Month: October 2020

Blue Roses

On an antiquing trip before the stay-at-home life began, I bought some old fabric flowers.  I had been experimenting with making my own fabric flowers (which I wrote about here), so I thought this bouquet would allow me to examine someone else’s construction techniques.

The roses were dirty – stained and discolored.  But at $1, I didn’t mind that.

Last week I chose to spend a few of the last hot days of the year playing in the indigo dye bath.  One of the pieces that I dipped was this bunch of roses.  Aren’t they nice?

I dipped other things, too.  This shot of two lace coasters shows the difference in one dip in the dye and two.  This shot on the wooden table could have been part of the last post on Blue and Brown.

A vintage crocheted tablecloth went for a blue swim, too.

More blue things in the next post….

Blue and Brown

I love blues and browns and I especially love them together!  

Mother Nature loves blues that go to brown, too.  Look at this hydragangea in different stages of its blooming life this summer.  The final brown bloom hanging on is just as beautiful to me as the most cobalt of blues!

I recently made a slow stitched study in blues and browns.  

It started when I made this notebook cover as a gift.  The colors were so rich and entrancing that I wanted to use the leftover bits in another project.

The linen background came from some yardage a friend brought to our quilt guild from her mother’s stash.  The mother was downsizing and moving – we benefited from the clean out!

The bits of blues and neutrals were from my collection of old and new bits of fabric and lace.

The hexagons led to a bee theme of sorts.

I experimented with various weights and colors of thread, added beads and buttons.

This format, the rolled up collage, is a favorite of mine.  I used a thin layer of batting under the brown linen while doing all the stiching.  For a backing to cover the messy seed stitching, I added a bit of an indigo overdyed linen sheet.  I attached this with a tiny seed stitch with a fine thread; going only through the layer of blue and the batting.

Queen Anne in Quarantine

Today is our 226th day of social distancing.  It’s October 18, the 292nd day of 2020.  (I’m keeping track of those things for part of my journal quilt for 2020.)  We still have Queen Anne’s Lace blooming in our yard!  

As I’ve shared before, I’m sending a photo to “the girls” each morning, letting the next generation of our family know that the old folks are up and at ‘em each morning; all is well.  I have an album on my laptop containing these nature photos.  There are daylilies, geraniums, clematis, roses, lots of wildflowers; there are rabbits and deer and mushrooms, too. 

One plant stands out as being ever-present.  Queen Anne’s Lace.  I truly love this plant…we’ve had patches of it in the yard every year since we moved here nine years ago… but this year there are more patches and they have been blooming constantly since mid-May.  

I love photographing these specimens from all angles, and I especially love the cage that forms as the flowers go to seed.  I’ve collected these seeds and scattered some already, hoping that in the future, wild carrots will be EVERYWHERE!

And, in the winter, I’ll still have some…these made with needle and thread.