Never Enough

Well, here I am starting on a new project. I bought a beautiful Angel's Trumpet plant this summer at the Biltmore House nursery in Asheville and knew that I would have to make it into a quilt. I do have a larger quilt planned that will incorporate the Angel's Trumpets but I decided to start with a wallhanging first. I have been working with a greatly enlarged photo (16x on my home printer) and deleting portions and moving parts around. My problem is: a large part of my stash is in North Carolina and I can't get there to get it at the present moment. So far, I have tried about 20 different batik backgrounds and nothing is just right so far. The one pictured here is the best of the lot. I have a lot of hand-dyes and other things in Hendersonville so I guess I'm going to have to work on that delayed gratification issue. As I've been working on this, I've been thinking about Ruth McDowell's line in her most recent book where she says that you can't just go out and buy the right fabric for your projects; you HAVE to have the stash. Boy, is she right!

And, of course, when you have a stash that means that later you'll also have scraps--lots and lots of them. I finally finished quilting my tumbling blocks quilt--called Stumbling Blocks. I don't have a picture of the entire quilt because I haven't put a hanging sleeve on it yet (don't know if I will) and it's too large just to have someone hold up. So you get a partial view. It's hanging over the rail of my sewing studio. I was pretty pleased with the result and the piecing wasn't near as tedious as I had thought it would be and I enjoyed the discipline of working on accuracy in joining awkward corners. I have friends who are far more acomplished at piecing than I am but every so often I just have to prove to myself that I can do it.

The last thing I have tonight is a second version of a sunflower hanging. I wanted to do a smaller, less complex version that I could offer as a one-day class.