Monday, April 27, 2015

It's been...0 days since my last fabric purchase

And a couple of weeks since my last post. I'm afraid I've been buried under mountains of paper for uni, and very little sewing has happened except for the odd bit of quilting.



Some time ago, I cut up a bundle of old T-shirts that held sentimental meaning for me and stitched them into the front of a quilt. I backed it with an old sheet and put a bit of batting in between, then carefully folded it up and put it in a bag.

A month or so ago I go sick of moving the bag to sweep and started quilting it with an odd assortment of embroidery silk that's been loitering in my sewing box since Moses was floating about in a basket. It's become a slow process that has acted as a kind of meditative process to relax me when I'm stressed and can't part with more that 15-20 minutes for sewing. It's one of those things where you need to concentrate just enough that errant thoughts can't make it in, or if they do they float through briefly and then bugger off.



There's only another 6 weeks of insanity left until I'm hopefully all done with this study caper and I can do things like find people who live near me to sew with, and play team sports and not work the equivalent of a 70 hour week (if you count study-load and work-for-pay together). And I've only got about 20'000 words total to put into a variety of assessments. Totally do-able, right?

In the meantime, I've been appeasing my desire to sew by loitering over sewing blogs like the dodgy guy in the dirty mag section of the news agency. Lladybird Lauren has, as always, been completing the most amazing array of projects even though she's just moved house. And Miss HandmadebyCarolyn trotted out this beautiful quasi-quilted dress last week...not quilted so much as pieced from pieces of old T-shirts, but mind-blowing! And Miss Katie Who Writes Stuff made some pyjama shorts out of some of the fabric I sent her, and that was also cool. They're really pretty! So, you know, the loitering around other people's pretty projects keeps my inner sewing-addict happy in the short term.

But then sometimes I walk past the op shop and they'll have new fabrics in and even though I swore that I wouldn't buy any more fabric until I'd emptied my current stash a bit...


But...well...I had to! Because ribbing is so expensive, and handy to have about, especially for the Free-Tee-Patterns project that I'm planning to do.


And where else are you going to find such mad retro paisley goodness? Besides, I was only in there for 5 minutes, so it's not like I lost a lot of study time or anything.**



**That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

2 comments:

  1. Someone has to cultivate stashes to make up for those of us who are incapable of doing so. If it weren't for your generosity, I wouldn't have anything even approaching a stash.

    Your hand-quilting is very impressive. I'm no quilter myself, but I have a friend who is, so I have acquired some second-hand knowledge of the level of work that goes into quilting. I hope you'll be able to share some photos when you're done.

    Katie @ Katie Writes Stuff

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    1. Hahaha. I suppose. Almost everything I buy has an end purpose in mind. I just need to sew faster...and you seem to have that down, so I might need some pointers.

      And that's so sweet. My quilting is actually pretty crap, but somehow regular small bits seems to be the order of completion for projects this size. I can't quite get myself to love the liberty print, perfectly executed variety done by Nannas for generations. I don't seem to have the patience for such precision, I'm afraid, so close enough becomes good enough. It's way easier if you start with a knee-rug sized project though; 1.2 X 1.5 metres-ish.

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