This year the word I seem to use most often is relaxing. I say to others, “I hope you have a wonderful relaxing Christmas!” I wish the same to all of you, my friends.
For unto us a child is born,
Unto us a son is given.
and the government shall be upon his shoulder.
And his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor,
The Mighty God,
Everlasting Father,
Prince of Peace.
Thread! I love it! Black Friday came around and Connecting Threads was having an extra special sale. So I ordered some thread. I ordered more than this but I LOVE this color collection. It makes me want to do some sort of thread painting or a whole cloth quilt using all of these colors.
When I was at Art Quilt Tahoe, I was talking to my teacher about my embroidery and she asked if I’d ever tried Cottage Garden Threads. Nope, never heard of them. Well, that’s because they are an Australian company. But once I saw all the gorgeous multicolor threads they had I was on a hunt. I found a woman on Etsy who sold their threads, and she was willing to make a custom order for me. I splurged and bought 22 different colorways all in perle cotton size 8 (this is just a sample of them.) They weren’t cheap, but the quality is evident. And now I want to make something just using all these gorgeous threads.
In between Christmas preparations and working in the garden I am stitching away. I’ll share some of what I’ve been doing in the next few posts.
I showed you the start of this beading project, but never showed you the final product. Once I started beading, it went fairly quickly. Much faster than embroidery, in my opinion.
And some close-ups:
I finished piecing together that giant quilt, made a sandwich, and quilted around each smaller block to stabilize it. And then I pondered hand quilting it. In the meantime, I was sitting in church, and wrote in my journal, “my next big quilt must be about PEACE.” And later in the week I realized that I could make THIS BIG QUILT about peace. So I marked out huge letters “PEACE” on it, and know that I’ll hand stitch those. And then I chose 12 excellent verses on Peace, and marked 12 spots on the quilt where these will be hand stitched. But in the meantime, because it is so huge and heavy, I think that I will machine quilt it. That way it might actually be finished in this time period where we all need to think about peace and what it means for each of us.
I’ve also started back to work on my series “Characteristics of God.” I’m hand stitching the words and then machine quilting each piece. Still pondering how to finish the edges. There are only 10 pieces in this series, so I am hopeful to complete them soon.
And in the meantime, my fascination with hexies has not diminished. They are fun to make, and relatively mindless at this stage. Just right for evenings sitting by the fire with two dogs on my lap and watching my TV shows.
debby quilts 