Something Different

It's an early morning here, my friends. I'm getting my hair cut today, and so I'm needing to be up and around and out the door early (for me). When I woke up around 4:30 a.m., my brain went instantly into high gear thinking of all the things I need to do today...which doesn't seem like much, when you get right down to it. Nevertheless, in retirement, even small tasks can make the day seem busy, especially when leaving the house is involved. So...here we are.

It was a no quilting day yesterday. When I got home from getting my toes done, it was several hours past lunch time. There was plenty of time to do some sewing, but going out always requires a nap. There was still time for sewing when I woke up, but I needed a break from the quilting. I decided to work on a project that's had me dragging my feet for several months. Enter this pillow:

It's looking pretty sad, isn't it? It's a backpacking pillow we've had for decades. When we were young and flexible, we bought a bunch of backpacking equipment, thinking we'd get into backpacking. We might have, but then...babies. By the time the babies were old enough to enjoy backpacking, we were too old to enjoy it, and so our backpacking days passed us by with almost no chances at backpacking. Oh well. 

So Mike has been carrying this pillow in his truck. He uses it to nap while I visit quilt shops. We have another one like it in another car, but this was the one we had with us on our last cross-country RVing adventure. And while our RV is very comfortable, the recliners where we sit most of the time hit me in the wrong spot on my back. I need a small pillow for more lumbar support. When we started our trip, this pillow had a tiny hole in the nylon cover. As we went, it got larger and larger. We kept taping it up to hold it together, but little holes were beginning in other places too. Obviously, it needed to be replaced or recovered. 

I'm not much of a pillow person. We don't have a lot of pillows around the house, and they haven't really sparked any sewing interest in me. So this was my first attempt at making any sort of pillow cover. I went in search of a tutorial, and settled on this one for making an envelope-style pillow cover.

It seemed like a good way to use up some of my flannel scraps too, and so I went digging through the yardage box. This one seemed like a good choice. The RV colors are grays and browns, and this one won't show dirt.

I didn't take any pictures while I was making it, but I followed the tutorial almost exactly. She doesn't make any allowance for the depth of the pillow, simply saying to cut the fabrics according to the dimensions of the pillow. In this case, the pillow was 12 x 12 inches. Since I was using flannel, I gave myself an extra inch to spare to allow for some shrinkage if I ever want to wash it. When it was all finished, it looked like this:

Here's how it looks on the "envelope" side. 

And let me just tell you, even giving myself an extra inch to work with, I worked up a sweat trying to insert the pillow into the cover. If I were ever to do this again, I'd give myself at least another inch to work with.

Okay, so that took about half an hour. It was so easy, I'm not sure why I've been dragging my feet about it. When it was finished, I was looking around for other pillows I could cover...only, see above. We don't have a lot of pillows around the house. Oh well. Maybe it's time to start something new. Smitty thought this was a great idea. He's tired of quilting too.

Oh Boy! A new purroject? Please purrmit me to assist in any way pawssible.

When I spoke of making up a new embroidery project in yesterday's post, I misspoke. I was thinking Domestic Affairs was next on the list, but in fact, it's this new project: "The Story of My Day" quilt from Anni Downs at Hatched and Patched.

I've had this in my pattern box for several years. I love her designs. They're so whimsical and fun. Way back in the earliest days of my quilting life, I made her quilt, "A Gardener's Journal."

More recently, I finished the quilt top for "Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs." This one is in the "to-be-sandwiched" pile.

Two slots have opened up on my embroidery dance card in the past couple of months, and this was the first new project selected by Mr. Random Number Generator. There are several projects in the book, but I'm making the full quilt. Here's the picture from the book:

Cute, huh? The embroidery designs are all done in her primitive style, and then sewn together scrappily. Certainly any quilt that can be made with scraps is a good one. I'll be doing the embroidery and then adding the scrappy borders to each block as I go. For the embroidery background fabric, I chose this "natural" Kona solid. It's kind of a boring picture, but there you go.

When I start a new embroidery project, I like to cut all the embroidery backgrounds for the whole quilt first. Also, I'll cut the stabilizer for each block before I start. It seemed too late in the day to do either, and so I when into my stash of embroidery floss to choose some appropriate colors. Using the color names and pictures as a guide, I came up with these from my stash. 

Since my color numbers are different from hers, I made up a key to keep me on track.

This afternoon, I'll cut the backgrounds and then trace out the first two blocks. The quilt has 25 small embroidery blocks, and so I'll do this project two blocks at a time, starting with these two:

That was all I did in the sewing room yesterday.

Today's activities are timed a little better with an earlier appointment. I need to get fuel before I go driving off, and so I need a little bit of an early start. It's too early for breakfast right now, and so I have some time to do a little slow-stitching this morning. I'll need it for this second day in a row out among "The English." If there's time later this afternoon, I'll get back to my quilting.