posted by Lily on quilts

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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?