Bein' Green

Happy Summer Solstice!  

It's summer....and I'm thinking about greens: apples, grapes, grass, leaves and pine needles, olives, Kermit the Frog, mint ice cream, watermelon, beans, peas, frogs, and all those lovely leafy salad greens.

My green card for our Rainbow Connection project is finished....and I'm pretty happy with the stitched starburst design. 

I have a push punch that allows me to punch a hole in the middle of a piece of paper....it kind or works like a drill.

It comes with three punch sizes....and it worked perfectly to punch the center holes for my startbursts.

I opted to keep the border simple....just a piece of green card stock with a darker green stitch line.  I did tuck a piece of black paper between the layers so the holes would show up more.  

It's subtle....but I wanted the holes to be one of the features.

Green card for the Rainbow Connection project.  ✅

Here's the back!

"It's not easy bein' green!"

Perfect quote for the Rainbow Connection project!

It's Not Easy Bein' Green

Kermit the Frog

It's not that easy bein' green

Having to spend each day the color of the leaves

When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow, or gold

Or something much more colorful like that

It's not easy bein' green

It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things

And people tend to pass you over cause you're

Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water

Or stars in the sky

But green's the color of spring

And green can be cool and friendly-like

And green can be big like an ocean or important

Like a mountain, or tall like a tree

When green is all there is to be

It could make you wonder why, but why wonder why

Wonder, I am green and it'll do just fine, it's beautiful

And I think it's what I want to be

Snowy Coast

A beautiful view and a little slow stitching.....life is good on the snowy coast of Maine. 

More Slow Stitching

I've still been enjoying a little slow stitching in the evenings now and then.....continuing with the English paper piecing squares.

This time I'm using batiks.....I love the vibrant colors and textured patterns. When I get a good variety of colors I'll start stitching them together. 

But I also did a little experiment with some metallic fabrics and made a little Christmas tree ornament.  What I like most about it is that it is all done by hand....while slow stitching.

After I stitched the squares together  I added a felt backing.....a little stuffing and a few beads.

I made it for my friend Anne....we were supposed to get together with her and her husband Dana this evening....but ended meeting virtually instead....but I did show it to her on screen.  

Anne had given me this little bauble she made in an online class with Izzy Moore....and I wanted to make something for her tree.  

Slow Finishing

I generally have several projects going at the same time...flipping back and forth leaving many of them partly done for months...or years.  I like the variety....but it's nice to finish something once in a while.

I settled in last evening for several hours of slow stitching....or maybe I should say....slow finishing. 

This post is about my process....so if the details make your head spin....move on and enjoy your day.  

Once I got my mug rug the size to hold a small plate...I was ready for backing and binding. This is what the back looked like once I took out all the paper pieces.

I didn't want to machine stitch on a binding and lose some of the border squares in the seam allowance. But I did want a binding because I like how it frames a quilt....I had to think this through.

If I do another one I will leave the edges of the squares along the outside unfolded so I can machine sew on a binding. 

To solve the issue on this one I cut a piece of stiff batting a little bit bigger than the quilt to create a border that the binding would wrap around.

I auditioned several fabrics for the border...and liked this black and white stripe the best.  It seemed to give it a little whimsy and was a nice contrast to all the colors.

I pressed one edge of the binding and hand stitched it onto the quilt with little whip stitches just like I attached the squares. I mitered the corners as I stitched.  Then I basted it on the batting and fabric backing.

I liked the addition of the black and white...so decided to hand quilt it by stitching in the ditch along each seam with black thread.  I couldn't rock my needle because the batting was too stiff...so it was up then down for each stitch....true slow stitching. I'm not all that great at hand quilting....but it worked out OK.

My binding was a little wide...but I just went with it and folded and stitched it to the back.

My apple with cinnamon snack was the test drive this afternoon. 

And this evening with a cup of tea....I officially got "below the fold" and can flip my paper over for the below the fold 1/2 of the puzzle.  

I will do a few things differently the next time around...but this tiny first English paper pieced project is finished and I enjoyed every slow stitching minute.

Gayle, a blog reader and quitler, contacted me a few days ago to cheer me on.  She's made two twin size English paper pieced quilts and has enough hexagon squares done for 1 or 2 more.  One can dream!

Colorful Squares and Circles

"She forgot about time and remembered to fill her days with everything she loved best." Brian Andreas

By the time many of you read this it will be Thanksgiving....and I wish you a delightful and joyful day....however you celebrate. Margie will join us for turkey and the fixings....interesting conversation....and a competitive game of dominoes.

I'm in love with the puzzle on my table....colorful marbles are one of my favorite things. 

And I'm auditioning the size of my little mug rug slow stitching project.  I want it big enough for a small plate....so another row or two should do it.  

All these colorful squares and circles makes me smile.

"I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way...things I had no words for."  Georgia O'Keeffe

Slow Stitching

Slow stitching is an ancient practice....but the term is relatively new. To slow stitch is to take time to mindfully create something by hand with a just needle and thread...or other tools of the trade. "It focuses on intention and the joy brought from creating...not so much the final result of the piece itself."

I have always enjoyed the mindfully mindless task of hand stitching.....of any kind. And I'm quite fond of this new term... so I'm going to incorporate slow stitching into my life on a regular basis...in a variety of ways. There are dozens of things in my head.

My new English paper piecing project is a perfect segue....and will be filling in the nooks and crannies of my days. And the colorful little pieces on the arm of my chair are just an added bonus.

https://slowstitching.com/

English Paper Piecing

I've always been intrigued with postage stamp quilts made from tiny stamp size fabric scraps...especially the ones that are made by hand rather than a machine.

Shirley, a friend from Lexington exhibited a postage stamp quilt in a show that I posted about here: 

https://joyfulputtering.blogspot.com/2018/10/glueing-and-waiting.html

I've always wanted to give it a try.

I've been re-inspired by Sarah Cooper's English paper piecing as a way to make a postage stamp quilt. Everytime I see a post about it on her Instagram Page....I say to myself...."I'm going to give that a try"......but never have.  Just recently I saw another post from Sarah....and at about 9:00 pm I decided it was time to finally give it a try. Not my best time of day for creating....but I needed to seize my enthusiasm.  This is Sarah's quilt in progress and it can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWdvy54rb6s/

English paper piecing is a technique where you wrap and baste fabric around a paper template then hand stitch the pieces together.  It's become quite popular with hexagon quilting.  I found this image and instructions here: https://www.allpeoplequilt.com/how-to-quilt/piecing/how-to-english-paper-piecing?

I grabbed a few swatches of blue fabrics and some punched paper squares and just winged it based on what little I knew.  Immediately I could tell this was something I was going to enjoy.

I'll share a bit about my process in a minute....but what I love about this technique is how much easier it is to work with small pieces...and how perfectly (or nearly so) you can match the corners. I could NEVER do that with machine stitching.

In the light of day....I was compelled to use more vibrant colors....so pulled more fabric swatches and put together a little box ready to go.  

It seemed almost decadent....but I took a little time this afternoon.....watched TV and thoroughly enjoyed myself hand sewing more little squares.

The fabric squares are roughly cut bigger than my 1 inch paper squares....which I just punched out of scrap paper.  Last night I was making more stitches than needed...today I learned that just a few were needed to hold the fabric around the paper square. Once the squares are sewn together the basting gets pulled out and the paper removed.

This was the lineup on the arm of my chair in the early afternoon light.  It just makes me happy.

And now I'll share the back of the blue chunk  from last night.  I have only taken out the basting stitches and removed the paper on the middle two squares....they are the only ones that are completely enclosed with stitches.

And this is where I landed this afternoon with the colors...just starting to sew some squares together. I would love to think I could make a full size quilt this way....Shirley's had 6,715 pieces....and that's a little daunting! For now I'm going to think small and maybe make these into a mug rug/coaster. This paper piecing hand work will be the perfect project to take on the road and when I'm having tea with my stitching buddies....or in the evenings watching TV.  What was I waiting for?