furniture we had made work for our rental space. Most everything translated well in our new home, including the the cute antiqued coat rack, which has provided an excellent space for us to put all our leaving-the-house shit for the past couple of years. However, this year when we got our Christmas tree, we had to move the coat rack out of the way and into the office to make room for it. And holy shit, what a difference the absence of a coat rack made! Our house is bigger in square feet than our old rental, but the living room/dining room is much smaller, and the ceilings are normal height. It was only through living a few weeks without the coat rack that we realized how awkward it had been in the room and how much space it took up.

The above photo doesn’t really do it justice, so you will just have to take my word for it- it crowded the area and ruined sight lines to the big window we have in front. So we got rid of the thing, kept it in the office for the holidays, where it continued to be in the way and take up too much space, but was less obvious. I needed a solution, something to house our bags and scarves and jackets, but something that didn’t involve having to use that bulky (expensive) coat rack. You see behind the rack to the wall next to the chalkboard? All the empty space on the left side? I hated that about as much as our huge rack (!). It was only apparent when you closed the door, but that space was usable and felt weirdly empty with nothing there. So, problem solved: get rid of the coat rack in the house and make a wooden something-or-other to hang on the wall in that empty space.

The next part was pretty easy; assembling some hooks and proper screws and finding a nice old piece of wood to reuse (this was from a shelf that had mostly fallen apart in the backyard when it flooded/ rained for the first time in a year). Claire sanded the board down but kept most of it as is cause the color and distress in it looked nice, and I screwed in some hooks on the front, and a few smaller ones on the bottom side of the board).

Positioned her on the wall, screwed her into the stud (!!)) and voila! Bye, bye, iron coat rack. The hooks used don’t all match each other, cause I couldn’t find four of the same ones, but I kind of like the mishmash look of them all together- plus, you can’t really see the hooks when they are covered in chilly weather accoutrement.

Final look:

Cleaner, opens the space and makes it much brighter, and provides a better spot for our armchair (not seen in the pic) which used to be shoved up next to the coat rack. The room looks so much bigger and less cramped, and I love being reminded of how important it is to rearrange furniture every once in while. Sometimes it just takes new eyes to recognize old problems. And speaking of old problems, I have a bulky expensive coat rack to give away if anyone wants it.

DIYing It Up

April 30, 2014/1 Comment/in DIY, Home Decor /by Jasika Nicole

Thanks to a blog post I read in November of 2012, I was introduced to a new book that had just come out, called The Handbuilt Home, by Ana White. It was purported to be a book that gave easy, comprehensive instructions to make furniture, no matter your experience level. On a whim I put the book on my Christmas list, and on the plane ride from Florida, where we spent the holidays with my family, back to Los Angeles where me and my partner had just moved, I read the book cover to cover and was penning a list of all the things we needed to buy at Home Depot on a drink napkin. Since putting all our stuff in storage in New York and spending 4 years in furnished rentals in Vancouver, we had no furniture to speak of, and more than anything, we needed a table and some places to sit; our first days in our LA rental found us in one primary spot in the house: a mattress in the middle of the living room floor, where we slept, ate, watched tv, read and cuddled. It took hardly any time at all for the coziness factor to wear off.

Anyways, my logic was this: we could either spend over a thousand dollars on a finished beautiful dining room table, or we could spend half that money on tools and materials and build one ourselves. Then, if we found the process to be fun and worthwhile, we could KEEP building furniture, making the investment of tools more cost effective with each project. Unfortunately, after our first two projects (a Farmhouse style dining room table and a matching bench), Claire’s interest had waned, but mine grew, and over the past year and some change I have continued to build furniture by myself, becoming more competent and taking on more challenging tasks. So far we have built the aforementioned dining room table and bench together, and I have worked solo on a coffee table, bookcase, printer console, upholstered vanity stool, and a rolling kitchen island, along with a slew of other smaller woodworking projects.

I wanted to share my latest furniture DIY creation here on my blog, because it is my most ambitious project to date. We recently got a master bathroom renovation to turn our tiny, barely functional hallway bath into an en suite with much more space and efficiency. In trying to make the most of our budget, I decided to take on the task of building our vanity, which, if purchased in the style and materials we wanted, would run us no less than $1500. With some free plans from Ana White’s website and a bit of advice from our contractor, I built the tile topped vanity from scratch and tiled the surrounding backsplash for $490, and it was custom built to fit the exact measurements inside our new bathroom. The project took about 11 days from start to finish, and the most difficult part of the whole project was the tiling. I had never tiled before and it was WAY more intense than I anticipated- I sprouted stress-induced fever blisters within hours after all the grouting was complete. I don’t think you can put a price on fever blisters, but all in all, the project came out beautifully and I am very very proud of it!

I built the wood part of the vanity in my garage and when it was ready for the next steps, our reno crew moved it to the inside of the bathroom.

I had to space out the tiles to get an idea of placement and figure out which ones I needed to cut.

I had no idea that tiling was such an intricate process and that there were so many PIECES involved! Edge tiles, corner tiles, border tiles…the list went on and on! Thankfully we used a simple subway style tile for our vanity so our local hardware stores always had what I needed.

After adhering the tiles to the surface and edge of the vanity, they need to be taped so that gravity doesn’t pull them down and the edge pieces fall off.

It took a while to find the perfect knobs and hinge hardware for these cabinet doors, but we eventually found some pretty crystal knobs that elevated the Tiffany blue color of the vanity (which was spray painted for a smoother finish).

Tiling is complete here and the sink was installed by the reno crew. The sink was purchased at the Habitat Rehab store for only $20, and it was like brand new!

Finished vanity with tiling, and you can spy the gorgeous black and white penny tile underneath (a tiling project that I did NOT undertake- I left that to the professionals!)

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