Day One

I like doing things with my hands. In fact, when I don't have anything to do with my hands, my hands are likely to get the rest of me in trouble -- usually by grabbing food out of the refrigerator and adding to my waistline.

Over the years, I have indulged my need to do something with my hands by learning different needle crafts. I have made my own clothes and clothes for my children when they were little. I have learned to knit, crochet, tat, quilt, embroider, cross stitch, needle point, rug hooking . . . pretty much anything that requires any type of yarn or thread.

I have been in a 10 year love affair with quilting. However, of late I have been meeting with an old friend of mine -- knitting. I found a couple of projects which I started 10 years ago and were relegated to a drawer. Pulling them out and starting them again has been interesting. One of them, a cabled afghan in a chocolate brown worsted weight yarn was a particular challenge since I could not find the pattern. I struggled through 12 rows, made a number of errors and then miraculously found the pattern when looking for my double pointed needles. I then came across an article that mentioned adding lifelines to your work. I had no idea what that was so I then googled "knitting lifeline" and found this video on adding lifelines to your knitting. Of course, now I need to buy those interchangeable knitting needles. 

I love Google and YouTube! I wish they had already been invented when I was learning how to do some of the needle arts that I do. It might have made learning all of these things so much easier. The biggest problem with Google and YouTube is that if you are typing in the word "knitting" they know that you are interested in knitting and every add for knitting suddenly appears. It is hard not to go shopping.

I have made a lot of quilts for co-workers who have had babies. It seems as if I have a job where everyone I work with is getting married and having babies. Perhaps that is why I am a little tired of quilting and am looking at knitting -- it started feeling like a chore to quilt because I was always under a deadline.

Attached are some photos of the latest quilts that I have done. 

Dancing Bears, 2009

This quilt was an experiment with all the different decorative stitching on my Bernina sewing machine.

This quilt was for a baby boy. Ya think?

I named this quilt "Butterfly Kisses" as the focus fabric has a floral design with butterflies in it.