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My goals for this week were to:
- Continue progress on the "Everything in It's Place" bag from Anne Unrein's class.
- Get the binding on the D4P baby quilt.
- Learn two more stitches on my Sue Spargo class project.
- Put beads on the prayer flag
Progress:
- Got the D4P baby quilt done! It has no name, it has no current destination. But it's done!
- Got the beads put on the prayer flag. And a few other things done on it besides. Now I just have to figure out what finishing touches I want to do--it doesn't need much, though, so it won't take long.
Cast-on bullion stitch
- Learn two more embroidery stitches. I learned three, actually--woo! I finally finished lesson four. Took awhile--lesson four stitches are all pretty time-consuming. I only used one on the project; the other two I practiced but decided I didn't want to actually use them yet.
The cast-on bullion stitch (at left) is pretty but very similar to the bullion stitch I did last time; so, since it takes even longer than the bullion stitch, I wasn't in the mood to do it all again. I did one to see how it looked, then cut it back out of the project. I may do one down the road as I still have a heck of a lot of project to embroider, but right now I wanted to do something different.
By the way, being able to slow the video down to 1/4 speed and put it on 30 second repeat helped a lot when I was trying to coordinate my thumbs for that cast-on stitch. Not being a knitter, that isn't something I've done much and she whipped hers off pretty quickly. After watching her do it very s-l-o-w-l-y several times over I finally got the hang of it.
Drizzle stitch
The drizzle stitch is darn cute (at left) but doesn't really work on this current project so I did one for practice and then cut it all off again. Good to know for the future, though. Yep, it's supposed to look like a wad of knots, basically, though generally it would be neater than this. You can't quite tell in this photo that it's 3-D--the stitches hang off like hair or fibers or some such. Cute in the right place--not right for my project. I cut these off when I was done practicing.
Double cast-on stitch
Finally, the third stitch was a keeper on the project this week. The double cast-on stitch is also very, very time-consuming, but pretty cool, and I was able to use it in a very limited space so I wouldn't be working on it for the next three years. I didn't get mine touching each other the way I'd have liked to--it was a little hard to see where my needle was coming out in comparison to the completed stitch before it. And I still need to work on evenness, but that all comes with practice. It's also a matter of learning how your thread will behave. This one was variegated in such a way that it divided in half color-wise, which was kind of neat, but now I know how to picture that ahead of time as I'm choosing threads in the future.
She has several examples of how she's used this in various ways (as she does with all her stitches) and this one has great possibilities for other places on my project. You may see more of this one later.
- As for the Anne Unrein purse project? Well, not so much. I looked at it the evening I finished up the baby quilt but decided the next step is not one I can leave half-done easily, and since I'm about the head out of town, it's better to be left until I'm home. So it's on next week's goals--but this time I hope to get it finished!
And yes, it did help listing my goals like this. Mostly, it got finishing that baby quilt stuck in my head until I finally just sat down to knock it out!
I'm actually on the road as this posts (waving at you as I drive by). I don't get home until Thursday, but I have Friday as a comp day. Friday evening my husband and I need to clear out of the house for a couple of days as my daughter is turning it into a weekend boarding house for her and some of her buddies attending a Comic-Con in the area. We're just staying in town because we've got some things to do locally, so it's not a terribly exciting weekend away, although we'll make the best of it! In any case, I won't have access to my sewing room for the weekend. For all those reasons, my goals are small, and largely involving embroidery that I can bring with me on the weekend jaunt.
Goals for the week of April 12
- Learn two more stitches for Sue Spargo class project
- Finish prayer flag. (It's quite close to being done.)
- Finish Anne Unrein's Everything in Its Place bag from Craftsy class--maybe. At least, make significant progress.