Seams French

A friend, recently back from Russia, brought this stunning traditional shawl for me. The shawl was hand crafted near Moscow, using traditional materials and methods. The yarn is spun from the fleece of goats, and is most commonly knit in only it's natural colours of white and grey. Said to be as warm as a fur coat, they are very highly prized in their home country where winters can be very harsh. Similar in texture to a mohair/cashmere mix, the shawl is lightweight and feels luxuriously soft and silky. Having only limited experience knitting laces, I can still appreciate the complexity of this hand crafted design. This highly prized, heirloom quality gift will be worn with great care and valued for generations.

Design and Colour Where to start? Never having worked on a landscape piece before, I am relying on the knowledge and experience of quilters and embroiderers, who have published books on the subject, to help me through the process. These are a few of the books that I am finding helpful for this process. Top to bottom/left to right. "Adventures in Design" and "Color Play" both By Joen Wolfram; "Nature's Patterns" by Joyce R. Becker; "Luminous Landscapes" by Gloria Loughman; "Serendipity Quilts" by Susan Carlson; "Machine Embroidered Flowers" by Alison Holt. What have I learned so far? How to proceed? 1. Choose a theme. The quilt will be a triptych, 3 long wall hangings, each representing a particular region of western Canada. There will be 3 pieces, exact size yet to be determined, and for current purposes I'm working with a 12" x 24" dimension for each piece. The first in the series will be...

With company visiting last weekend and with Canadian Thanksgiving coming up this weekend, I took a little time-out from my regular stitching to add some colour to the table linen scene. Two years ago, when sewing some rather large drapes for a patio window, it was necessary to buy a whole bolt of fabric in order to get the colour and weight of linen required. Because there were about 12 meters of linen left over, there was easily enough for a tablecloth. It was made to fit our table with an added extension, but here it's on the table without any extensions. (The colour of the linen is actually a brownish terracotta. The colours on the first two photos are much "pinker" then the true colour. I'm not sure why; all photos were taken at the same time?!?) To get the width that I wanted, some additional lengths of fabric had to be added to each side of the fabric. In staying true to my goal of using only (well mostly!) fabrics from my stash this year, I was also...