Day Tripper

I think I may have given the impression over the last couple of posts that I am a bit down.  I hope this blog doesn’t come across as wallowing or depressing as most of the time that’s not the way I feel at all, occasionally, a bit of a wallow is quite therapeutic and allows one, well, me anyway, to spring back with vim and vigour.  The vim and vigour might be a bit more evident if we had had the much mooted T-shirt day yesterday.  It was dull, dreich and miserable.  I put my newest quilt on the line for four hours and it made absolutely no difference to it.  It just sat there, waving its funkiness in the grey air.

I brought it in 4 hours later weighing approximately 0.0025 grammes less than when I put it out.  There was, as they used to say in a part of the world where I once lived – frequently in Post Office queues, “no drying”.

But it is now finished, dry and folded and in a little while when the light gets better I will attempt to photograph.  I am really delighted with this one.  If you thought I was chintzy and traditional at heart well, you were wrong.  The fact is I love it all.

I have used the Kate Spain Terrain patterns (a jelly roll) and some additional yardage (a yard and a half) of a matching print.  The quilt it has yielded is bigger than my recent ones being about 40″ x 60″ about the right size for a first bed, a coverlet for a single or a throw for the back of a sofa.  The way she has used the colours which are strongly contrasting make me want to sing – they really are joyful.  It is, as you can see very simply pieced and echo-quilted to emphasise the strips of colour.  This looks particularly effective on the back of the quilt.  The thing I am most pleased about is the binding.  I have made a binding strip from some of the left-over strip and well, it just works really well and I’m delighted.

Today I will be mostly playing with my (sshh!!!) new sewing machine.  It has a larger harp area for rolling my quilts, droppable feed dogs and 84 different stitches.  It also hums pleasantly, in a reassuring, germanic way and just feels more “the ticket” for a more industrial set up.  It was not what I thought when I bought Hannah a sewing machine for her Christmas present last September (which she never got, see here).

Now, all that said, I’m off, back to my hollow and there I will wallow … in glorious mud.  It must be a legacy of Junior Choice but I cannot hear the word wallow without that song coming to mind.

Off to hum Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud in a reassuring, germanic way for the rest of the day.

 

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