Tuesday 31 March 2020

Precious little sewing

Locked down, like most of the world, it seems.  Ah, my foolish dreams of sewing, reading, wafting around the house thinking deep thoughts and learning fifteen new languages before lunch.  In fact (of course) I am feeding more people, more of the time, clearing and cleaning more (not my forte but even I have my standards) and spending quite a lot of time supervising school work.  Sewing, not so much.  

I am grateful, though, that so far we are all healthy and hopeful that I may eventually find a rhythm that allows for use of a sewing machine and/or needle and thread.  

In the meantime, just before this all started, I did a bit of sewing that I haven't had a chance to blog.

Sadly these are mostly pictures of that phase at the beginning of a quilt when, basically, I am still a bit stuck and am making bits in the hope that light will dawn.  

I made some hourglasses - different shapes and sizes.
Then I went away, thought about it and decided that, for now at least, I didn't want to go down that route, which felt a bit predictable.  So, second start involved lots of hourglass the same size (I use the term lightly, since they are not being measured, just eyeballed).
 Once I had a few, I could play around a bit...
 or this?
Nearly, but not quite.  Still, it feels like I am groping towards something that will satisfy me.

Maybe I will start getting up half an hour earlier, or going to bed half an hour later, and carve out some time that way.


Wednesday 18 March 2020

What I found in my boxes

I'm sitting here waiting to hear if our schools are going to be closed and wondering whether this blooming virus is going to result in extra sewing time or less.  I guess I'll know fairly soon.  

I have been rooting about and found quite a lot of fabrics that I think might go with my three shirts.  In a perfect world I would probably go out and look for another shirt, but this time I'm going to go with what I have. Probably one or two of these won't make it into the final quilt and probably I'll have to go away at some point and find something extra.  But for now, this will do.
I don't have any clear ideas, beyond hourglasses, so I'm going to make a few blocks to get myself started and wait for something to occur to me.  


Wednesday 11 March 2020

Moving swiftly on

Actually, it's more like moving on after another week of procrastinating about my hand quilting, but that's another story.  

Back to the beginning I go and this time rooting around in my shirt box turned up these three.
The nice plaid on the left means that as well as yellow, purple, white and that lovely petrol blue I could search out greens, blue, grey/black, pink-y red.  That seems like enough possibilities to send me off to see what there is in my stash.

I know this will be an hourglass quilt of some variety (since that's the current AHIQ theme) but more than that I can't yet guess. 

Tuesday 3 March 2020

And just like that...

This one is done (if only my quilting was progressing in a similar fashion).  I ran out of virtually all my original fabrics and the, to continue the theme, of most of my replacements, though to be fair they were only very small scraps.  If I had more I might have made this just a tiny bit bigger, but I haven't, so I'm calling it a finish.  And I'm fine with that, because I like this a lot.
Sadly I still can't get a really good photo that shows the fabrics off, but this is the best I could manage.  Maybe once it's quilted I'll do some close-ups.  

The hourglasses in this are a nod to the latest AHIQ challenge, though I am going to do something more hourglass-y next, or that's the plan.  In the meantime, though, on with the quilting.