April Art & Quilting

Despite taxes and lots of work for the day job I was fairly productive with my sewing and quilting in April. At the beginning of the month Blogger locked down all my blogs because of the spool art embroidery project I finished at the end of March. I got them back, but I still have no explanation why they would object to my stitching.

Kat came home unexpectedly for a friend's funeral, during which time I made and embroidered two practice pieces with scraps leftover from piecing the linen quilt.

This is the one I worked on while waiting to find out if her flight home landed safely. You can almost feel the worry coming off the stitches.

On Easter Sunday I put together this little silk piece. Okay, I admit it does look a bit like an alien one-eyed spider creature that wants to eat your face. But I'm (slowly) getting over my aversion to pink.

I also batted, backed and pinned the linen quilt, which took six hours. I am not getting any faster at this in my old age.

Starting to embroider this quilt was a joy, too.

This time around I am going to take weekly breaks from the linen quilt and do small one or two day projects so I don't get burned out on it, and my first break project was hand stitching and quilting a new mug rug for my desk.

I also made a little art quilt out of silks and taffetas for my embroidery inspiration board.

Happy May Day. :)

Comments

nightsmusic said…

Happy belated May Day! I should be so productive. Jimmy went back to work today and I have my house back so hopefully, I can get back into my routine and get something accomplished. I've felt like such a slug while he's been home. I don't know why I can't seem to get myself motivated when he's in the house all the time. Retirement is going to be a difficult thing if he decides not to work in his barn every day.

May 2, 2022 at 5:25 AM

Downsizing

This was my fabric stash once I sorted everything -- 22 full bins. I spent a day taking out and boxing up what I could part with, with the goal of trying to reduce it by half, so I'd have 11 bins. I was very strict with myself, and removed everything that for one reason or another I was sure I wouldn't be able to use. This is what I ended up with -- 12 bins of fabric that I'm keeping. It's not quite half, but close enough. Half of what I took out went to a local quilter friend, a school and Goodwill. These four tightly-packed bins will be going to the local quilting guild once I make arrangements with them for a drop-off place. I am relieved and a little sad and now determined to control my impulses to thrift more fabric. I don't want to do this again, so until I use up six bins, I can't for any reason bring any new fabric into the house.

In Progress

I promised myself I would show you the good, bad and ugly of my cleaning this year. This is what it looks like when you dump thirty years' worth of stashed fabric on the floor -- and oy, what a pain in the butt to pick up again! This is what it looks like after it's been sorted, folded and placed in containers, which took me about a week. Now the hard part is to downsize my stash by at least half, I think (that's my goal, anyway.) I've already e-mailed the president of the local quilting guild, a local friend who is a quilter, and a public school art teacher I know to see if I can donate some of the excess to them. The rest will go to Goodwill. Already I've reduced my vintage textiles from two bins to one, and my scraps from three bins to one. It's probably the hardest clean-out I've done, which is why I saved it until last. I know I have too much fabric, more than I can use in my lifetime -- but at the same time, I love it. So I have to

Other Stashes

Along with clearing out the spare bedroom and tidying my office and our guest bedroom, I decided to reorganize some of my stashes. This is all the yarn I have on hand, sorted by color. It looks like a lot, but lately I've been using up a minimum of half a bin every month, so this is approximately a year's supply. All of my solid color cotton perle thread. I go through a lot of this every year, too. I need a container in which I can fit all of it together, but I haven't found the right one yet. I won't show you all of my fabric -- I'm still reorganizing this stash -- but I went through everything and donated two bins of fabric I won't need to the local quilter's guild.

Valerean

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