Thursday, December 29, 2011

Meadow - December progress


If you haven't guessed by now, I like to have a lot of variety in my projects.  This is the needlepoint project I started this fall.  The design is by Elizabeth Bradley, and this one is from the Natural History series.  I've loved Elizabeth Bradley designs ever since I bought her books back in the late 1980s.  About five years ago I found that the kits were available online, and I've finished two so far:

Woodland

Duck Pond

My general plan is to join them into a wall tapestry, but I don't know how many I will do.  Although there are ten designs in the series, only four are available as kits.  Once I have finished all the kits I will consider if I am sufficiently inspired to keep going.  My intention is to do one each winter, because needlepoint is too hot for our Toronto summers.  Back in November I calculated that if I did about an hour a day, most days a month, I would be done by April.  I lost a lot of time in December when my allergies flared up (including my allergy to wool), but I'm hoping to get back on track now.  Monthly updates here should keep me motivated!

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

409 Yoyos!

Here they are, all 409 completed yoyos!  I am actually a little sad that this part of the project is over.  It's been fun catching up on my tv shows while making them.


The next step will be cutting the background fabric into long strips and sewing them down.  Here is a better photo of the background, a brown batik:


The pattern suggests that the yoyos be sewn down with a running stitch and strong hand quilting thread, rather than an applique stitch.  I have tested this and I like it.  If I take the stitches between the gathers I can preserve the dimensionality of the yoyos, which will be nice.  I'm really hoping that this next stage will be easy enough to do in front of the tv as well!

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Auditioning Backgrounds for my Nine Patch

This is a "repurposed" UFO that I've just started to work on again.  I cut the fabric over a year ago for a different project.  Since then I have become a convert to using washed fabrics, and none of these fabrics were washed.  I also recently realized that I made a cutting error, and cut the wrong proportion of large squares to small squares.  Then finally, I decided that it would be better to paper piece the original design, using washed fabrics.

So, what to do with all these unwashed squares?  I decided a basic nine patch would use up some of the small squares, and I will try to wash the remaining large squares to use in the paper pieced quilt.

My only remaining question was what fabric to use for the background squares.  The first is the Redwork Toile by Alex Anderson:


And the second is from the Jubilee Garden collection from Connecting Threads:


It is interesting how different they look in photos compared to real life!  In real life I immediately preferred the second one, which looks kind of plain in the photo.  But upon reflection I still will use the second one.  I don't like the way the darker lights seem to clash with the toile, and even in the photo you can see it is too busy.  The toile is beautiful, I'm sure I will think of a better use for it.

This is yet another quilt to finish before I start Sedona Star!  But I cannot order the fabric until after January 1st, so that gives me a little extra time.  In any case, Sedona Star will come first, and this quilt is in the "nice to have" category, but not essential.
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