WIP Wednesday: Plague Month

Tags

cats, Covered in Love, embroidery, Pooh, quilting, sewing, Shelby, WIP Wednesday

WAKE US WHEN IT’S OVER

WIP = Work in Progress

So I started 2018 with all sorts of ambitions and plans and fresh-new-startedness and then . . . I got sick.

Actually, my honey got sick first, right after Xmas.  And he’s STILL sick, which will give you an idea of what sort of ugliness we’ve been dealing with here.

so . . . very . . . droopy

I SEEM to be getting better in a sort of two-steps-forward-one-step-back way, but we’ll see.  I’m hoping to avoid the second act–starring antibiotics and Prednisone–that my honey’s going through.  😦

I have managed to sew a bit during the plague, though, so let’s talk about that.

I had two Xmas presents to finish up, so those were my first priority.

The first was this embroidery for my buddy Heidi.

Terrible lighting on this is not doing it justice, but I was in a hurry.

Here’s a slightly less shadowy one I took before I bordered and framed it:

This design was a coloring page over here and it immediately made me think of Heidi’s lovely back garden with her cats peeking out of it.  I did this in more muted colors to (hopefully!) suit her taste; most is backstitch, with a little lazy daisy on the smaller leaves and outline stitch on the outline of the cat and the yellow flower.  Very fun to do, but I deliberated too long on starting it and so it wound up late.  She loved it, though!

And I also finished the wall quilt for my partner’s sister:

Finished size is about 16″ x 20″.

I did sort-of-but-not-quite matchstick quilting on this to enhance the sense of horizontal motion.  I skipped over the triangles with the quilting because I didn’t want to obscure the piecing in them, which is really my favorite thing about this quilt.  I used the tip here to start with drawn lines 2 1/2″ apart, then fill in the space between them.

Close-up on the piecing here, because I really need to try this again sometime.  I love the balance of simplicity and subtle detail in this quilt.

I finished the quilt up about the time I got sick.  So what to do now?  I wanted to make something but I didn’t trust myself to manage anything that might require brain power.

I decided to take a stab at some charity quilt blocks.

These are for the block drive happening over here for a charity called Covered in Love that provides quilts for the families of people who die in the hospital.  I’ve been wanting to do some charity sewing, and easy string blocks like these are a fun way to do that.  I’m using some old pillowcases (came in a box of random linens from my Buy Nothing group) as the foundation and lots of bright scraps for the piecing.  I’m up to eight blocks now and have barely made a dent in the box of strings I collected for this, so we’ll see how many I can churn out in the next six weeks or so.

There’s also been some progress on my flannel PJs, but I’ll leave that for next week.  Until then, wash your hands and stay safe, friends.

STH