hot mess express

This summer, I took a train. This is nothing new, just incredibly infrequent. I took trains all over Europe when I lived in Amsterdam, and have done this particular Amtrak route from SF to Chicago once before, when I was in graduate school and plane tickets were just way too expensive for the holidays. This particular trip was with my dad (foot on the left!) who flew out to SF to keep me company on the multi-day trip back to visit family. Why hot mess express you ask? Just look! This is my lap of creativity and boredom busting. It's a beautiful mess.  

For anyone who has taken cross country trains before, in America at least, you'll realize that my attempt to start a new embroidery project was foolish at best and at times downright dangerous for fingertips. I had high hopes of making progress on this hip fox and floral piece, but the bumps and jiggles were really just too much. I did not get much further than what is in this picture. Of course a start is better than nothing, so progress was made, but away the needle went. 

My other companion on the trip was a long-standing knitting project. Just over two years ago, I started this wrap. It's a lovely Scottish lace piece from a folk shawl collection of patterns I scored myself at Powell's in Portland. I finished the pattern feet ago, but had quite a bit of the ball of yarn leftover despite having done my research to decide this would be the perfect amount of yarn. Best laid plans and all. When that happened I decided to just keep going in pattern and to not start anything new until I finished this - so-called monogamous knitting. That has actually meant that it's taken me a long time to make this AND that I haven't worked on anything new since. It was a banner day when I finally got to the end of the yarn and cast off that last stitch on the train. A bit anti-climatic really since I had pretty much run out of crafty distractions then, but exciting nonetheless. It seems quite long and I'm interested to see how big it gets after blocking! 

 The next time I have a train trip I'll remember to leave stabby projects at home and pack more yarn. 

summertime quilt finish

This was a photo I snapped out of the train window on my Amtrak trip to Chicago this summer. I remember the feeling of looking out at the prairie once we got to Iowa and having a strong sense of place from having grown up in Illinois. The mountains in California are great, but give me wide open spaces any day!

Interesting that I don't think I ever wrote about this particular quilt in progress! The photo on the left is from mid-July 2020. From what I can tell from my archaeological dig, I worked on this that week, and then I do recall not knowing if I wanted to add to it or not, so I hung it up in the closet "for later". Well. Later is now! I conferred with my mom and decided that it could indeed just be finished without any additions and be a nice sized lap or picnic quilt. I had it all sandwiched and pinned up before this trip to Chicago so I could throw it in my luggage, finish it there, and then leave it with mom who said she would enjoy it.  

I remember this being a jelly roll of very cute summer prints - umbrellas, rain boots, bicycles. I took some inspiration from a tutorial at Missouri Star to make the mixture of strip blocks and stars, using colors I had in my stash that serendipitously matched for the star backgrounds. I lucked out finding a fabric for the binding (years later) that coordinates pretty well. Happy to have this one done - it has for sure been one of the primary mental blocks in the closet whenever I've considered starting a new quilt, so the mental space is growing!