Handy

Today was a day focused on hand-sewing projects. There was quite a bit to do.

First, I finished up the Retro Camper stitchery. This was the short embroidery project I took on during my birthday month instead of working on my "meat and potatoes" projects.

And with that done, I was ready to mount it in a wooden embroidery hoop for hanging. 

I've never actually done anything like this before, and so I used a combination of two methods for this. First, being a messy embroidery person, I decided to line the back with the same "map fabric" I used in the Happy Campers quilt. Sharon V. this one is for you:

I just spray basted it to the back of the stitchery...and you'll notice that I didn't show you the back of the stitchery. As I said, I'm a messy embroidery person, and that's all I'm going to say about it. 

Using another fabric on the back is the brainchild of Wendi over at Shiny Happy World. Only, I didn't have quite enough fabric to finish it off the way Wendi did (although that would have been preferred). And so I did it using glue the way it was done by Purl Soho over at The Purl Bee.

I don't like the way the excess fabric looks a little "chewed off", but the glue is still wet. When it dries, I'm going to try to clean it up a little with an X-Acto knife. I'm a little worried about cutting where I don't want to, and so I'll opt for "chewed off" if necessary in order to avoid settling for "cut to pieces". There's only so far I'll go for neatness. This is going to hang in our camper, after all. 

So here's how it looks from the front.

Cute, huh? The embroidery floss colors are a little washed out in this image. It looks brighter than that in person.

So then, I was feeling a little under the gun to get my piece ready to go for the hand-applique class on Saturday. This is the block I'll making:

The pattern picture is so pretty...I hope I can make it look at least close to that good. Eventually, I'd like to turn it into a table topper. Anyway...while I was out running around yesterday, I picked up the background fabric I'll be using so that I could trace the pattern onto the wrong side. We were to cut a block 18 inches (eventually trimmed to 16 1/2 inches) and then trace the pattern using a #2 pencil, thus:

That's the wrong side of a mottled cream-colored batik I'm using there. These are the rest of the fabrics that I've pulled from my stash to make the flowers and leaves:

And then I gathered up the rest of the items included on the supply list, so I'm all ready to go for Saturday. Tomorrow I'm going to make a BLT Bow Tie Pasta Salad to take as a dish to share for the potluck lunch. I think I can make all the component parts and then assemble them when it's time to eat. I made this about a month ago, and it was so good. I'm using cherry tomatoes and adding some red onion to mine.

Then, since I was fresh out of any hand work for my morning routine, it was time to get back to the "meat and potatoes" projects. I made up the next Quilting Snowlady block. The next block is called "Quilting Is a Snow Sport". Here's the picture from the pattern:

And here's the stitchery I traced out today:

Do you see where I added the cat? 

It took me a few minutes to sort of "get" what's going on in this block. See how she's hanging a finished quilt on the line...the "finish line"? Cute. I imagine she's going to take a picture of it and then write a blog post about it. That's what I would do.

So that brings me up to this moment in time. The sewing room was a total mess from working on so many projects, and I still didn't do any more work on the naughty stepchild quilt, A World Apart. I'm letting it get its mind right before I continue on with it.

And I've pretty much given up on finishing my biggest goals for the month of May, but somehow I imagine I'll live to sew another day. How about you? What did you do today?