Very Exciting, Very Fun!

If I get a tax return, I usually buy myself a little gift. This year I bought some fiber from Three Waters Farms. I really liked this color way, so I bought 8 ounces of it.

There is a cardigan that I like on Ravelry, and I decided I would like to make it. You can see that it uses various yarns.

So I thought that I would dye some turquoise fiber and spin that, and also mix it with the Three Waters Farms color way. But so far I’m not very motivated to go out and dye some fiber. So one day I went out to my storage shed to see if I already had some dyed turquoise fiber. And I couldn’t believe my eyes. I already had 8 ounces of turquoise fiber spun up in to yarn! And, I had these two other light and dark turquoise fibers.

I might dye that turquoise yarn into a darker turquoise. And yesterday, because I had a cold, I basically just sat and spun all day (no thinking required.) So I held the light and dark turquoise fiber together and spun a variegated yarn.

Quilting is continuing on, and a little rug hooking. But I am really excited about knitting a sweater again.

New and Old Things

Let’s start with the old. Do you even remember when I started this project? I don’t. But the other day I was cleaning out my closet and I remembered this very large project. I was going to make panels with front and back, and then do that “quilt as you go thing” to put them all together into a very big quilt. The front has 7 inch squares with a one inch border, and my idea was to embroider in all the borders. So I got one out and started embroidering on it again. It takes a long time to embroider each border. So I went back into the closet to see how many panels I had left to do. When I finish this panel, there will be four panels done. AND EIGHT PANELS LEFT TO GO! I was kind of complaining about this to my BF, and she said, why not just put the four panels together into a smaller quilt? Brilliant!! There are other things I’d rather be embroidering.

I finished this next quilt in time for the Intersection of Faith and Arts Conference. It was actually a lot of work to piece together the background, and to embroider all that writing on it. I had thought about doing a series of these, with Biblical blocks in the background, and important (to me) verses on the front. But I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to do that again. Well, I had three people comment that they would like to buy this quilt, and so that encouraged me to make the next one. Its always nice to hear that people appreciate your work. (This verse is Matt. 11:28-29 from Eugene Peterson’s The Message.)

I really like making these improv cris-cross blocks. No ruler or rotary cutter necessary! So I made a bunch of samples in case anyone wanted me to teach this. Very fun to make. (And yes, I did square them up at the end so I could easily put borders on them.)

And lastly, I am always so very happy when I get a picture from a workshop participant telling me that she finished her class project! Because, to be honest, I seldom finish workshop projects. I especially love the colorful border that she put on this project. Thank you so much for sharing!

I’m back in the studio finally. I spent half a day cleaning up (yes, still more needs to be done but there’s at least room to move around in there!)

A Finish and a Flub

Remember that very sparkly piece I was working on? The fabric from Joann’s? Well, yes, I finally finished it, and I decided to wash it because the darn black attracts so much lint and dog hair. I should have just worked on brushing that dog hair off. Because, the GOLD washed away in the washing machine!!!

Here’s one close-up. You can see where the steel color is showing through.

There were a few places, like this one, where the gold stayed on better. Anyway, that was a lot of work for all the gold to wash off!

I started this piece a few weeks before Christmas. I saw something like it on the screen at church. French knots, I thought! So all those dots in the sky are french knots. I used quite a few different colored pale threads in 4 sizes–perle cotton size 3, 5, 8, and 12. What I really liked was that I had a dark blue for the sky, and then I also had a piece of dark blue with a lot of little squares on it, which would work for the town. As I neared the end, I decided that I wanted to include the shepherds and  sheep and the angel with her words of good tidings! I used some wool thread that I had bought recently to outline the town and the angel and the shepherds.

To be fair, I googled “french knot sheep” and of course, there were plenty of examples! I was trying to make them too complicated.

The back was a mess, since I went all the way through to quilt the french knots down. So I put a second back on, and quilted a bit to stabilize the whole thing (four layers.) It makes it quite sturdy. I do like this piece a lot.

I forgot to mention that I was teaching Quilted Embroidery again at The Cotton Patch this past Saturday. It was such a nice class of women. They all seemed to enjoy working on their sample piece to learn some simple embroidery stitches. It was a lot of driving in the rain, but I do like driving over to Lafayette–it takes me through the Delta, and it is a very pretty drive.