My husband has been having some health issues recently, and I have been in several waiting rooms, well, waiting. Occasionally a doctor's office will have some juicy gossip magazines with all kinds of fashion/hollywood pictures to look at, but it doesn't take long to skim those and then be reduced to watching the soaps on the tv in the corner, or reading golf digest. You know, the magazines your doctor has finished with and then put in the waiting room.
When I discovered quilting, nearly 20 yrs ago, I discovered the joys of handwork. I have since branched out into all kinds of machine work and mixed media, but my affection for handwork continues. I have handpieced 3 quilt tops to date, and have handquilted uncounted bed and wall quilts. My current handwork is something I've often thought I MIGHT attempt, if I got desperate enough, LOL. I recently read through a book (click the link for pictures and a preview) that a friend had bought and shared with the gals at our weekly sewing time meeting, and fell in love with the notion of a Cathedral Window quilt all over again.
The 1st step was cutting out a huge pile of 8 inch muslin squares. I didn't have 17 yards of one kind of muslin, and decided that, rather than go out and BUY MORE fabric, I'd make it scrappy. Not only would the colorful window panes be scrappy and multi colored, but also the muslin would be. Each square must then be folded and the sides stitched...
I don't typically count my pieces of blocks, which is sometimes pretty wasteful, when I cut out more than I need, but when you consider how many muslin blocks you actually need to make even a full size bed covering (and I want to make a queen), counting at this point seems wasteful! I KNOW I'll need to make LOTS more, so why count now?
Once I stitched the 2 sides, I learned how to do what I consider a weird 3 dimensional fabric manipulation in order to sew up the 3rd side. I have no idea how to explain it, but I ended up with a huge pile of what looked like fabric fortune cookies that I turned right side out, poking all the corners to sharp points. My bad, and fairly unclear picture:
These then had to be ironed flat, with the corners as sharp as possible, the opening used to turn the square right side out hand stitched closed, and then each corner folded and hand tacked to the center. The hand work begins.
I know I'll have to do a lot more of these, but now it's time to cut out a lot of little colored fabric squares for the window panes, and I've chosen to use batiks. YUM!
