Monday 14 March 2022

Yellow plaid

The colours for March in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge are yellow and gold. As I'm only making 9-patch blocks in plaids for the challenge, my choices of fabric are very limited.


I had only two fabrics to work with, and I made these six blocks with them.


The heavy flannel shirt was from my DH, and the other fabric with more yellow was a blouse my mother had sewn for herself and worn a lot.

The yellow colour makes me think of the first wild Spring flowers like coltsfoot and and dandelion, or daffodils, but we have still deep snow and night temperatures down to 8 degrees below freezing point. Luckily the sun is yellow in the bright blue sky. 

 

Saturday 5 March 2022

New finishes

I have many projects just waiting to be finished. It is always so fun to start something new, but when it takes a long time, the enthusiasm fades away and the project finds a place somewhere, usually a bit out of sight, and is forgotten. This box of embroidery floss is a perfect example. I have inherited, received as gift and bought embroidery floss over the years, and tried to keep them in one place.


As you can see, the place is an old shoe box, and my system is not very organized. I was thrilled to find these plastic bobbins online, and when they arrived at the beginning of last year, I started to organize my collection.


It was a very slow project, I found more fun doings, and the floss was forgotten for a year. Then I decided to finish it by working for an hour a day with the floss and bought another box as I could see one box would not get me very far.

Dear daughter spent last week with us, and on Thursday we sat together and organized the bobbins by colour. The DMC colour chart was not useful as I have embroidery floss from several manufacturers. Therefore we decided to use our intuition and just tried to please the eye.


Doesn't is look delicious?

My other finish was this Paper Lanterns quilt designed by Loft Creations. I made the quilt top five years ago, and this year I plan to quilt as many as possible of the tops I have waiting.


My blocks are slightly larger than in the pattern, and I used a dark background to make the lanterns glow in the dark night. This reminds me of a late Summer night when I was about ten years old. My eldest sister was coming home after a year in student exchange in the USA, our parents were meeting her at the airport and they were coming home very late in the night. We hanged paper lanterns in trees and on the washing line to welcome them.



In the photo the binding is only pinned on the backside but today it is sewn, with label and all. Two months of the year are behind, and I have finished two quilts. I hope to finish one again before the end of this month.