Caribbean Blue

Here

Sometimes, when the sun hits the lake at the right angle on a day like today, it almost looks like a Caribbean blue. Almost? Well...

There

...you decide. This is Willemstad, Curaçao, and the photo is courtesy of this website. Willemstad is the inspiration for a new project that has totally jumped the queue despite my best efforts to suppress it. This pile of fabric has been sitting on the corner of my sewing table for over a week now:

It is clear that I won't get anything else done until I deal with it. Although it was published in 2005, I just bought Home Sweet Home by Barb Adams and Alma Allen a couple weeks ago after I saw a finished version of the quilt over on the Den Haan & Wagenmaker's blog here. So I have some "Double Dutch" inspiration to blame! Did the Dutch blog give rise to the Willemstad connection? Maybe. All I know for sure is that I really wanted to use a supersaturated blue background, and some bright Caribbean colours:

The weather forecast for Toronto is well below freezing all next week, but I'm hoping these colours will keep me warm! Now that I've bowed to the inevitable, I'm hoping to get the houses blocked in quickly. I needed a real applique project, after all. Wasn't it one of my New Year's resolutions? ;)

The Awl Saves the Day

So, as you can see, my embroidered wall quilt L'Herbier is back on track. In the last post I'd had a challenging day stitching the ribbon embroidery through the two tightly-woven layers of fabric in the circles.

In the introduction to one of my silk ribbon embroidery books, one of the recommended tools is an awl, so you can "pre-drill" the holes for the ribbon. After the first day, I remembered that I have one!

A year or two ago I bought this for $1.99 at a hole-in-the-wall fabric store that mainly sold lycra and sequins for costumes. I recall that I thought it would come in handy one day. It sure has! Today's stitching was a piece of cake.

I'm so relieved! The muslin lining was otherwise so nice and useful, with a great hand, that I really didn't want to give it up. So now it can be full steam ahead! Whew!