It's About Time

Happy New Year! Coming out of a working hibernation that started right after the Christmas holidays, that's more than a little belated. TIME. What happened to it, and who has it anymore?

My favorite area--landscape fat quarters and favorite photo of my boys, now grown

Everything here has been in flux, with lots of progress but no big finishes (except on the knitting front). That's partly due to my first major studio clean-out in 8 years. A big thank-you to the Netflix Marie Kondo series for inspiration.



 

As for the second landscape in the arched-window series, shown in my last post...

...this is how it looked by February, and I was decidedly unhappy with it at that point. The wall fabric was too close to the same tone as the forest panel, or parts of it, and some of the veins in the marble wall looked almost like tree-branch extensions! I soon realized that to give the forest and wall more separation, the raw edges I had already finished with seam sealant were going to have to be satin-stitched---something I'm not bad at doing but which adds quite a bit more TIME.

That change has now been made, and it's definitely an improvement, but I'll save that for next TIME. All that's left to do is block, trim and bind the quilt.

But while I was still pondering what to do about the landscape, a distraction project was pieced. This will be a twin-size scrappy bed quilt for the Center for Women & Families here in Louisville.
The top and batting will be quilted in three separate sections. Each section will then be quilted to a backing through the sashing only. A border will be added after trimming and joining the sections. This all takes extra TIME but will save a lot of wear and tear on my neck and shoulders.

Panel design (black-and-white) by Kathy McNeil

Another distraction project was this koi panel designed by Kathy McNeil (I think for an AQS quilt show), which I colored with watercolor pencils. After heat-setting, a thin mix of fabric medium and water was applied with a small brush, one section at a TIME, always working next to a dry section to keep the colors from blending.

The finished panel was washed in warm water with Color Catchers and I'm happy to say that none of the color bled out.









Also done was a cleaning and oiling of the (now motorized, previously treadle) Singer No. 15 that we picked up for free, and here it is in its new home in the studio. This machine was manufactured a long, long TIME ago---one-hundred and sixteen years, in fact (the maple table it now shares with my main machine is even older!). I'm anxious to piece my next bed quilt on this old beauty.

That's all there is on the quilting front for now. Hopefully I'll pick up speed from here on out (and maybe stop knitting for a while!) so I can blog more often again.

Thank you for stopping by!

Linda