Man, it was a great summer. There were boats, golf carts, museums, parties, trips. There was sausage making, quilt making, knitting, baking, and a lot of quality time with far flung folks after a couple of years of relative distance and isolation. And the two projects that loomed over all of it were the secret quilts.
Two young relatives found out their families were expecting at the same time, due at the same time, so some quilts were in order. One wanted a blue theme and the other asked for green.
Quilt #1: Blue
For the blue quilt, I picked an array of solid blues, black and white prints and low volume backgrounds. I went with a carpenter’s star pattern, which yielded an easy, pleasing quilt, bound as usual with black and white striped binding from the Satin Bee.
I tend to like pretty wild variations in color and print, so this was a little on the subdued side! I hand quilted it with a little stitch-in-the-ditch and sent it off to the new baby.
Quilt #2: Green
The green quilt turned out to be a more difficult creative challenge. Green is one of my favorite colors, but when I’m dreaming about fabric and yarn I tend to go for high contrast dyes and super bright pinks and yellows. So, choosing fabric for this one at all was the big challenge. I went back to Blue Bar several times to fret over my fabric choices, got more FQs and fretted some more. I finally decided I was being weird about it and got to work on a classic scrappy HST quilt.
I paired a lighter and darker triangle for each HST, then arranged the dark and light halves of the HSTs into diamonds. I bound it with more B&W binding and tied it off with variegated embroidery thread. It’s a little wackier than the other, but as a wacky quilt fan, I was happy with it. I hope the recipients like it too.
Since these were gifts, I didn’t engage in my usual process documentation on Instagram. Some process photos below.
Sharon gets her groove back
After the initial shock of the shutdown, I spent a lot of pandemic time trying to recover my creative groove. One tactic that turned out to be pretty fruitful was pulling out older unfinished projects and giving them a whirl with new eyes. Since then, I’ve been trying to project manage an old piece alongside a new piece to keep things moving.
The one lingering piece that I cannot seem to get done is the Find Your Fade shawl. It’s a gigantic shawl made of sock yarn in mostly garter stitch. The Hedgehog Fiber yarn I’m using for this piece is beautiful, but your girl just cannot get excited about this much garter stitch. It’s been on the needles for going on three years, and my goal is to have her done by the new year. Wish me luck.
