Making under the radar…

Although I haven't posted much lately, there has been a lot of making going on around here. Much of it has been for magazines, so I can't put that up on the blog, but there has been some personal making too.

Whenever I'm in the midst of embroidery projects, which is what I've mainly been doing for the magazines, I like to counterbalance this with more robust, or monotonous makes that don't require too much thinking and fiddliness. Knitting socks, and hand quilting my blue and white quilt tick both boxes on that front. I'm losing count of the number of pairs of socks I've knitted recently. I have one pair currently on needles, three pairs ready to be worn or wrapped up as Christmas presents, and at least another two pairs that are being worn – there may be more. I'm in danger of turning into a sock factory.

When it comes to mindless sewing, nothing compares to the blue and white quilt, you can just about see it's reverse in the background, behind the socks. I absolutely love the slow rhythmic action of hand quilting but progress is slow, especially when stitches are small. I've spent many evenings sewing into the small hours yet barely a quarter of the quilt is quilted. Sometimes I wonder if the quilt isn't bewitched, and actually grows when I'm not working on it, or perhaps elves come in at night to unpick my stitches!

So this scarf was a gratifying make. It's made entirely from stash, tweed leftover from a quilt I made a couple of years ago, with a blue velvet backing salvaged from a ripped dress. It took all of four hours to make and much of that was pressing – result!

Tweed is one of my favourite fabrics (I much prefer woven to printed fabrics) but it can be itchy and is definitely costly so I saved these scraps until I knew what to do with them. A velvet backed scarf was just the thing.

Elizabeth,
x.