Items in progress on the coffee table.
This fragment from the larger Middle Passage series is nearly done.
A little bag in progress… not sure how I’ll construct straps yet.
I shipped these 2×2″ squares to Jude Hill on Thursday as part of her “Magic Feather” project.
This one was too big, so it’s a keeper:
It’s a real lesson in scale, because at four by four instead of two by two, this little shape is decidedly more moon-like than stone-like.
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.
a border takes shape… this is for a “quick” happy quilt for D., whose eight month adventure with two broken bones (actually four, because it was the ulna and radius, twice), too many casts and x-rays to count, one night in the hospital, and two surgeries, came to a close a week ago with the removal of the pins.
and now, the big questions is: to skateboard again, or not?
the doc said, “all I can tell you is, we see a lot of repeat customers around here.”
I am back to work on a commission from the spring. How great it feels to wrestle with all the challenges that attend improv quilting rather than the challenges associated with not working at all!!
The sewing challenges presented by improv quilting include — lumps where different weight fabrics meet, lumps where a necessary re-fragmentation of a pieced section renders a formerly bigger patchwork piece into a very tiny postage stamp-sized piece which is butted up against a new seam; the imbalance of motif or color that occurs when rearranging large pieced sections; the sorry loss of a quarter inch of a beloved fabric chunk… like this little fishy’s nose.
I consider the satisfaction of designing-as-I go well worth the lumps and bumps.
Thank you readers, who offered so much encouragement and insight to me recently after a particularly gloomy post. It surprises me when taking the risk of sounding like a whiny baby proves so worthwhile. Thank you.
I particularly took to heart two things — one, that trust is important here, and two, that stepping into the river of creativity is more important than the style of one’s waders — in other words, when time is tight perhaps a medium that lends itself to quicker results might be the ticket. Or, in the alternative, now that I have a paycheck, perhaps I don’t mind making fewer quilts a year.
Thank you again.