Searching for Inspiration

Good morning, my friends. It was another day of distraction yesterday. The first prompt, "Bird House," was announced for Season 15 of Project Quilting. I made the mistake of checking for it while I was in the middle of my Bow-flex workout. From there on, every time I took a 30-second interval rest between exercises, I was running into the sewing room, or looking at my bookshelf, or looking through notebooks, or looking online for inspiration. Probably, I spent hours on that yesterday. Nothing really lit my fire nor inspired me to make something until I came upon this little stitchery in an Etsy shop. This is a design from KFNeedlework Design. I really loved the simplicity of it.

And while I wanted to do something original, I found myself really wanting to make this. I have some fun fabrics I can use to finish it off too. That settled it for me...and, frankly, I was tired of trying to come up with something. We have just a week to make a quilt from inception to binding, and so there isn't a minute to waste. 

Having come up with an idea, I turned my attention to finishing up the blocks for the Whimsical Quilt Garden. These are the last two, and they took absolutely forEVER to top stitch. This first one with all the stamens above the flowers...oh my gosh...I nearly lost my mind top-stitching those.

Fortunately, I had my helper cat nearby to give meowral support.

The other block was time-consuming as well with all those yellow flower petals.

But now they are finished and ready to be sewn into a flimsy. There's one project in line ahead of this one, but it should get finished up pretty soon. I have some pretty fabrics to use when I sew it all together.

There was just a little time left in the day, and so I readied my bird house stitchery for stitching. With all those straight lines, I printed this design on Sticky Fabri-Solvy, rather than drive myself crazy trying to trace it with a ruler. As for driving myself crazy, I was nearing the final bend by that time.

Then I selected some floss colors from my stash.

And now that one is ready to go.

Of course, I'm still in the middle of stitching the Girls' Getaway. So, I went straight upstairs and finished up the section I was working on. I'm happy to say the chain-stitched braided rug is finished now. My sewing projects seem to be conspiring to drive me crazy right now.

Now I've moved my hoop up, and I'll start working on the awning.

My friend, Nancy in Reno, asked a question about the color on these stitcheries. Nancy, you are no-reply, and so I can't answer you directly. However, this is a frequently asked question. You can find excellent tutorials about adding color with crayon and with colored pencil on the Crabapple Hill Studios website. As for which one to use...crayon or colored pencil...I think colored pencil gives a better result. On the other hand, crayon is easier. On a large piece like this, I'll use crayon. On smaller pieces, I'll choose colored pencil. 

Also, and this is just my personal preference, Meg Hawkey uses white crayon under color to act as a "primer." It can smooth out any bumps in the fabric, and color can go down more evenly with it. I find that part of the process tedious and difficult to see, especially on white fabric. I generally skip that step, but that's just me. If you want to give this a try, I suggest trying it both ways and then do whatever you like best. 

Okay, so I'll be setting the Girls' Getaway aside for a day or two while I stitch up the Project Quilting bird houses. Possibly, I can finish them in a single day, but it will probably take two days. There's nothing on today's agenda, and so it's going to be an NBS day. In fact, it might be an NBSS day (nothing but slow-stitching).

January is going to be a month of distractions. The next video for the Dot-to-Dot free motion quilting challenge should be released today or tomorrow, and I'll want to keep up with that.

Then, our new carpet installation is set for a week from tomorrow. We'll be emptying out recently purged closets and drawers into boxes for storage while the furniture is being moved around to make way for the carpet. We'll also have to disassemble my mid-arm quilting machine and disconnect my desktop computer. Also in line to be disassembled is our bed. We'll sleep in the RV while our bed is out of commission. So, you can see there's a whole long list of diverse items on the week's agenda. Also, the reveal for the "Patterns in Nature" art quilt is coming up on February 1st. I'll bet you forgot all about that, didn't you?

So, you can see I have plenty to keep me busy for the next couple of weeks. Today, though...slow stitching. It might be my last day to put up my feet and settle in for a long slow-stitching journey, and I'm going to savor every minute of it.