First, a long time WIP (although truthfully there was not a lot of progress being made). I started this shortly after I got my longarm which is now a year and a half old already! It is going to be a cover for a piece of foam insulation we use in our bedroom window at night in the winter and to block the solar gain in the summer. It began as necessity when we bought our little old house with single pane glass, but adds insulation to our better quality windows now. We use very little heating or cooling as our adobe house tends to hold the temperature pretty well. I had intended to do a lot of handstitching on the wool, being inspired by Spiritcloth whose work and blog I really enjoy. My hands don't cooperate, and now I'm just trying to finish the hand quilting on the one mountain on the right, having put it back on the longarm and doing a lot of texturing on the other mountains.
This next project turned out better than expected. It's to be a donation quilt. It was hand pieced and had been languishing in my friend Pat's stash. It wasn't her work, nobody would even think it was if they had seen it! I had this idea to quilt it heavily to hold it together. Four to five (big, longarm) bobbins worth of thread later, I had invested too much into it to quit, and had to persevere, and finish. I've since told Pat to remind me that a pantograph would have been adequate for it. If nothing else, all that thread should keep someone warm, and it looks okay from a distance.
And another project which had a deadline, a wall hanging for Pat's birthday. I used one of the "santos" in a panel of three that she gave me, and then a lot of found treasures from the house she bought in Willard. I'm always looking for and finding buttons, coins, and bits of glass around our house. I continued that when we went to do some yard cleanup at her place. I imagine (and because I'm already of an age where I can make up stories--or should that be, again of an age) that a child must have dumped out his mother's button jar, because most of the buttons were found right outside the entrance to the outbuilding which I have dubbed her studio. There was also a little toy truck tire and some less than stellar treasures that I didn't use. Oh, and the bamboo cane it's hanging from was found in the attic by the guy that did the roofing. Time for lunch! I'll try better to be one of those people.
