1504 Lakeside Avenue

I have been wanting to make a certain embroided wall hanging for quite a while.  So I finally got around to it this fall.

Here is a photo of my parents' house.  I had a regular-size photo, which I xeroxed and enlarged.  I outlined the important parts of the house. 

Then I traced it onto tracing paper.  I had always thought that I'd make this a red-work project.  But then I thought, red isn't exactly my mom's favorite color.  Oftentimes one also sees "blue-work" and "black-work."  But in the end I decided to make it multi-color.

I had a lot of fun with this embroidery.  I used Frixion pens to transfer the image from the tracing paper onto the fabric.  It was a piece of fabric that I had tea-dyed a long time ago, and it had a fusible lining on the back.

I'll show you some of the detail.

Finished with the embroidery, I had to decide on border(s).  These next four photos are really poor quality, but all I was wanting to see was color combinations.

I finally decided on a green flange with the brown grunge fabric.

Of course, I added a hanging sleeve and a label before mailing it to MomStitches for Christmas.  

Of course, I forgot to measure it, but it's not real huge, maybe 15 inches wide(?).

A Christmas Wreath

 I made a new Christmas wreath last week.   I got the idea from a wreath I saw at my local quilt store, The Loft, in Gualala.  I saw it in the store a couple years ago, but one thing and another (including a broken arm!) got in the way of my finishing it.  Here's how I made it: 

Tools you need are a chopstick (or 2) or a pencil, a straw-wrapped wreath form, some glue, and quite a few fabric squares about 3" by 3".  I rough cut my squares with a wavy blade to reduce fraying.

This glittery, glow-in-the-dark glue will be wasted here!  But it was handy.

You will actually need many, many of these fabric squares!

I do not know how many squares I cut.  I was keeping track of the count, just for fun (?), but I can't find the little paper with my count on it.  If I find it I will amend this blog post.

I basically used red and green fabrics, with a few "rogue" colors thrown in for variety.  My rogue colors were reds and greens of a "non-Christmas" hue, sort of pink-ish, or a green with a lot of brown in it, etc.

Here is the process.  The pencil or chopstick needs to be sharpened but not too sharp.  You don't want it to poke through the fabric, but it needs to be sharp enough to poke into the wreath.

Center the chopstick in the center of a piece of fabric, then dip the fabric-covered point into a little glue.  Push the whole thing into the wreath form.  And carefully pull the chopstick out.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Just keep filling in the spaces until you don't see any more of the wreath.

You can see that I left the plastic covering on the wreath, but I did remove the label!  I suppose a styrofoam wreath might have worked as well--I haven't tried that.

And here is the final result.  I'm very happy with it.

Fabric Shopping Bags--Where Have They All Gone?

I count it as just one more tiny sad thing about this quarantine period.  But we are not able to use our fabric shopping bags.  And I fully agree--I'm not arguing the point.

So while my shopping bags are unoccupied, shall we say, I decided it was a good time to wash all of them.  Here are some of the bags.

Most of these bags are courtesy of the Green Bag Lady.  Teresa has changed the world, I believe, by giving away thousands upon thousands of fabric bags.  All over the world.  You can visit her website here..

This bag is not actually from GBL, although I used her pattern to make it.  I love it because it is made from fabric by Harmony Art.  It's a nice sturdy fabric, too.

I'm pretty sure that this next one is the first bag I ever received from GBL.  It, too, is made from Harmony Art fabric, a very cute little child's alphabet design, with cute little words spelled out in the grid.

And here is its number.  Each bag is numbered and kept track of at the GBH Headquarters.  This bag is number 5,349, fairly early on in the production history.

This is another beautiful Harmony Art print, this time a very pretty polished cotton which has a luxurious feel to it.

Then there's this bag, from the year of Nashville's flooding.  (Can't remember the date.)

This is its number, though, #10,332.

Further on in the progression of bags given away/number of bags.

I count myself fortunate to have had the privilege of working with Teresa, just a little bit, by helping to hand out bags at grocery stores with her and with her "Bag-ettes."

This is my most recent bag (which is the polished cotton shown above), #55,545, which is a great number, don't you think!  The number of bags that have been made to date is about 70,000.  Isn't that fantastic!

So, whenever we do get to emerge from our lairs, I will have nice clean fabric bags to use.  Thank you, Harmony and Teresa!