Public spaces in my area opened up today, so I celebrated by going to a coffee shop. It was wonderful to sit and watch the world go by again.
This is the same painting I posted last week, but further along. I brought some of the mid-ground flowers up to the foreground with the open lilac blossoms. Now it shows that this is an opening lilac tree, caught just as the blossoms move from buds to full blown. I think the painting may be finished.
This painting was meant to be a quick study of the lilacs, but ended up taking four hours to finish. It was done on stretched canvas and measures 16×12 inches.
Multicoloured Woven Ball
Done on a light green background, this ball uses variegated purple for the pentagons, variegated green for the triangles, and a bright orangey yellow for the stars. It was divided into a complex 10 pattern so it has 12 faces. There is a star in the center of each face. The divisions were marked by yellow with a metallic thread in it. All the threads used for this pattern were crochet cotton.
The trickiest part of this ball was getting the weaving pattern right.
Quilting
As I wrote last week, I put aside Bonnie K. Hunter’s Mystery Quilt while I focus on finishing an overdue gift. I have been working on quilting a queen-sized quilt on my domestic machine. It is difficult sometimes to get the quilt through the throat of the machine. If you want an explanation of this look at last week’s post.
The quilting is going well but slower than I hoped. I am still doing the major seams of the pattern.
My first step in the quilting is to outline the main elements of the design. This is often done by stitch-in-the-ditch, where you run your line of stitches right in the very middle of the seam created by sewing the patchwork together. I prefer to stitch just outside the ditch, about a millimeter to one side. You can see the lines of quilting stitches in the picture.
I am doing this stitching on both sides of all the sashing in the quilt and all around the borders. The sashing outlines each block in the quilt.
After this is done I will be stitching patterns inside each block and running down each border. Not sure what patterns I will use yet.