Updates

The spring cleaning is about half done, and my emptied bin count is up to fifteen now. One of them was filled with yarn that I had been saving for another of those rainy days. Only I can't knit any longer, and my ability to crochet lasts for about five minutes, at which point my fingers begin to cramp. So I boxed them up and sent the lot to a dear friend who I know will put them to good use.

In a sense I've been working my way backward through all the years I've been quilting and crafting, so it's been a retrospect of my creativity in stages. So far I've reminisced while sorting through supplies from my crocheting and knitting years, my mercifully brief jewelry-making phase, my mixed-media journaling period, my online painting class, and even my 1000 ATC project from 2012. Every time I tried something new I had fun, and learned a lot, but I always came back to quilting.

The last new craft I tried was diamond painting, which was very time-intensive but not especially fun (I think it was the plastic "diamonds", which were really hard for my arthritic hands to manage.) I'm glad I gave it a go, but it made me realize that if I'm going to put that much time into a project, it needs to be something I love.

As for the block I'm making this month for my silk crazy quilt project, since doing the patchwork I've been tied up with a project for my day job that is fun but demanding most of my time and energy. As a result for the last week I've had only about an hour at night to stitch. This is how much I've done on the center burnout silk velvet patch:

Weirdly the copper Holographic Sulky now looks golden once I'm stitched it on, but I can see the copper color a bit from an angle:

I'm trying to keep the stitches small so it likely will take another week to finish the patch. I love the effect, though, so I'm happy to work at a crawl.