Slow Sunday Stitching

 I won the game of chicken I was playing between myself and the yarns for my sweater. I finished the body and the short sleeves with just the smallest little balls left of each colour. Whew!! I have one more round of the green to do on the second sleeve and the I can go and start to pick up the stitches around the bottom of the sweater for the green contrast band. Maybe after this sweater is done I’ll go back to my cross stitching. Or maybe, since I’ve enjoyed doing this sweater so much, I’ll dig around in my yarn tote and find some yarn to make another. I’ll have to wait and see. Sometime soon, I hope, the warm weather will get here. We have ordered a small screen shelter that can be set up on our deck. Hopefully it will provide protection from those nasty black fly bitting critters so I can spend the nice days outdoors. It should arrive sometime this week. Hopefully there will be a nice day where we can set it up and try it out before those nasty critters arrive to drive us nuts. They are the only down side to living up here in lovely Muskoka. Thankfully, their season only lasts for about 6 weeks, May into June, and the rest of the time is pure beauty. 

Anyhow, I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then perhaps put on an audiobook and take some stitches in the quilting of My Tweets.

What we’re working on

 I have a couple of more quilts to show from our Prayers and Squares group. There is a quarter square log cabin style quilt. We had a new lady come and join us. She is very quiet and focused. She put this quilt together over the course of 2 weeks. 

I finished the second of the flying geese quilts, but I don’t have a picture of the finished quilt. Here’s a teaser. 

And then I’ve started another one, using bright and fun colours out of the bin of 3 1/2 inch strips. I’m in the process of doing the quilt as I go on the blocks and then using narrow strips to put it together. It is going to need a border. It’s only 39 inches wide right now. The back is going to be as fun and bright as the front. More on that maybe by next week.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I finished the body of my sweater using the two skeins of yarn last evening. So far I am winning the game of yarn chicken, but I still have the short sleeves to finish. It’s going to be close. It also still has a band of the contrasting green that needs to be added to the bottom to bring it up to a wearable length. Aside from this sweater, there hasn’t been a lot of slow stitching happening here. My Tweets needs some attention before I can add another picture of it since it looks much the same as the last time. I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I had forgotten from many years ago, how much I enjoy the hand quilting process. It is slow and steady, just the quiet of the rocking needle. Sometimes it is accompanied only by the quiet around me, sometimes by watching something on the computer, sometimes by listening to a good audiobook. I would say that I have at least a quarter of the centre block finished now. The callus on the finger that I use on the underside of the quilt to feel the needle come through is getting thicker, so I can quilt for longer. I am quilting in the ditch around the appliqué shapes, which doesn’t show up on the photo, and then the background lines approximately 1 inch apart.

Later on in the evenings I am still working on my sweater. I may end up with a game of chicken between the amount of yarn I have left and the end of the sweater. I hope I don’t have to order more yarn because I have lost or thrown out the identifying tags for the colours, although I do know the brand. I could always do a fade type thing if I had to, I suppose. I’ll do a few more inches on it and then make a decision to order more yarn.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

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What we are working on

 We have been very productive at Prayers and Squares lately. However I haven’t been very good at getting pictures of what we’ve been doing. We’ve gotten a couple of 3 years quilts done. One using a very pretty floral fabric with some coordinates. Pat’s face can be seen peeking over the top of that one.

And another using a panel of butterfly squares also using some coordinating fabrics. We also finished the star quilt using up some wildlife fabrics. The centre of the stars have moose and bears and Canada geese in them There is more of this fabric left, so I have plans for it.While browsing on pattern websites I found a pattern that I absolutely love which uses multiple sizes of flying geese.  The pattern is called Got Geese. 
I love making flying geese units, so I found some odds and ends of earth tone fabrics and started in on the making a couple of weeks ago. It grabbed my attention so strongly that I now have it done, other than an outer border. And that new one using up the wildlife fabrics, I have an Electric quilt mock up for it. The geese are almost all made and ready to sew into the blocks. That’s all the news I have from our group. I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My sweater continues to grow. I’ve separated off the sleeves and have about 2 inches of the body done. But the really exciting piece of slow stitching is the start of the background quilting on My Tweets. It is going faster than I thought it would. The amount here was done in an afternoon. I don’t have any calluses built up on my fingers yet, so I had to quit as the finger under the quilt was getting quite sore, as was my wrist. I haven’t been able to get back to it, due to our grand daughter being off for March break and also the now almost finished reno of my room. The ceiling is in and the baseboards are going in today. There is still all the tapeing and mudding and sanding of the drywall seams in the ceiling, but I suspect that is not going to happen for quite a while yet.

I’ll link up to Kathy'sSlow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 Most of my slow stitching this past week has been knitting. I’m making really good progress on my Walk Along T-shirt/sweater. The helical knitting technique that blends the two different skeins of yarn is working beautifully. It’s not even noticeable that the light colours are two different yarns in there. They are close enough in colours that they blend quite nicely. I am getting so close to the dividing point of taking the sleeve stitches off the needles. After that it will go even faster.

I also have taken just a few hand quilting stitches into My Tweets. It is in a new hoop and stand that is quite comfortable to use. I’m still trying to decide what I am going to do in the backgrounds. I have a few ideas and I picked up some painters tape to help with the straight lines I am thing of. But until I have a firm idea I don’t want to do too much on it only to maybe have to take it out. I just realized that I never posted a picture of the finished top. Here it is. It was difficult to get the whole thing into a picture, so it is slightly crooked.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.