Erica's Stitches

It is now officially spring.  On March 26, 2011 I spotted the first pasque flower of the year. It has been an incredibly dry winter and I don't expect to see as many flowers as last year.  Usually the pasque flowers are sprouting everywhere and so far I've only spotted a few clumps. If you look out the window it is bright and sunny and I'm tempted to put on shorts and a T-shirt.  But, the sun holds no heat.  With jeans, sweater and fleece jacket it was too cold to stay out for long. But the flower is a sign.  Warmer weather should be coming along any time in the next 3 months.

Here is a started project I purchased at a White Elephant Sale.   There's not much to look at right now. But, the stitched area will be about 2 by 3 inches and contain a flower arrangement. The instructions are not dated.  The paper is yellowed.  Nothing appears to have been computer generated.  The newest book in the bibliography was published in 1976 so the pattern must be newer than that date. The big clue to age comes from some of the floss in the kit. The first and third skeins are from my collection the rest are from the kit.  Notice the top and bottom edge of the labels - they are black not gold.  The lettering is also bigger.  But, the differences are subtle. Not so much the bottom half - the new labels are much longer.  Instead of just the basic information, there is now a bar code, web address and the universal care symbols.  100% cotton appears in many languages (at least I assume it translates to 100% cotton). The bi...

My Shamrock Sampler is complete.  I used a beautiful green over dyed silk.  For the red/brown color I used 2 different silks randomly to create the illusion of an over dye.  The top is mostly the lighter color and the bottom is mostly the darker color. To make the sampler look more faded and older, I wanted to tea dye it.  Unfortunately, I didn't know what to expect from the silks.  The green specifically stated that it might not be colorfast and I had no idea about the reds. So, I staged a test.   I wet a paper towel and rolled in some snippets of each thread.  No bleeding of the color!  Next, I poured on some tea and still no bleeding! So, I dribbled tea all over the sampler, more on the bottom then the top and hoped.  The silks still didn't bleed!  I love the antique look.  I wonder how it will fade over time. At the same time I got the chart, years ago, a friend inherited a bag of tie scraps and I took some to make a ...

It's that time of the year again - the white elephant sale. Besides the usual donations there were a lot of really big donations. Bins and bins of patterns. Boxes of books. Yards of fabric, threads and yarns.  Notions.  This and that.  From one stash to another.  Yes, I brought some home with me. There must have been hundreds of charts.  Each chart represents a potential - a project that someone wanted to do but never did.  I like the ones that were started and abandoned.  I get a sense of accomplishment from finishing, even if I didn't start. Imagine all the hours of potential labor represented in those boxes?  Even worse, imagine if every chart ever made were stitched.  How much wall space would be necessary to display it all? Hmm, wonder what I should work on next?

I haven't written about my latest quilt in a while.  The quilt has 17 big squares ,   24 nine patches and 57 flying geese .   Since then I've add 2 square in a squares, assembled it, added borders and basted.  Now I'm trying to decide how to quilt it.  It's a smaller quilt so I'd like to do something more adventuresome than stippling. I'm getting inspiration from the fabric.  Here is one of the main background fabrics (rather busy, isn't it?). The ribbons and flowery vine should be easy to machine quilt and make an interesting design. I could either quilt it randomly or go put the ribbons in the ditch and the flowers over the blocks.  So many decisions to make.  That's OK, it will take a while for me to work up to the actual quilting.

My "band" sampler is getting closer to done.  It's been a long and winding road. The bands are supposed to be 2 by 6 inches.  MIne are 2 inch squares.  Part of the decision was to use up scrap linen.  Another part was to make the stitching go faster.  Finally, it was a challenge to shrink the designs. Initially, I was going to sew the 6 squares together to make cubes.  I thought a pair of stitched dice would be a good idea.  I changed my mind.  The ground fabrics turned out to be of different counts and it seemed like too much work. Instead, I pondered the idea of sewing the squares into a quilt.  I almost scrapped that because it also seemed like too much work but I didn't have any other ideas. I was planning on more than 12 squares, but when I started arranging the squares some didn't fit in with the others (they'll go into something else).  I replaced them with other squares that fit in better. Next challenge was to pi...

I stitched on my travel kit while waiting in the airport.  I worked on the border.  It was simple enough that I could stitch without referring back to the pattern. There are other sections that it would be more fun to work on, but they involve more counting and attention to detail. Usually I like to stitch the border last.  So, I was very relieved that after stitching all of the vine the border connected back to itself.  I hate ripping.  I was even able to fill in some of the shamrocks.  I have many more to go. When I got this pattern, it was a free download, but the link now yields only a "sorry this page could not be displayed".  But I did find a link to a picture of a finished sampler . The design is "An Irish Shamrock Sampler" by Lucy Lyons Willis of La Chatelaine Designs.