The Joys of Working by Hand

I’ve rediscovered the joy of hand stitching.  Needle turn has always been my first love but now I am enjoying hand piecing as well.  I have paper pieced before but I can’t keep it up for any length of time.  I can’t tell you how many packets of paper piecing papers I have.  Maybe I need to destash those.

Jen Kingwell’s Pretty Circle Game has really got me hooked.  I think it is the templates, no I know it is the templates and the fabrics are really pretty.

The templates make tracing the pieces and marking the seam allowance easy and give easy points of reference to join even the curviest of seams.  I have even started cutting blocks for Delilah, which I was going to machine piece but I now have the first 2 months (4 blocks cut out) ready to start stitching. I am using my Tula Pink stash for this quilt and mixing them with black and white prints.

The Row by Row is looking good.  I have the templates ready for the next two appliqué rows and I will start to work on them tonight.  Think it will be the tulip row as I think that will be super quick then on to the flower shop row.  I hope to get 2 rows done this month that might be a bit ambitious as I have a work trip in a couple of weeks and that will probably cut into my sewing time, but I work better on a deadline.  Pattern writing started on the weekend.

Our airconditioner died the other week so we are hoping that the weather stays cool for the rest of the summer/autumn while we organise quotes for replacement/fix but I don't think we will be that lucky.