End of another month already?

Where in the world has March gone to? Was it washed away by the rain? blown away by the wind?? I only just got accustomed to the idea that February was over, and now March is gone too?? Who authorized that?!

March was full of many distractions for me. There was travel, and dance events, and travel for dance events. There was miserable drenching rain and billowing winds, and there was alluring sunshine. The sunshine was particularly devious: it made me want to attempt a garden. Doh! As a result of the weather, I ended up with several plant starts that needed repotting, so now I have five slivers, dirt underneath my fingernails, quite a few containers of potted vegetable starts outside in the yard, and several flats of five-year-old seeds taking over my dining room table that decided to germinate much to my shock and awe. (The seeds decided to germinate, not the table. ...though a germinating table would definitely hold a higher shock and awe factor than some sprouting seeds, even five-year-old seeds.) Yay! The beginning of a vegetable garden for the first time in YEARS! woot! My mouth is already watering with the thought of fresh peas and lettuce and green beans this season! I hope that my plants grow and thrive and produce produce! .. it would probably be more likely if I quit nibbling on the poor things long enough for them to get established. Heh. For the past two weeks I've been making a morning round of my container garden, peeking in at all the little plants and encouraging them to grow (Pep-talks help, right?)
And each morning I pull off one or two leaves from any plants that look big enough to spare them. :) Yum! spinach leaves and lettuce for breakfast! ... except that the plants are so small that I only get about three to five leaves total before I decide that I'd better not take any more or risk killing the poor things before they get a start in life.
(Patience is not my best virtue.)

All of which means that I ended up doing less stitching than I had anticipated over the course of the month. The travel and the dance events were very unfriendly to stitching, so instead, I took my tatting shuttles along with me and I made some tatted trims. You'll spot a couple of them on this month's block. The others will most likely find their way onto future blocks.


(The semi-transparent gray mask is my attempt to obscure the blocks from past and future months and clarify where March begins and ends.)
The wedge shape makes photography challenging, so here are a couple of detail shots as well:




I also managed to create my BJP mandala for March! woot!

Gardening and spring flowers definitely influenced my stitching this month in all of my work. The crocuses, grape hyacinths, and daffodils have come up in my yard to greet the spring weather (all three crocuses, two daffodils, and five-hundred-thousand-ish hyacinths that survived the floody-wet winters, anyway.) It's the color combo of spring greenery, daffodil yellow, and hyacinth purple/blue that determined my color selection for this month's BJP. :)




I didn't get much done on my TAST postcards, even with this past week designated as "catch-up week"-- so little, in fact, that there's really not much to show for Whipped Wheel and Barred Chain... I'll have to chip away at them as I can, and show them when there's something to show. CQJP and BJP take priority, and I'm really quite delighted to have accomplished as much as I did on both of those!

Tahlia: TAST wk 8, CQJP Feb

**SO** far behind schedule! I am counting on today, tomorrow, and Tuesday to catch up a bit and make some real progress with my CQJP wedge for February.


TAST wk 8: chain stitch : twisted chain with varying angles, open chain, magic chain (with two colors threaded in one needle), chain stitch to create shapes

I think I picked an unfortunate postcard for this particular stitch, as the stitch itself is subtle enough that it was tricky to find ways to keep the stitch from just disappearing against the energetic prints! ... also, this postcard would benefit from a variety of stitches instead of just one stitch. I think I will use this realization as a guideline for my future TAST studies, and try to keep prints to a minimum when I am trying to explore the possibilities of a single stitch, and use an excess of prints only when I am giving myself full permission to embellish heavily with whatever stitch seems appropriate in the moment!



CQJP block looks completely unimpressive at the moment!! My time has been sucked up by performance rehearsals. Last night was the performance for which we were putting in extra time, and it went really well! Everyone stayed upright, and glitches were minimal! :) ... but the result is that I don't have much thread on my CQJP block yet!



What I did get finished, though, is this lovely little embroidered interpretation of the valentine bouquet that my husband got for me this year! This pic shows how I turn the embroidered patch into a free-standing applique with finished edges that is easy to slip-stitch in place on my quilt block. I am REALLY liking this technique for appliques and expect that I will use it very often in the future!



So my CQJP so far looks like this. The rose applique is just basted on for now in the space I think that it might occupy, although the embroidery on the block might change the placement of the applique, once I get that done.
There is also a little growth to my January block from the last time I posted about it. Not a whole lot of change, but a little here and there.
I do hope I can catch up again!!!
At least I can say that I am not yet getting tired of this project, and I am very glad for that! Long-term energy investment in a single project is not something that I excel at!



I would like to say that I managed to find time to create a February BJP, but I didn't. This is the BJP that I made in January that I then misplaced, so I had to make a second BJP for January! ack. ... so this is my spare BJP which will fill in for whichever month doesn't get an official one of its own. ... hopefully that won't turn out to be February, because I have some nice heart-shaped beads that I would like to use for February's mandala! .. but it's nice to have a back-up plan!
So, for now this is my progress, meager as it is, at least it's still forward momentum. . I hope to be able to put up an update in the next couple of days to show that I actually did get something accomplished in February! the month's not over yet, and I need every single minute that I can get!

Hugs all!


The picture of the bouquet from which I sketched my embroidery.

Busy couple of weeks!

It's been a busy couple of weeks! Unexpected house guests, out-of-house obligations, generalized chaos. It was difficult to find time to stitch, but somehow I managed at least a little: less than I'd hoped for, but more than I'd realized!

Week 5 TAST: Herringbone


Week 6 TAST: Chevron


Week 7 TAST: Detached Chain


I might get a little more work done on the Detached Chain before the next stitch comes out, but that seems unlikely, considering the rest of my weekend schedule!

I've decided that I'm going to make it my mission to make friends with metallic threads. :P Not my favorite yet, but I am learning how to make the relationship somewhat less than abusive. :)

There was a postcard and an ATC to create for a birthday swap:



and a re-creation vintage dress (UFO) that I finally got half-sewn together:


The front of the dress has gathered details at the shoulder, bust, and waist. I put top-stitching thread in my needle to stitch parallel lines with a long stitch length to pull the gathers, and then instead of pin-basting (which always seems to let the gathers shift and get messed up), I thread-basted with herringbone stitch. It worked like a dream and was much quicker to work than I would have expected!



Sharon Boggon's Studio Journal class started at the beginning of the month, and I've been struggling to balance my schedule to allow enough time to work on that, too! One of the first week's suggested exercises was artistic frottage (also known as "brass rubbing"), and I spent some time experimenting with textures around my house:



Then Valentine's Day came along, and my husband sent flowers!


I took a lot of pictures of it with the intention to add a floral motif to this month's CQJP block.
With all of the other demands on my schedule this past two weeks, I've hardly even begun to stitch on February's CQJP block! Ack! .. and I will need to make the BJP mandala soon too. I did get a lot done, so why am I so fixated on what I DIDN'T get accomplished?

TAST- wk 4, CQJP-Jan, and BJP-Jan progress

Week 4 of TAST featured the Cretan stitch. I wasn't sure I'd be able to make enough variations on this stitch to make a postcard interesting, but I surprised myself!

The line at the top I started out just varying the length and compression of the stitches, and then realized that it was reminding me of an EKG or a seismograph reading, so I played around with that idea a little, trying to get it to be more accurate. (This stitch also reminds me of fish bones or snake vertebrae.) I can see that it has great potential as a filling stitch, but didn't really want to play with that idea very much this week-- other things had ahold of my time.

Which brings me to CQJP! I definitely put myself at a disadvantage by waiting until January started to start piecing together my block(s). I've only had about a week so far to stitch (instead of four weeks), and I feel like I need at least a week more. My stitching time during that single week was also impacted by the snowstorm, power outage, and stray cat, so I really should be surprised and pleased at what did get accomplished!

This wedge shape is a difficult one to photograph efficiently. I have to settle for a large photo in which you can get a general idea but can't see detail and then supplemental detail photos.

Since the stray cat impacted my life and schedule so much this month, I decided to commemorate him with a decorative patch. I used a scrap of the light green silk that I had used for piecing the blocks together. I inked the design on with a rubber stamp that I found at a thrift store and a "Stazon" brand ink pad. Then I used single-strand silk floss reclaimed from an old silk sweater and hand-dyed to the color I wanted to outline his features and add some fur. His whiskers are DMC metallic gold- single strand doubled over in the needle, and the brown of his eyes is DMC floss. When I finished stitching the cat, I traced an oval around him, used a heavy-weight thread (handquilting cotton) to stitch a running stitch line over the oval tracing, and then turned the edge over and buttonholed it a stitch at a time to keep it in place. When the buttonhole stitching was complete I trimmed the excess allowances, and I ended up with an applique that was very easy to handle. I blind-stitched it to the block using the same thread I'd used for the buttonholing-- which I believe was a fine Perle cotton marketed for tatting.
Again, the stray cat takes most of my stitching time! Ack! ;)

I used several of this month's TAST stitches to further accentuate this block. I decided that I did not want to limit myself to only using the featured TAST stitches of the month, so you will also find bullion stitches, chain stitch, and other explorations with thread and needle, but I definitely did find ways to incorporate feather, buttonhole, and Cretan in the stitching I've done so far. I still want to add some fly stitch, and I have plenty of room still to do that.
I will still be adding to this block for the remaining three days of the month! (counting today).
I will be leaving the bottom patches of this wedge blank because that is where the peacock's body will overlap the tail fan, obscuring any stitching that I do there.


(You can click on the pictures to see the detail better, and use <"ctrl"> <+> to zoom in -- at least on my browser that works.)

Because of the wedge shaped blocks, I decided to stitch all of my blocks together before beginning embellishment. This makes transitions between blocks easier, but makes the thing as a whole more cumbersome. I also decided that because of the wedge-fan shape I would start from the center of the fan and work outward. This will help keep embellishments and beads from previous months from snagging threads as I continue to work each month. I hope that these decisions will make the project as a whole a little bit easier!

My BJP seems to have wandered, and apparently I didn't think to photograph it right when I finished it, so I will have to add that update in a supplemental post. :P

Week 3 progress: TAST and CQJP

Well, the snow and power outage put a bit of a crimp in my progress, but before it did so I got a lot done this week!
I spent most of the week putting together my "naked blocks" for the CQJP (Crazy Quilt Journal Project). Originally I had thought that I would make each block (wedge) in the month that I needed it, but for a variety of reasons I changed my mind and decided that I wanted all of the wedges completed so that I could see how they would work together. It took most of my work hours this week, but I got it done:

and I started my stitchwork on one of the wedges:



Of course, it was also week 3 of TAST (Take A Stitch Tuesday): Featherstitch.
TAST (Take A Stitch Tuesday)

In keeping with past weeks, I made another postcard (4 x 6 inches) featuring experimentations with featherstitch:


I experimented with changing the angles of the lines, with overlapping, with using the stitch on curves, with closed varieties and open, and with knotted varieties.

I also found a moment to add a moment to add a buttonhole ring and a string of buttonhole loops to my week 2 postcard:


So all-in-all it was a productive week, even with the snowstorm. :) I'm a little worried, though- next week I have to finish up this first CQJP wedge, a new TAST postcard, and my BJP mandala!

Tuesday Stitchers import: Tast wk 2 buttonhole

I spent most of my time this week stitching together my CQ wedges, but they still need a few hours' work before they are complete and ready to start stitching on, and I don't have pictures of them yet.

Despite that, I did find some time to stitch buttonhole experiments for TAST on a spare CQ fabric postcard. :)


I've used simple buttonhole with differences in leg spacing, crossed buttonhole, knotted buttonhole, detatched buttonhole with beads, detatched buttonhole cup encasing a plastic gem, buttonhole on a curved line, buttonhole to outline picture elements in one of the fabrics, tailor's knotted buttonhole as a buttonhole, buttonhole to couch on a lace flower applique, buttonhole wheels with legs pointing in and with legs pointing out, and buttonhole with crossed legs.

My favorite is the beaded buttonhole edging. I will definitely use that approach again!

I can't help but feel that if I hadn't been spending so much time putting my wedges together, I might have had more time for stitching! ha! But next week I should be able to finish up the wedges and then I will not lose that much time in any of the following months! (I'll probably lose the time to something else, but hey. That's life.)

CQJP color palette

Originally I thought that I would make my CQJP out of quilting cottons. I have plenty to choose from! And I love making crazy quilts from printed fabrics. ... but in the end I decided that I wanted fabrics that have a more sumptuous shine and feel, so I dug out my fancy fabrics and came up with this colorway:


I guess I have plenty of purples! On the left hand side are my "greens" which are more like teal than green. Ideally I would have a lot more of them,but since I don't, I've come up with a tentative plan that should work... I just hope it's "crazy" enough.

Eric's Fan Quilt

Well, instead of sewing, I've been spending all my free time the past couple of weeks cleaning and rearranging my workspace. It's a worthy endeavor, and I am confident that the investment of time and energy in cleaning now will let my creative energy truly blossom in the new year. :)
Unfortunately, somewhere in the rearrangement of piles and boxes and the sorting of fabrics and buttons and threads, I have misplaced my favorite little digital camera! ARGH!! ...so the picture for today will come from archives that I didn't get around to posting when I should have! ;)

My brother came over for Thanksgiving dinner this year, and we got to talking about quilting (he's started doing applique recently, incidentally), and reminiscing in general, and I mentioned that I'd been doing some cleaning and re-organizing, and had happened across a couple of boxes with his name on them. Well, we dug them all out and sorted through them, and among them was this:


It is a queen-sized fan-quilt that I started for my brother in December 1994. If I get it finished by 2014 it will have been 20 years aborning. My brother decided to give me until 2019 to get it finished, just in case. I wonder if I still have all the pattern templates? I wonder if I have enough cloth in the right colors, or if I need to buy more to coordinate? I wonder if I can remember what the plan, exactly, was! I do know it needs a little freshening up (tricky when it's in pieces) and ironing and piecing and more piecing. I will be chipping away at this project throughout 2012 alongside CQJP/BJP/TAST and assorted other obligations.