I'm totally panicked - the quilt I just finished is making its inaugural trip through the washer and I don't know what will happen.

Finished:

A new pair of underwear from Jalie pattern number 2568. These are the hipster style. I find them a little low in the back for my taste but still very comfortable. The pattern doesn't give any direction on how long to cut the waist and leg elastics and my guesses were a little bit off. I think I might even skip the leg elastic next time I make this style. I love this ruffle trim though; it's so cute.

In progress:

I have a finished quilt top and a pile of freshly washed and pressed flannelette to back it with. I still need to make a label for the back and sew the backing together. I'd like to hand baste the sandwich together instead of using pins this time and that means waiting until Abby goes to bed so I can lay things out on the kitchen floor without interference. Zeke gave his seal of approval last night when I had everything on the floor in my studio.


Started:

Canned asian pears in light honey syrup. I finally got myself some canning equipment. My plan was to make apple sauce but the idea of home canned pears was so appealing I got some of those too. I'm not sure if I'll get to the apple sauce after the pears are finished or if that will wait until tomorrow.

This quilt is consuming my brain. I can't bring myself to change the thread in my machine to work on something else. I'm so curious to see how it turns out I just have to keep working on it. It's almost all I think about while I'm at work and the first thing I want to do when I get home. I've got six large panels done now. I tried to lay them out on the floor on Saturday morning, just to get an idea of how I'll be putting things together and how big this quilt will be, but the floor would not co-operate.

I decided to move on to step two.

The bag of scraps this quilt came from included pieces of muslin along with all the quilting cottons and I had decided to just sew in the muslin scraps like everything else. Once I was working with larger pieces of quilt top I thought the muslin looked a little too plain and wanted to spruce it up a bit.


I had a package of Sublime Stitching embroidery designs (actually intended for some very comfortable but boring underwear) that looked perfect for the task. This is the Flower Power set and they are a lot of fun to use. I transferred on different designs for different sized pieces of muslin, kind of randomly. Some of the larger pieces were big enough for two or three designs to fit together. A few pieces were too small for anything. I experimented with using different stitches (well, stem stitch) but mostly stuck to back stitch because it's so easy.


I'd forgotten how much I enjoy embroidery. It's so quick and satisfying. I don't know why I don't do it more often. There must be all sorts of things I could embelish. You can make it as complicated as you like, though I tend to keep things rather simple. I like the way it makes me think about the weave of the cloth I'm working on; something that was previously a smooth expanse becomes a network of lines and spaces and I'm trying to decide which space would be best to push the needle through.


I love the textural quality of embroidery. It always seems like it should just be flat - it's a line drawing after all - but the design is raised and almost sculptural. I like to think that even someone who could not see would enjoy touching a piece of embroidery.


For those tiny spaces too small for any of the transfer designs I realized I could make things up. A fun adventure and not anywhere big enough to be intimidating. I'm now finished two of the quilt panels but that doesn't really tell me how many embroidery patches I've got left because the muslin pieces are not evenly distributed throughout the quilt. I know there is one with cat-tails still to do; I'm thinking of trying some satin stitch.