This has been the strangest summer weather wise. It was so cold on the weekend I seriously considered turning the furnace on and while it has warmed up slightly, I’ve been wearing a sweater or hoodie all week when I go outside. I’m not complaining though, as I’ll take this over heat and humidity any day and it’s much easier on my breathing. Our city also made the national news this month as we had terrible flooding – they estimate we had two months of rain in one afternoon. Every other house you drive by has a dumpster in the driveway as so many people had flooded basements and ruined possessions. We were lucky – when we renovated our basement quite a few years ago, we spent a small fortune having a trough dug around the interior of the basement and a sump pump installed. Since then, we haven’t had any problems. This poor guy wasn’t so lucky.
I did manage to accomplish a couple of things on the sewing front. This simple four-patch was an attempt to use up some of my green scraps – it didn’t even make a dent! I’ve made this pattern several times and you can find the pattern on Mary’s blog.
We had some stonework done at the front of our house this summer and I was looking for a new wreath for our front door. Everything I found was either cheap and nasty or $200 – neither of which appealed to me. During my online search, I came upon a tutorial for a scrap wreath. Since I love blue and yellow, I grabbed those scrap bins and started cutting a million 1” x 5” strips. Now my scrap bins aren’t just strips – they are literally any piece of fabric left over that I can’t bear to throw out. After all, you never know when you might need a 1” square of orange for a penguin’s beak or a snowman’s nose! Because I was cutting the pieces pretty much individually, it took me ages. If I were to make another one, I would use batiks as they wouldn’t fray as much and they would be the same colour on both sides. Here’s my finished project.
I originally had a different bow on this, but while it didn’t look bad close up, from the street it needed more punch, so I made another one. The one below is the original.
I also made a wallhanging for a birthday gift, but I forgot to take a picture of it before I mailed it. Hopefully I’ll have one to show you next time.
I’m looking forward to taking a class from Bonnie Hunter in September. She is teaching at the Amherst, NY seminar that I try to attend every year. I thought all the spots would have been taken up by guild members, but Lee and I were lucky to get into the class we wanted. I’m sure she will have all kinds of tricks to teach us so it should be a fun day.
