BLOG 202

 

Last week I was in the grip of a nasty cold which made me low for a few days and which took several more to shake it off. As ever, generous to a fault, I have now passed it onto my husband who is just about on the right side of it now. I don’t know where it came from but it doesn’t help when people say ‘Oh there’s a lot of it about’. This immediately reduces it to something ‘common or garden’ and denigrates the self-cosseting we all like to indulge in when we feel under the weather.

That said, on the rare occasions when I do catch a cold, I usually take my box of tissues and a Lemsip to the sewing machine and just sew mindless stuff for hours on end. It requires little energy, it gets things done and it makes me feel mentally better than I am physically. So, more Gresford sale stuff has been finished this week. I added a backing fabric made up of Batik squares to ‘Trip round the Batiks’. It was quilted with an all-over random swirling design in a variegated thread, with a decorative machine stitch along the inserted blue strips.

 

                                      Backing fabric

                                               Quilting

 Then I moved onto ‘Stringing the Stars’ which, at the beginning of the week, was smaller than I wanted it. Much strip piecing onto a paper foundation layer later, and I was ready to make it larger.

 

                                         Stringing the stars

  I added more squares so it was 6 squares x 6 and attached a bright 2” border as a contrast

 

                                    Bright border

 I machine quilted around the dark centre squares of the stars with a decorative stitch and dark variegated thread, and I did a random swirling design in the lighter squares with a light variegated thread.

                 Centre square stitching

                         Background quilting

 Smaller stuff included some reverse applique workshop samples; these were easily made up into small Cat Mats, with a circle of decorative stitches in a variegated thread to finish them off.

                                     Cat mats

And finally, another stained glass wall hanging, similar to the one I showed a couple of week’s ago, was completed.

                         Stained glass 1

                        Stained glass 2

The work shown over the last few blogs represents a mammoth amount of work in anyone’s book and, if I am honest, I think I am done with this ‘slam them under the machine and knock them out’ pieces. Anyone who wants to make work to sell has to take short cuts and find the quickest way to churn them out, sales and money being the obvious focus. Where is the enjoyment in that? I am reminded of my one and only foray into ‘making to sell’ when I lived in Milton Abbas in Dorset. I was asked by the owner of the local tea rooms to replicate a doyley made in fine cotton. With a sense of pride and some effort, I replicated it and showed it to them. ‘How much would you estimate it cost you to make it?’ was the obscure way the question was posed. Thinking in terms of the cotton I used and not the time it took, I estimated about 90p. ‘OK’ came the reply, ‘We’ll have 40 of them!’ I hadn’t seen that coming and, being too polite to remonstrate, I just gritted my teeth and got on with them. I vowed then that I would never make anything to sell ever again. And what have I been doing over the last few weeks? Making stuff to sell! Time for a drastic change after Gresford I think.