Tag: Stitch: Patchplay

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 …

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 😉

Patchplay reimagined

~ Liz A ~ 23 Comments

While waiting for some books to come in from the library to inform my nascent knowledge of handsewing, I decided to just play around.

Yesterday I tried my hand at pintucks …

and today I pulled out a tub of clothing with the unifying characteristic of being made from sheer cloth. While some of it came from the thrift store, most of it came from my closet and my daughter’s closet. Which is to say, it never made it to the thrift store …

I’m not much for the terms “needlework” and “patchwork” when it comes to the “work” part … I’m more about playing around with cloth.

So I have an idea to make a boho shirt. At first I imagined doing it in patched squares, but that sounded too much like … uh, work. So I decided instead to randomly tear long strips of sheer cloth and patch them together …

with the result being this after a morning’s worth of playing around …

A little shy on length, but that should be fixable.

Then I saw this on my Instagram feed …

Exactly what I’m talking about … except my vision is a lot shorter and has sleeves … ha!