Made by hand

Another trip to England...to mind my grandchildren. We've always made things together - puppets and theatres, cardboard box houses, books, dolls....this time it was small boxes. Well, I made some - my grandson was completely underwhelmed, preferring to play video games...my granddaughter was polite/kind enough to join in. Hers is the rainbow one.

Yes, the eyes are the wrong way up...

She does like sewing, so we also made a quilted pencil case - most of which she did herself...

I wonder if she likes rainbow colours...

A trip to the charity shops brought in a good haul of fabrics for the bird rug.

They're still not quite the dark teal I want, but as close as I could find.                      The colours of my photos are sometimes nowhere near true to life - as in this one - no matter which setting I use. I think I'll have to bite the bullet and read the manual.

So now I have nine bundles of different strips to work with. I pull out one or two from each bundle and hook them almost at random...

And the good news is .... the patchwork is finally finished, with 28 feet of hand-sewn binding completed.

In 1970 I visited the American Museum at Bath and saw 19th century patchwork quilts for the first time.

They are displayed in these suspended glass cases so you can get right up close, and what I loved most about them was that some of the stitching wasn't that great...and I remember clearly experiencing a deep awareness that these had been made by hand, by real women. I suddenly felt a sense of connection with those unknown women who had cut and sewn the fabrics more than a lifetime ago. The very first patchwork I made, six years later, was a Log Cabin cot cover for the baby I was expecting and I hand-stitched it all.  (As I sat sewing by the window to get the most of the winter daylight, I did feel rather like a queen in some fairy tale.)

So maybe it would be faster to finish the binding on the machine, but I much prefer to do it by hand...with stitches that are not perfectly even.

 Front...(the colours are not true in this photo)

...and back... Because I'd sewn the blue binding to the front before working out the back, (plan ahead???)  I had to put some of the blue into the design, but there was only a very small piece of it left. There was a fair bit of redrawing and muttering..."if that one is six inches wide and that one is four, then...."