I confess …

 

I was tempted – and I fell. But the socks are within a few rows of finishing – and I have finished this. Sort of.

It needs to be turned into a cushion cover but I don’t have any suitable backing fabric, so that means a little retail therapy. It is a public holiday weekend in the UK – and the fabric shop is next door to a gardening and DIY place, which will be heaving, and just off a major route from London to the south coast – so I am not venturing up there before Tuesday at the earliest.

So I’ve only got 6 things on the go now. Sort of.

I was tempted to start something new, because in Googling about looking at Trapunto I read somewhere that it is a good idea to use polyester wadding for the stuffing, and cotton wadding for the backing, so when you wash it the cotton shrinks a bit and the quilt looks puffier.

It was the magic word ‘shrink’ that did it. So I started this.

Probably all the stitching you can see is a line of tacking across the middle – but take it from me there are four Trapunto’d fleur-de-lises there. The backing is felt – and the plan is to hand quilt it and then shrink it. Remembering the colour catchers this time. I hope.

The cloth is a bit of got-to-the-end-of-the-dyeing-session-so-pour all-the-leftover-dye-over-a-piece-of-scrap fabric. [That was very hard to type and ‘scrap’ lost a letter in the process. Guess which.]

I think it proves quite well that red, yellow and green make brown.

I have two excuses for doing this. The first is Cobi's very sensible comment on my last post, that we should go with the creative flow when inspiration strikes. I know I have spent a lot of my creative life thinking that I would just finish ‘this’ – whatever ‘this’ was – and then do what I really wanted to do. Somehow I never got round to what I really wanted to do. Strangely, C&G seems to have cured me of that to some extent – perhaps because it encouraged me to give myself permission to do creative stuff.

I think that is why I haven’t made many clothes for Babybel – I realised that I could provide her with nice clothes much more cheaply – and have fun – and keep stuff out of landfill – and make a contribution to charity – by buying her things in charity shops.

The second reason is that [retrospectively] I realised that I might be able to use shrunk Trapunto for this month’s Dyehards Surfacing Challenge – a quilt without batting . [Have to check whether a bit of stuffing counts!]

You may think I do far too many challenges - and at times I think you are right – but this month they seem to have kick started me into actually doing something with all these tile ideas, rather than just playing around with paper and paint.

Speaking of which – I decided not to waste the boring white  paper cuts I made for the fleur-de-lis quiltlets - so with some paper and spray paint, I made these. Not sure where I’m going with them, although I think it may be time to deconstruct some tiles…

And finally - a photograph taken on the beach when we went Crosby last summer to see some Gormleys.  There was some very entertaining graffiti on a recumbent and weathered tree trunk – this was my favourite.

The Gormleys were pretty good too.