What I hadn't yet done

flowerise

I love Friday mornings. Faced with thoughts about what I need to get done in just one day is so much more peaceful than the thoughts I have on Monday mornings about what I need to get done in five days. This morning I am enjoying this. In playing around with these beautiful Pearl Cottons, I realized that in all my experiences with embroidery and hand quilting, there was one venture I had yet to try.

stitchy.stack

And that was drawing onto solid cloth free form (with a water soluble fabric pen), and then hand quilting the artwork. I most often do this sort of thing with embroidery, but I thought it would be interesting to quilt the art instead of embroider it. Using a range of colors kept my interest and felt a little bit more like my embroidery experiences than my hand quilting ones. When I hand quilt, I am almost always, yes definitely always in fact, following the lines of the piece work, rather than using any sort free form stitch style, or template stitch pattern.

landscape

A pillow is a great place to practice your hand quilting stitches. Creating the pillow front is exactly like creating a quilt top, but because the back side of the stitches will be hidden inside the pillow, you can feel a little less freaked out about your quilt back results as you go. You may remember I gave some tips about the stitch here and here. I am no expert, I just love it a lot. Can you imagine a whole single cloth quilt like this? Gorgeous. I am an inspired girl right now. The stitching takes a while, and you certainly wouldn't have to do it as densely as I've done this (I get carried away when I doodle). But doing a single cloth quilt would save you lots of cutting and piecing time. For this little pillow top (about 14x20") I hand basted the top, batting, and backing together pretty densely, and because it wasn't a giant, heavy quilt, I did the hand quilting without a hoop or frame entirely, which felt really comfortable. In that process though, I continually smooth out the surface, and hold it out flat with my open under hand as I stitch with my upper hand. Hard to describe unless you're next to me on the couch. Perhaps a little video one day soon.

stitched.pods

There you go. Overcast, cool Friday morning. Pillows. Stitches. The weekend to look forward to. Oh, and the underside of that pillow is peeking out a tiny preview of a little print from my next fabric collection, Loulouthi. Lots to look forward to!

xoxo, Anna

ps. thank you so much for all the "white room" housewarming comments- I appreciate them so much, and feel so entirely blessed to have the space and your encouragement!