A paean to paperless piecing

~ Liz A ~ 20 Comments

There are many things I have learned from Jude Hill, but none more valuable than her paperless piecing technique.

My favorite take on it is to tear cloth into strips …

then fold the edges back and overcast stitch the patches together. The magic in it is how beautifully the seams stay open on the other side …

So now I’m off to “quilt” this pillow top …

to a linen backing … and I put “quilt” in quotation marks, because the resulting double layer of cloth won’t truly be a quilt as there will be no middle layer.

There will be more to come on the meaning within this cloth once it has been united with its other side. Later gator …

The good, the bad, and the silly … in no particular order

~ Liz A ~ 20 Comments

It is raining for the first time in 45 days, so I went outside to smell the scent of it and to uncover the new baby tomato plants, which have never before experienced rain …

which lasted all of five minutes … poof!

We’re also growing swallowtail caterpillars which are exceedingly fond of parsley … 15 of them at last count …

And I have no idea what this is all about, but I love it all the same …

On the other hand, I wasn’t loving the paper piecing experiment, so I disassembled it …

Hopefully the third time will be the charm.

Georgia on my mind

~ Liz A ~ 19 Comments

Georgia O’Keeffe, that is … and her quote about fitting what you want to do into what needs doing (in my previous post).

How I needed to do laundry. But I really wanted to stitch.

How I needed to go to the grocery store … twice, because the first store didn’t have everything on my list. But I really just wanted to stitch.

How I needed to make lunch, and cut up the melon and pineapple and bananas that I got at the store. But I really, truly wanted to stitch.

Because I’ve been thinking about Georgia and New Mexico. And feeling a little guilty because it didn’t take me a whole day to get groceries in Espanola as Georgia once did. Really, I should be able to find the time to stitch.

But oh do I ever envy her the drives she made between Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu and Espanola. Where the rocks rear up out of the land into a crystal blue sky, each bend in the road more incredible than the last …

I just wanted to stitch a memory of being in that magical place, of the colors and angles …

But no, not that exactly. More like this maybe …

Paper piecing on freezer paper, sketched in pencil on a piece 18” x 18” … we’ll see how it goes … if and when I can get to it.

But first I need to hang the wash … then I need to make the pickles, pasta salad, and chicken salad for dinner tonight.

When really, I mean it … I just want to stitch 😉