Rayen

For my first quilting project of September I decided to do some stitch practice to see where my hands are, and picked two large squares from my basket of vintage fabric from the Coop to make a mug rug. I just sandwiched these squares with some batting and stitched. I used holographic light gold thread and the smallest, sharpest quilting needle I have, and stitched for a couple of hours without too much fuss. My thumb and forefinger are in pretty good shape right now, so I was able to handstitch the entire block. The stitching is not what it should be, but it helped to do it the way I wanted to. Now I can move on to machine quilted projects without too much angst, I think.

One of my aspirations for fall is to use the time to creatively heal. Crochet has been absolutely amazing for me this past year, and I am very grateful for how much it's helped me deal with my ongoing struggle with arthritis-induced limitations. Yet I'm still fighting myself and my dislike of how little I can hand stitch anymore, and the fallout is that I'm not quilting much at all. It's time to fall back in love with sewing, with my sewing machine, with fabric, and with making things from fabric. I don't have to hand stitch to quilt, and I know it. Fabric still grabs my heart. I have, do and always will love fabric. That's the place to start, because 1) I already have a lot of fabric and 2) I still want to make things with it. The other thing I haven't been thinking about is how good it feels to work with fabric and turn it into something. I love that, even when I don't hand stitch it. When I made the mat for my nephew's dog...

For my calendar project's September tote I have to first decide which fabric I want to use, and I have a couple of candidates. This basket of vintage fabric that I got at the Coop keeps tempting me to use at least some of it for patchwork. I also have no bad feelings about it. I also have this table cloth I thrifted originally for a summer tote that I have yet to use (I'm not sure I can cut it up. It's really pretty.) The brown shorts on top of this pile of thrifted pants was part of an idea I wanted to try -- recycling an item of intact clothing into a bag -- but I'm not sure I can make it work like I see it in my head. Anyway, I need to pick a fabric first before I get started, and out of these three possibilities the basket of fabric is the most appealing (and it's already cut up!) So I will use that for the September tote.

My nephew is obsessed with the Miami Dolphins. I remember being the same way when I was a kid, when the NFL was not as it is today but a truly remarkable and exciting sport (as an adult I found out the inidividual cost of that sport for the players, and my hero worship abruptly died.) Anyway, because I understand his obsession I agreed to make him a quilted table runner for his house using licensed Dolphins fabric and the team's colors. So we visited Michaels, where I picked up some bleached muslin, Kona solids and embroidery floss in the team's colors for the project. My nephew likes this runner I quilted some years ago, which features friendship star patchwork, and asked me to make his the same. Unfortunately the patchwork was actually made by someone else (I bought the top and backing fabric from an Etsy seller who has since closed her shop) and I just sewed together, quilted and embroidered the runner. Since I don't have the pattern I'll have to rever...

During our last visit to The Coop Antiques I picked up a pretty white basket for 20% off and a bunch of vintage scrap fabric, which I want to use for practice patchwork. Yes, I could use my own scrap, but I wanted fabric in new condition, which this definitely is. I only spent a few bucks on the fabric, but when I rolled out all the pieces I was a little startled by how nice and big they were. Most of them are 10" square, like they came from layer cakes. I think these are from the eighties or nineties, judging by the prints. I also picked up about a yard of vintage tile print fabric (the one on the right.) So now I have plenty of nice fabric to practice with. Maybe I'll end up making a quilt out of them.

The other day a memory came back to me of a serious incident in my twenties involving a dog attack on a neighbor's toddler. No one witnessed the attack, only the aftermath. I treated the victim, who was permanently scarred on the face because of the attack, but I also happened to know the dog's owner. The mother of the child was horrified but did not blame the dog, which I thought was extremely decent of her. The dog's owner blamed the child, which may have been justified but did not help the situation. No one knew what really happened, as the dog couldn't defend itself, and the toddler was too young to describe it. Ultimately the owner put down the dog because her spouse was afraid it would attack their young child. No one got out of that incident without serious damage. I remembered all of this while reading an article about a similar situation. What surprised me was that I had not thought about the incident in at least forty years. It really upset me....