...Growing, Building, Cooking, Preserving, Crafting...

2006 began our urban homestead when I broke ground on a garden, which now includes perennial fruits, flowers, & many vegetable varieties. We dream of solar panels, keeping bees and hens. Until then we'll continue growing and preserving our own fruits and vegetables, building what we can for our home, cooking from scratch, and crafting most days.

3.11.2010

Scraps of Memories


I finally finished the quilted pillowcase I started a couple weeks ago.  I had a throw pillow in the living room that I'd found at an antique store years ago; it was pretty scratchy and uninviting and always ended up on the chair in which people rarely sit.  So I decided to have some fun making a new case for it.  I had an interesting scrap of fabric I found in my grandma's attic years ago.  It was sew onto a pink moppy piece of fabric and looked like a drawstring purse.  I ditched the moppy material and kept the other piece, with gray and red roses, thinking I'd use it sometime in a small project.  The day finally arrived.  I made that piece of fabric the centerpiece of my crazy quilt top and added other memorable scraps I'd saved: disassembled pieces of my grandpa's old silk tie, trimmings from a tie-dyed apron I made for my nephew, parts of a vintage pillowcase, some embroidery linen with an interesting print (which I ended up embroidering on the new pillow), some strips of a red sheet, and bits of calico my mom gave me.  As I randomly sewed the pieces together--not planning the width or orientation of the strips--it became an "anything goes" quilt as I crafted without regard to colors, patterns, textures, and sizes.  It was like I had a blank canvas and I just made it up as I went along.  The new pillowcase fits nicely on this now comfy, squooshy throw pillow.  It goes well with my favorite red leather armchair, a relic that belonged to the doctor who started my dad's business in the early 20th century; there's still a burn from on of his fancy cigars on the underside of the cushion.

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