Home Alone

It seems like ages since I have had a weekend home alone!  It happened this weekend - everyone left except the dog, who occasionally requires more attention than the average toddler...and thinks something is terribly wrong if I haven't gotten out of bed by sunrise...  The solitude made for a fairly productive weekend.  Nothing finished, really, but I did make progress on a couple of projects.

One of the projects I worked is a hooked pillow for a magazine article Nola is writing. I started with a plaid wool and three complimentary pieces.

The idea is to show how different the plaid looks when hooked different ways. 

The top two squares were hooked with the wool cut perpendicular to the selvages (actually vertically in the picture above - in the direction of the colored stripes). The left square was done by sorting the strips by color and hooking a frame with the green strips and filling the center with the red and yellow. The square on the upper right was done by cutting the wool and hooking it in exactly the same order as it was cut from the piece.  The lower right was hooked in the same way - in cutting order - but from wool strips cut parallel to the selvage. The lower right was hooked randomly mainly from a mixture of strips cut in both directions.  This will be finished off as a pillow with the plaid wool on the back. Nola has a bunch of people doing these.  It is very fun to see all of the different effects that people have achieved with the plaids!

I spent some of the weekend catching up (or almost catching up) on prepping my SBOW blocks.  I still need to piece the background for week 7 but have all of the wool pieces cut. Blocks 1-6 are prepped and i am nearly finished stitching block 1. I have a LOT of stitching to do!

I also finally made a start on my first broderie perse section for my Rising Sun. I have been avoiding it - it is definitely not my favorite technique - but I really want to have it in progress to take to Baltimore on the Prairie. I didn't do any sewing....it is amazing how long it takes just to choose fabrics!  I am about half way through the prep.  I think a couple of the flowers I selected will be a real pain to applique...they may end up being switched out for something easier...but I am going to give it a shot.  I'm kind of liking how it is turning out so far.

I addition to taking several frisbee breaks to keep the puppy happy, I also took a little time out to dispose of some zucchini. 

Sadly, I barely made a dent in the pile on the counter, but the house sure smelled wonderful!