Grounded Thanksgiving: three stitch crafts

      Colds clobber and cause one to miss Thanksgiving food and togetherness. Driving for groceries wiped us out and so would a drive to NJ and NYC. However, there is no place like home and one can catch up on crafting.

      I took Hannah's web and turned it into a doll quilt, trying to teach myself embroidery writing without any planning ahead. I made Chrissy's birthday present, a portable sewing kit, using a quilted floral fabric. For my journal quilt, I marked the election.

      Hannah had given me that square with her embroidered web (second photo) and I made a back for it. I ran across a note from her saying she would like to make another quilt with me after our first one. I left a corner for her to embroider on my side. So far it says, "read, draw, sew, Hannah's web." I need to learn the proper stitch and write it out ahead, but I am allergic to planning.

       Instructions for the portable sewing kit are at my blog for June 10, 2012. Using this double-sided quilted fabric from JoAnn's makes the crafting even easier! Up high on this blog in the Search area, by the blogger symbol, type in "portable sewing kit."

       Half of my friends and family are Democrats and half are Republicans and we love each other. Shown here are the flag "Bark for Barack," the bandaid for universal health care, and the caught FOX which I felt was destructive by distortions. The confettied flags are a quilted cushion for our country that will need one. Click to enlarge photos.

Happy Thanksgiving!

   It is such a pleasure to enjoy the cooking of young people! Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. (click to enlarge photos)

Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.  Seneca

All that we behold is full of blessings.   William Wordsworth

We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.  Albert Barnes

Happiness doesn't come as a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have.  Frederick Keonig

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.  Albert Pike

Weaving Thanksgiving: a journal quilt

     For November, our 12" x 12" journal quilt group entertained the theme "Thanksgiving." To the last meeting we each brought small pieces of fabric to be distributed to everyone. These fabric pieces were to be incorporated into our block.
     Nothing came to me except the notion of baskets of blessings for which I am grateful. Celeste at our last meeting showed how she had taken strips of fabric and woven them into a quilt and I thought that was the only thing to do.

      I cut the strips using my new shape cutter that I picked up at the Quilters' Gathering in Nashua NH where I took Hannah who was evacuated from her home in NJ because of the latest storm. She LOVED the quilt show. Note the weaving behind Hannah!

      I wove the strips as one would make a lattice on a pie. I did this directly on the batting, took it to the machine to sew with no pins or spray glue and, surprisingly, it held together.Maybe not on the edges, so I cut them off neatly and took the border fabric and placed it on the back, big enough in size to wrap to the front to overlap strips of batting to be zigzagged to the the woven area. While weaving I thought of all the different personalities, some rough edges of grateful Thanksgiving gatherings with multiple personalities and the mixing of families. It is a cheerful journal quilt that I thought would never happen
      Click to enlarge the photos.

click on that turkey

I just added, a week later, the silhouette, in beads, of a turkey roasted.