General Update

So it turns out my interest in blogging is hampered by my lack of interest in taking photos every step of the way.  I will have to start training myself to do so.

Quilting activities will remain pretty slow until October, when I will hopefully finally have a room to myself.  In the meantime I will be doing needlepoint, which requires considerably less space.  So if I get off my butt enough to take pictures of that I will upload them.  I am currently in the middle of two needlepoints.  One is of macaws, it's very pretty but I have been working on it for a number of years because I am crippled by indecisiveness when it comes to what stitches to use for each of the different background plants in the image.

The other needlepoint, which I have just barely started, is a needlepoint tuffet.  It's 8 separate canvases, a massive undertaking.  I hope to get one canvas done per year.  I am very intimidated because it's incredibly detailed and is going to require a lot of new stitches and techniques that I have never tried before.  At the same time I am excited by the beautiful design and the promise of a lasting heirloom once I actually finish it.

Above: the one fish I have actually done on my new needlepoint.

So those are the two projects I will probably be working on for the next few months.  In the short term, while I have the use of my mom's sewing room I made her a purse, following a pattern that I received for Christmas (I'm not yet skilled enough to try much of anything off-pattern).  I originally made myself a purse with this pattern a few months ago, and my mom was really excited by my choices of colors.  Colors have definitely always been my strong suit and picking out fabrics is pretty much my favorite part of any quilt (hence the reason I'm not a big fan of kits...they take out the best part!) and my mom felt that the fabrics I had chosen for my purse were never colors she would have thought to pick...but together they looked really nice.  Below are photos of my original purse.

So when it came to my mom's purse we picked colors together and I was very happy with the final product (I added in a few improvements over mine, such as store-bought handles and a cell-phone pocket) but she was a bit disappointed in the colors because the outer pocket takes up once entire side of the purse (as you can see with the teal above), essentially obscuring the main fabric which was her favorite part.  So I just told her to carry the purse backwards, with the pocket towards her, so that the side that is entirely main fabric will be facing out.  Anyways, you learn with every project.

My next projects are to do some machine quilting.  My mom is just finishing up a paper-pieced fish wallhanging that she would like for me to quilt for her.  Additionally, I need to eventually quilt my Stairway to Cat Heaven quilt, although that is a far ways off I think.  I want to buy a big thing of cheap muslin and just do a ton of free motion practice before I quilt anything for real.

So anyways, that's a brief update.  Hopefully I'll get around to taking some more photos and uploading them here.  Expect infrequent updates until October.