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!

kodachrome finished

As predicted, it did not take very long to put the final touches on this awesome quilt. I bound it with the same print I used on the back which is this whimsical sewing notions print that I wish I could get more of. I don't even remember where I got it! 

I love everything about this quilt and I am really proud of it. This was perhaps my first project where I have tamed this many scraps into something cohesive, deliberately designed, and yet still delightfully scrappy and chaotic looking. It is also a sweet memory capsule of so many prints and projects of the past, as scrap quilts can be. It feels very appropriate for this quilt to be the one that built the bridge to my way back to quilting and creativity. I feel it deserves a much longer discussion, but perhaps when one has lived with the process for so long, what else is there to say? It is done. It is wonderful. And it is loved.

kodachrome quilting

And April was the month of wresting a rainbow into a sewing machine. 

I can walk to the local library, and I am thrilled that they have a well stocked crafting section. There are a lot of great volumes on fiber arts including a great selection of quilting books. One book in particular, Walk: Master machine quilting with your walking foot by Jacquie Gering, was an incredible find. The pages show all kinds of creative ideas for straight line quilting and they are designed in a way that is achievable on a home sewing machine. I am looking forward to trying many of them out. 

For this quilt, I took advantage of the regular geometry of the top to try out this nested chevron pattern. It kind of reminds me of the Star Trek logo or a flying geese unit. It is difficult to see in the picture of the full quilt top, but the overall effect of the angled lines against the rectangles is one of movement. I'm so glad I chose something different than just mirroring the rectangles to make it more interesting. And I didn't have to mark anything!

The dark thread color I chose looks equally good on the warm fabrics as well as the cool ones. It of course disappears more on the darker cool fabrics while maintaining that texture that the eye can pick up even without seeing the thread. Quilting is always the hardest part for me, the trimming and binding will be the reward!

 

moths can be pretty too

This has been a really nice project as winter has given way to spring - I started this on February 17 and tied off the last knot as April began. Finishing the needlepoint flowers felt like a triumph that deserved an encore, and I remembered that I have a foursome of embroidery kits with whimsical nature motifs. Checking them out, this moth seemed like one of the simpler options, so away I went. And just look at those colors!! So cheerful. 

As I stitched in the early stages I wondered what on earth would posses someone to design something with a moth in it. After several layers of color and weeks of progress, I got it. What a delightful thing! The rusty tan that makes up the bulk of the wings seemed like an unusual choice until I got the blues and greens added, then I really liked it. I have also reconfirmed for myself that satin stitch stresses me out, and the filler stitching is a bummer, too. Flowers are much more fun! I actually expected to like the stems and leaves the least of all but it turns out that adding them in a final flourish at the end was quite pleasant.

For now, it is finished and I am not certain what I will do with it. I am likely going to work up the other three (at some point...) and then finish them all off in their hoops and hang on my wall somewhere. They may also end up in a quilt, or as something else. I am leaving open the possibilities. A collection of some kind would be really pretty. Tiny pillows? We'll see. 

gentle reintroduction

I took stock of my sewing room recently. I have a lot of quilt tops. Like - a lot! They are all neatly hung in the closet waiting their turn out of the way, but they do feel "in the way" mentally. Whenever I think of starting a new sewing project, I feel them staring out at me suggesting that I might consider finishing something first. And so we baste. 

I already had batting measured and cut for this quilt top, and the piece is on the smaller side compared to some of the other things in there, so it felt like a gentle reintroduction to sandwich and baste just this one. 

I fell in love all over again with the design and the rainbow of colors. It was fun to see all the bits of fabrics from projects-gone-by and to remember how proud I was of myself when I had the gumption to actually cut and organize all of those rectangles. 

I might not know how I want to quilt it yet, but getting it to this point feels like an accomplishment and a significant toe dip back into this room after a long hiatus. 

stitching my way back

I started this panel in August 2023. I can remember how quiet the house was. With Dave and both cats gone, there seemed to be so much space both physically and mentally. I wasn't quite certain what to do with it all. So I stitched. 

One evening I thought to myself - what haven't I been doing that I have wanted time for? Well, so many things. But one of them was making. Crafting, creating, playing with color. Sewing seemed like such a big undertaking, I didn't want to work on any of the knits in progress I had, so this needlepoint kit felt right. It was self contained, did not seem to require much brainpower, and would set me on the path to filling time with more than my circular thoughts about how much had changed and whether it would be for the better. 

I got this from DMC as part of a tranche of goodies I got to order on their dime after my 2020 National Embroider Month project won a contest. It's funny that I can so vividly remember working on that project - it was February 2020 and a time that felt so unaware of what was to come next. Despite the retrospective poignancy, it was also a project that helped me settle a then-anxious mind and accomplish something I never imagined I could. And so perhaps this needlepoint was more than appropriate for the moment given that connection. 

It took much longer than I thought it would, but I did enjoy the making. Once I got to the flower petals, it was absorbing and enjoyable, and filling in that deep dark brown was especially satisfying. It is quite large and is intended to be a pillow. I'm not quite certain how to get it from this to pillow cover yet. It seems to me that the canvas would be gnarly for a needle to work through? Will puzzle it out at some point! If not, it would make a fine framed piece of art.