We’ve been spending a lot of time doing yard work so I have neglected stitching and blogging. Gotta go for it while the sun shines, right?

Anyway, today it’s raining, so I’ve been catching up on random April patches. I pondered whether to put all of them into one post, but decided to keep it simple and just post one at a time.

So, first up is one of my most valuable sewing tools (after needles): the humble safety pin.

Virtually all of my patches are made with a harem cloth backing to stabilize the stitches. Straight pins are painfully difficult to use, so I’ve become a fan of 1″ bent quilters’ safety pins to secure the harem cloth

I actually ran a marker along a pin to make the patch true to size …

and if the details are less than accurate, the silhouette is true enough.

One down, four to go.

It was more that one year between visits to the bank. Not that we ever went often, but because of the pandemic it was one of many things that we simply ceased to do.

And so, at long last, I went back. Hoping that I wouldn’t be too rusty when it came to opening our safe deposit box. And then, deciding the key would stand as the symbol of this latest return to something like normal …

It was also an opportunity to try out a “what if” … seeing if a stitched border would contain Inktense dye. It did.

And then I looked long and hard at my mismatched strips of patchplay and decided to cut down or completely redo several patches in order to make the February and March strips match the other three …

The new images have been added to the original posts, where I can return and compare them in the future.

And as I wrote this, the verdicts came in at the Derek Chauvin trial. Relief washed over me … Hope has a place to grow.