A Little Stack

This morning I finished sewing in the ends on half-dozen cotton washcloths I've knit for our annual Operation Christmas Child shoe boxes.  I have half-dozen wrapped bars of soap in baggies; each will be accompanied by a cloth.  These were fun to do and used up three balls from my stash  -- Lily Cotton "Sugar 'n Cream" for the most part.  I love knitting this sort of thing with self-striping yarn as it's fun to see how the colours play out.  :-)

If you like the heart-shaped ones and belong to Ravelry, the pattern's a free Ravelry download...or you can get it free online.

I followed this up by photographing the half-dozen or so tracings I did for Linda -- Activity #6 of Module 8 in the C&G. This is the last exercise before I plunge into the actual design and construction of my final assessment piece.  I wanted to finish up now, because I'm off for a few days to a women's retreat, and thought it would be a good point at which to take a break.

"Simple"

The object of the exercise was to re-visit a photo of a collection of items with which we began 'way back in Module 1.  I printed it off in grey-scale (left) to avoid the distraction of colour, because I needed to trace out the major lines (right).  The idea is to identify shapes for applique.  You can see I was still rather distracted!

"Simpler" and "Simplest"

I traced it out twice more, simplifying each time, reminding myself of these words from the course materials: "leave out lines you don't want".

In the final two tracings, we were asked  (1) to identify areas in the photo that were 'busier' or more interesting than others, and fill them in; and (2) to find a shape from our past work that we really liked, and use it to fill in a large empty space in the tracing.

I enjoyed these tracings the most.  I repeated my simplest tracing for each of these samples.  The shape I used on the right -- a semi-circle -- is from a piece of metal I found in the road on a walk a couple of years ago.  I like the way its surfaces -- both straight and curved -- repeat lines found in the original tracing, and the balance that filling that space gives the piece.  Definitely applique potential!

This afternoon's Work In Progress will be the finishing of a binding on a little flannel quilt I began earlier this fall.  Once it's bound and washed, I'll post a photo.  Promise!

Tonight, I'll turn out the lights in the front of the house, move to my sewing room in the back, and happily stitch blocks for a scrap quilt I've been putting together with left-overs.  I have all the blocks made; this evening I'll begin to assemble them into rows...and to join those rows, a glass of vino at my elbow and favourite jazz on the stereo.  

A bientot!

P.S. Linking this post to WIP Wednesday on The Needle and Thread Network.  Enjoy!