First Monday in 2021. I had a productive weekend, I don’t know if it was because the weather was rainy and cold, or I was actually inspired to sew and finish stuff. Not that I haven’t been sewing stuff lately, maybe because I had a few things that could be finished. I made the string blocks for the Grassy Creek clue. I made a foray into deep stash and found lots of grays, too bad my neutral stash isn’t that deep anymore. I am starting to think that this quilt will be mostly grays with pops of the other colors. Looking back at the yardage requirements, 5 Yards of grays, yeah, I think I should have read that more closely. But, I have more gray than I thought and the only gray based quilts I have made are Gravity and the Meeting of the Geese. I have to adjust my mental picture of this quilt.
I got the Thicket 3 quilt quilted and bound. I think it took longer to get it on the frame and the digital design set up than it took to actually quilt it. The design is called modern rounded diamonds, it probably could be a little more dense, but I wanted the quilt to be drape-y and soft. The Santa hat quilt is also bound and waiting for a photo shoot. I want to stage it in front of the tree, and if I’m feeling especially, um photographically inspired, I’ll dig out the other Christmas quilts and refresh their listings too.
Other starts this weekend were a hat and a puzzle. I gifted myself two puzzles this year, a 2000 piece Thomas Kinkade one called ‘Santa’s – something’ and the ‘Festival of Quilts’ one with 7 Bonnie Hunter quilts featured. The Santa puzzle is really difficult, Kinkade may say he’s a painter of light, but I think this means he actually makes everything else in his paintings dark. I have to work on this with two overhead lights and natural sunlight. I got the border done, and I am working on the cottage and center. I think I may have to sort the rest of the pieces by color, especially the sky and snow areas. The hat yarn and pattern was an impulse purchase from Bare Naked Wools. I am on their mailing list, and the do have nice patterns, mostly to show off their yarns, which are solids of natural colors with some dyed reds, greens, and blues. The yarn is called Stone Soup, I think because it contains a bunch of different fibers:
DESCRIPTION
Stone Soup DK Stone soup is a unique blend of rambouillet, columbia, lincoln, navajo-churro, alpaca, silk, bamboo, tencel, bison, and llama, which offers exotic color, tweedy texture, and crisp stitch definition. This fiber blend is 95% produced and entirely spun in America.
Sounds good, right? And it is really soft and bouncy and a pretty oatmeal color. My issue is the plethora of tiny sticks, seed hulls and grassy bits in it. It makes it almost itchy, I definitely would not want cowl or close to the body sweater out of it. When I fist started the hat, I was picking the bits out, but they just keep popping up. I’m going to finish the hat, wash it and see how it goes from there. I wanted to gift it to a friend at the end of the month, but who would want to wear a hat that was so scratchy?
I made a little progress on the Cat cross stitch, I am trying to catch all the missing stitches, the random one stitches. They take a while to stitch, threading, anchoring, stitching, anchoring and clipping. But I confess to changing a few, to similar colors, as they were close enough to jump too. Looking forward to finishing this. I had to buy some interfacing at Joanns yesterday, so I perused the stitchery category and found a clip on magnifier for the hoop. I would eventually like to get one that clips on to the Ott light I have, but I haven’t seen any that would work. I could get a new Ott light, but mine is still working well after 20 years, I ordered a new bulb for it too.
My job(s) for today are to get another row quilted on the Hydrangea quilt and get the top pieced for the Jungle fabric quilt. First I have to go to the dentist for a consultation, my first time out and about since last year.
One last thing, I am making a mental effort not to make lists of UFOs, fabric and yarn purchases, stash busting or yarn use for this coming year. I think I’m going to do something easier like “loose weight” for a New Year resolution 😏
Be Kind
Touch of Grey 