flat and prickly

Hi!  I’m still here - well you know this to be true, because you’ve just read about Saturday’s emergency crewel.  But I’ve been a bit quiet - a bit like my quilts - flat, heavy and full of prickly pins.

And I worked Sunday and Monday - and I’ve done almost no sewing.  Mmmmm…

So today was time to get out of the rut - and I almost did.

I bought a new cd to jolly me along …

… and it is wonderful - very, very sweet - Kimya Dawson is such a treat - the funniest, poignant, truthful lyrics - and childlike - and very romantic at the end - makes me smile.

I had a pretty ruby grapefruit for morning tea …

… it took me the rest of the day to throw out these ends they were so pretty.

I admired Mary Margaret who’s all sewn up and on the Laura Ashley chair (with loathsome piping that I will never, ever, ever, ever use again - please, stop me if I try!)

And then I decided to finish quilting a basted quilt from last year before I started quilting any of my new flimsies.

What an odd quilt!  And look at that horrible machine quilting!  Ugh!  So I ripped it out and started hand quilting the centre square. But it looked frightful - pokey, uneven, ugly stitches, so I ripped them out and decided to try machine quilting again.  I tried for about - oooh I don’t know, 10 minutes -  and it looked truly frightful so I cried.

Then I got a bit of a grip :-), played the Juno cd again, and decided to find an online tutorial for how to hand quilt properly (as opposed to stabbing!) with a hoop.

And do you know, I sat myself down, and carefully followed the instructions, step by step, and by the end of an hour, I was able to rock that needle back and forth!  My stitches are long - but mostly even - and the stitches on the back are almost always much bigger than the pinpricks they were earlier!

The quilt is still revoltingly heavy and huge - it is a cotton batting.  I almost considered ripping the batting out and replacing it with thin, light wool, but that would have been extravagant and wasteful - so I’m perservering.

I wouldn’t say I’m over my flat, prickliness - but it feels good to write some posts, and read other people’s stories (I hadn’t even read my bloglines for 3 DAYS!!!).  And I have a lot to be thankful and cheery for - I mean, look around block-a-day- what a hard life I have - NOT!

So tomorrow - I’m going to do some more quilting - an hour’s practice each morning.  And then, I might get out the civil war blocks - I think I’m going to do all the ones I like and are do-able and then turn them into a sampler border on a medallion quilt - what do you think?

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