Back in Action

After my recent move, I am finally getting settled and back to blogging. The new apartment wasn't ready until a week after we left the old apartment. So, everything went into storage and we went to visit my grandmother for a week. She was thrilled to have us and we had a wonderful visit. I took one project with me to work on. Only one fit in the car with all the baby gear. I chose the blue crazy quilt block that I started embellishing during Sharon's encrusted crazy quilting class last February. She is offering this class again in a few weeks and I highly recommend it. Her instructions are great for beginners and seasoned crazy quilters interested in applying design concepts to their crazy quilting. This is the progress I've made so far. None of the seams are really finished yet, but there are a couple of things to highlight.

The white wavy seam is my attempt at the Portuguese Stem Stitch for Take A Stitch Tuesday. It wasn't done correctly as I was working from memory, but it is some variation of knotted stem stitch. Now that my internet access has been restored and I can stitch with the instructions, I will have to give this stitch another try.

The chevron seam has straight stitches along side it. The idea was to continue the geometric shapes from the patch above it. This is my first try at doing this purposely. I'll be working at this more as my muse permits.

This next seam is a herringbone stitch with buttonhole stitches done over it. I've tried it once before, but I like this one better. I used a #5 pearl cotton for the herringbone. Then the buttonhole was done with 2 strands of the new DMC color variations embroidery floss. If you haven't seen this combination of stitches, Annie has instructions on her blog.

There are several things going on here. On the left seam is branches feather stitch that will have white stitches or beads added later. A fancy twist of fibers was couched down around a printed angel picture. I've started a meandering filler design with detached chain stitches on the right. Along the edge of teal lace, I started with a wide cretan stitch and then added rich yellow straight stitces for an accent. The yellow was picked up from the printed patch and will be repeated as an accent throughout the block.