April arrived with beautiful sunshine. The clocks went forward in the early hours of Sunday morning (31st March) and so we have lighter evenings. The down side of the time change is the alarm going off but it's dark again. The 1st April was my Mom's birthday. She died in 2002 aged 76 but she is always in my mind. Yesterday I was working on my embroidery and went on a trip down memory lane of my mother teaching me stitches. I wish I'd paid more attention as my work would be much neater but unfortunately as a child / teenager you always have lots of other activities that seem more important. Enough reminiscing, time to make some plans for April.
The Chookshed challenge number drawn for April was 4. My number 4 is the Japanese panel.
I want to split this panel and use sashiko to join it together as a quilt. If possible I want to include this piece of Sashiko that I completed when trying out this style of embroidery.
I took a lot of measurements of the different parts of the panel so I could make some decisions about how to lay out the various parts. This is still a work in progress but hopefully decisions will be made soon.
I'd really like to make a start on the quilting of the dinosaur quilt but unfortunately this is a very large heavy quilt and at the moment I don't think I have the stamina to work on it. That may change going through the month. I do have a smaller quilt I'd already started quilting and this seems the obvious project to work on. As I use my machine on the dining table I need someone to lift it for me as I have strict instructions not to lift anything heavy for the next few weeks. That won't be a problem and so I will try and complete the quilting on the churn dash quilt.
Later today I'm going to look in my sewing cupboard for projects I've started and not finished or worked on for a while. Things get lost to the back of the cupboard and over the last two months the ploy has meant I have sewn blocks together to complete quilt tops. I know there are still some orphan blocks in there.
I will still be continuing my embroidered tablecloth as this is so relaxing in an evening and at the same time I need to get on with my knitting. I also have another frog block to start work on. This is the one I pulled out to start stitching this month. It's slightly bigger than the previous blocks but it shouldn't take long.
My remaining item I want to sew is a blouse. This has been cut out for some time and it would be good to get it made. I don't have a photo of the pattern or the fabric so that will follow soon.
For now I need to get started on some sewing. I'll let you know how I get on in my next post.
Take care
Lyndsey
