And now for the only thing on anyone's mind...

HOW is that quilt coming along?

Bright birches is moving along.  I decided that the squares really need to finish at 16x16, then made the first square exactly the right size if I perfectly lined up the background fabric, which is to say that I made it about an inch too short.  So that's not super-great.  There's a decent chance I'll just make the top row squares a titch shorter than the others, probably won't even be noticeable, but there's an outside chance I'll forget all about it and it will mess things up when I'm trying to put it all together. 

I am continuing to give a non-negligible amount of thought to every single fabric placement, but at this point I think I have all the needed strips started, and am plodding through piecing them together.  The background fabric coming all from stash is a stretch, but it could still happen.  


Baby Raccoon

Or perhaps that thing you just can't get off of your mind is this little delightful baby raccoon.  

At this point, there are like, hand to God, 9 colors I haven't broken into yet.  It is sheer insanity.  There are two creams that I wouldn't feel confident staking anything on being able to tell apart, and the two browns I KNOW I can't tell apart.  And yet I cannot bring myself to substitute one for the other or deviate in any way from the pattern, although last night for the first time I found a color where it wasn't supposed to be and didn't give it a second thought.  One misplaced stitch in the melange of light and lighter gray, medium and mediumer green, and brown/brown will not affect anything.  

So far, in the New World we've found ourselves in, my bit of crafting time in the evening feels exactly the same as it had before, so it's a really nice comfort.  While everything else is falling apart, I can count on half my ass falling asleep while I make tiny medium green stitches across an expanse of raccoon fur.  

Happy crafting! 

Not quite butterflies

The quilt is done and hung:

Overall, I find it hard to look at, to reconcile as a single object in one's mind.  In person, I see more slanted stars than flying farfalle or butterflies.  The quilt I linked last post used rectangles, rather than squares, and I definitely should have done that.  I used 5" charms, raiding a pack of neutrals I've been sitting on for baby quilts.  This quilt came 100% from stash, which I'm very happy about.  The backing is a pretty neutral large-scale print that I got at a local fabric store from someone else's deep-discount destash, which I was happy to put to use. 
 

Does it tie the whole room together?

Quilting-wise, I only outlined the farfalles - we can agree, yes, that the neutrals needed more?  I didn't know what to do, so I left it. 

The binding got the fancy treatment that Stolen Quilt also got - I machine-stitched a fancy zig-zag on the front with the binding folded around to the back instead of hand-stitching it down.  

The only real success I see here is how nicely the batik worked to pull the forest green and seafoam together.  I like that.  Otherwise, it feels weird and too personal and awkward.  BUT!  It's probably better than a bare wall.

More on the decorating front is this first attempt at Sashiko:

Before washing out the pen

Traced a pattern, stitched a pattern, in the aforementioned forest green.  I used this heavier-weight fabric I bought for pincushions, which is kind of a looser weave.  Now I don't know how to finish it to hang in the same office - Sashiko pieces, if the internet is to be believed, tend to be made into useful objects, rather than just decorations on the wall.  I don't want to quilt it, so that leaves framing it or finishing it as a hanging somehow.  One of those floating frames might be nice, or a $0 option that has yet to occur to me.  

If you have any ideas, drop me a line.  

Happy crafting!