picturing along

practicing blanket stitch

Mary stitched - Unfortunately, paint and pigma pens 'ruined' front side

Winter session class - table

class mascot

Audition for ‘African patchwork’ by Leslie… beautiful scraps, beautifully arranged.  She has since dispensed with the black borders, and butted all the African prints up together.  I love how it looks above, but I’ll admit to preferring her later version.

Desert Town quilt in progress - Leslie

house landscape WIP - Mary

As you can see, we are having fun in this class.  Last week, we worked on embroidery stitches.  This week, we’ll continue with a few more stitches, look at binding ideas, and continue with works-in-progress.

Find a great stitch reference here:  arts and design needlecraft glossary.

Circle time

Machine-made doily, nevertheless a pretty frame.  Filling in some leaves of my own, and filling in some leaves that either wore away or never got stitched.  K’s father and grandparents encircled.

pins in my mouth and on my lap

Pinned this little piece up yesterday.

Took it to the Reggie Lewis Athletic Center and quilted a little during the four hour wait for C’s 4×400 relay.

It may be an exercise in frustration.  No glue, no tulle, no basting –  just me and my lazy girl pin job.

My strategy is to work the places that can easily be worked first, always making sure that where pieces meet, the fabric will lie down properly.  Pretty much means working edges inward.  It helps to have two needles going, sometimes.

I am doing a combination of folded-under applique and raw-edged.  Probably, with the possible exception of that red velvet, this quilt will be entirely hand-quilted.

You may remember this bleached red plaid from the Happy Hut Quilt that I made for D. (that red plaid flannel was used, one December not long ago, to make his pj bottoms – a traditional Christmas Eve gift in this house (though I will admit to buying the pants in the last couple of years)).

I finished that quilt, by the way (above).  The Ghost House version is in a lull.  Down in the cold, cold basement on a pinboard.  It will wait.

 

building forward, looking back

I am in the thick of replacing my website using ‘weebly’ – a drag and drop method.  It’s not that versatile and in fact, very frustrating, but the price is right and at this point (I haven’t added text or images to my existing website in YEARS because it is so cumbersome), almost anything will represent an improvement.

Anyway, I just came across this quilt.  See how important it is to date your work?!  I would have guessed “2008″ as the time frame for this poppy, but stitching reveals that it was made in 2002.

I keep wanting to ‘get back’ to poppies and keep finding that I don’t.

Do any of you, dear readers, have themes or images that you developed/loved and that were well-received and that you keep saying you will ‘get back to’ and then don’t?!!

Why, I wonder.

Maybe it’s not enough to go back to something just because other people liked it.  Not sure.  Ideas, responses welcome!

Today’s the busy day – writing class in the a.m. (Yikes! must bathe! Must eat breakfast! Must do Morning Pages (writing class is so much better if I do them first)) and then my quilting class (here, thankfully) in the afternoon.

What did I do today?

In my head-shaking tally of the day yesterday (baffled, again, at where the time went),  I kept forgetting that I spent the morning over in the art room at the elementary school around the corner.

This wall-sized map and cool 3-D wall hanging are from the hall outside.  It is so much fun (“Miss Dee!!  Miss Dee!!! Can you help?!! Can I make a mouse? Does this look like a coffin?”) and so good for me in so many ways, that I’m surprised it keeps slipping out of my mind.

So, forget the laundry, dog walking, the progress made on three small quilts, the prep for tomorrow’s class — forget cooking dinner, packing lunches, making smoothies in the a.m., forget the dentist phone calls and the three conversations with my sister… the little stint with two third grade classes was enough to call it a good day.

Stumpwork poppy – beauty!