ON THIS MEMORIAL DAY . . .

THANK YOU !

'Nuff said.

. . . and EMBROIDERS occasionally

Well, although my embroidery is not quite as stunning or prolific as my daughter's, I thought I'd show you how I am currently spending some evening hours.

I guess it's been about 3years ago, now, that I was involved in a "light/dark" fabric exchange with my on-line quilting friends. The quilt has been assembled for quite some time and I have been working on the embroidery off and on for a couple years.

Not sure if you'll be able to see much embroidery in this photo:

But you might get the idea here:

The half-square triangles are the fabrics sent by my friends. I found coordinating "almost solids" to add to each block and machine embroidered the sender's initials in the middle block. Each large block has machine SITD quilting and the small blocks have hand quilting around them. Then I added embroidery to the "solid" block to kind of mirror the pattern in the prints within that block. So the quilt encompasses several types of quilting.

I am almost finished, now working on highlighting the sashing with back stitch and French knots.

(As I was working on it the other night, my stitches took me by the block made from my dear friend Jan's fabrics. Sadly, she will not be adding to her blog or see this blog entry as she is now in hospice care after a courageous battle with breast cancer.)

I found several new-to-me embroidery stitches in this book.

This is a shot of the entire quilt before I began the hand embroidery.

A few more evenings and a 3 year project will be finished! FINALLY !

BACK HOME

Yes, I'm back home. In fact I've been home a while -- got home two weeks ago today.

A few days my first week were spent in Nashville staying with grandchildren while Mom and Dad and big sis were at the Spring Quilt Market.

Then trying to catch up on the house and get a little bit of a garden started has kept me pretty busy.

I have managed to add a couple more strips to the charity quilt that's been on my "design wall" for a couple months now. Hopefully that top will be finished this week.

I did do a bit of knitting while I was gone. I've found that socks are the perfect travel project -- easy to pack and not too cumbersome to work on in an airplane seat.

I didn't quite have the second pair finished when I cam home and I didn't have a good large eye tapestry needle, so the first three socks traveled home keeping each other very good company, strung on the same two knitting needles waiting for the Kichener stitch. It worked.

I've started on another pair of socks . . .

and the next birthday sweater.

So that's what I've been up too lately.

I think I'm going to go downstairs, get my "design wall" and see if I can figure out a spot to put it in the laundry room. (I'm basically lazy and don't like to pick up my "stuff" every time I leave the project, but it's really driving me nuts having it left out in a living area all the time.) So the work space area dilemma continues . . .