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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...."

 
 
 

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             © 2019 by Krystyna Pomeroy. krystynapomeroy

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