Skip to main content

Now I Get Boring

I've been making slow but steady progress with hand-quilting the koi quilt. This is my favorite part of the quilt-making process, but now that I'm sharing my work with quilters and textile artists on Twitter I feel a bit self-conscious about how slow I work and how long it takes for me to finish a bigger project. I am really boring.

I know it would be faster to learn how to machine quilt, or even take my quilt to be long-arm quilted at the local indy quilting shop, but I really like stitching it by hand. It helps me improve my stitching, and just feels right for me. Also, I only do quilting for pleasure, so there's no pressure to finish anything quickly. I know professionals have to produce a lot to sell; I'm just playing with design ideas. Honestly, I don't even know what I'll do with this quilt when I finish it (probably send it to my favorite person.)

I can already tell the backing fabric was a good choice; it looks really nice quilted. Stay tuned for more snail's-pace updates on this project.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gifts

This is a story that starts out very sadly, so if you're depressed by the holidays you might want to skip the first part. As far back as I can remember I've dreaded the holidays. Being poor, having constant family troubles and belonging to a strict religion made that time of year always pretty unhappy. I just hunkered down and hoped to get through without being yelled at or punished because I didn't do something I was expected to do, like sit in church for hours without moving or making a sound while a priest spoke mass in Latin. Gifts were uniformly disappointing, too. My mother usually gave me dolls or socks or underwear for Christmas. I understand now as an adult that she was doing the best she could, and trying to save money at the same time, but as a kid I'd been told good children got what they wanted for Christmas. I was a pretty good kid, but while my friends received new bikes and cool toys and lots of treats from Santa, I didn't. I thought San

We Have Backsplash!

Yesterday my guy and I decided to chose this natural stone as the backsplash tiles for our new kitchen counters (which will be in the same quartz I'm holding at the bottom of the photo.) Since all the bids for installing the backsplash came in very high my guy is going to put it in himself; he's done a bit of tile work in the past, too. I swear there is nothing this guy can't do. :)

Detoxing Results

For twenty-four hours I left these five vintage cigar boxes sit with detoxing agents (baking soda, coffee grinds, dryer sheets, vinegar and Febreze) inside them to see which worked best to remove the tobacco/storage odors that came with them. I then removed the agents and did a sniff test. Before we get into the results, a reminder: none of what I do is ever meant to be expert advice, as I am certainly not an expert at anything. Follow my methods at your own risk, and please first consult an actual antique expert conservator or restorer to detox items that have value for you. Okay, let's see how my experiment worked. Baking soda (left) did nothing to remove the odors. I think if I let it sit for a longer period of time it might have done something, but for a 24-hour test it was a complete fail. Coffee grinds (right) removed 100% of the odors, and left behind definite coffee scent. I like that and think it goes very well with wood, but if you don't like the smel