Patsy Thompson Practice Piece

 Hi all -

I hope everyone is doing well! We saw a bit of winter weather last week, which was really appreciated. I also made an unexpected trip to visit my family for this week. I'm having a septic issue at my house and decided to go somewhere else while they hopefully get it fixed this week. So now I'm hoping for nice weather for the week!

I was hoping to share some progress on my quilt for Angela Walters' Arcs, Curves & Points With Rulers quilt along (QAL) this week, but that didn't happen. Angela had said in her live from the prior week that she would talk about possible border treatments in last week's live, but it looks like that live got reschedule for the first week in March. I'm not sure what happened. Hopefully I just misunderstood or Angela forgot to mention that she wouldn't be doing her weekly lives for a couple of weeks. Anyway, I thought about figuring out the border quilting on my own, but I only have the borders on my small panel so I'd really like to see her ideas before I quilt it. And I decided that I really want to finish quilting my small panel before starting on the large panel so I ended up putting this project aside for now.

To get a little bit of sewing in this week, I decided to add binding to a little Patsy Thompson practice piece I quilted years ago. I've always loved Patsy's work and I followed her blog religiously. I had made this piece as just a practice piece and I put it in my pile of little quilt sandwiches that I keep by my sewing machine for doing things like checking my tension and playing with the stitch settings when using a specialty stitch. But every time I pulled out this sandwich, I loved it too much to use it as a scrap and would throw it back into the pile. I finally decided to pull it out and put a binding on it so I could hang it on the wall.

Patsy Thompson Practice Piece

Patsy Thompson Practice Piece - Close-Up 1

Patsy Thompson Practice Piece - Close-Up 2

The color is pretty true in the first and third pictures. I was also playing with quilting on a shot cotton for the first time, and I really love how it turned out! I put quick corners on the back of the quilt for hanging.

Patsy Thompson Practice Piece - Back

I like to hang my small wallhangings using thumb tacks since they are easy to use and don't do much harm to my walls. The quick corners are easier to make than a hanging sleeve and they work well with the thumb tacks. I'll enjoy having this piece on the wall where I can see it regularly!

I also made some good progress on my knitting this week. I was able to finish my read Lemme Cowl designed by Laura Nelkin.

Lemme Cowl

The cowl looks really cute with the matching hat! It was cold this morning so I was able to wear my cowl on our dog walk.

I also finished my Open Minds shawl, also designed by Laura Nelkin.

Open Minds - Center

This shawl is so big that I couldn't take a picture of the whole thing on the blocking boards without a step stool! So, instead, I took pictures of the different sections.

Open Minds - One Side

Open Minds - Center Close-Up

Open Minds - Arm Base

Open Minds - Arm End

The styling of this shawl isn't appealing to me esthetically, but the feel of it is incredible! It will make a wonderful scarf!

Finally, I started a new shawl -- Atween designed by Laura Nelkin.

Atween

The yarn for this shawl is lovely to work with. It feels good in my hands and is easy to use. A nice break from knitting with the mohair which is kind of a pain to work with!

Nancy