Saturday, December 05, 2009

New Project!

We bought a new Christmas tree, and I'm looking forward to decorating it tonight. Bentley says we'll have some popcorn, too, and I always watch "The Sound of Music" when I put up my tree. Not really a classic Christmas tale, but it was always on TV during the holidays when I was little, so there's the "tradition."

I cast on for a sweater vest. It uses two colors of Noro variegated yarn. I love watching the new colors emerge! This is a testament to my increasing skill as a knitter...it is working up very quickly.
The mitered blanket is about halfway done. Yes, I *have* been working on it for years! I finished the individual blocks a few months ago, and I started the seaming process. Note my two different techniques. The right side is done with crochet, and the left is mattress stitch. I'm kicking myself because I tried to figure out mattress stitch from a book, decided it didn't look good, and went with crochet. The crochet doesn't look very good either, but it was faster than my interpretation of mattress stitch! Over Thanksgiving, my mom taught me the right way to do mattress stitch, which doesn't take very long, and makes an invisible seam. You guessed it, I will be taking out all the crochet seams. This project has taken so long that it is worth doing the best I can.

The purple beast left my house a couple weeks ago, hooray! I am taking a break from quilting for other people so I can work on a few of my own projects. I dove right into this beauty.

Paper pieced, 40 pieces per block, and I need 42 blocks. Oh, and to make things exciting, it needs to be done (pieced, quilted and bound) by mid-June. (No, I can't quit my day job)
1680 pieces to sew, plus picking off all the paper...I'll play Scarlett O'Hara and think about that tomorrow!