'If you make happiness your goal, then you're not going to get to it… The goal should be an interesting life."

Dorothy Rowe

Saturday 2 May 2009

I confess …

 

I was tempted – and I fell. But the socks are within IMG_6359a 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.

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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.

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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 IMG_3579-1- 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.

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