The Bare Minimum

It's Monday and I have spent the last couple of days sewing and doing the bare minimum of studying.

I re-watched part of an iQuilt online class I bought awhile back with Gwen Marston and I used some of her techniques to sew two pillow tops, one with warm colors, one with cool. (I lay these out on the foot of the unmade bed to photograph them.)

 The unruly log cabin and half-log cabin blocks are influenced by a lot of different quilters, Marston and Freddy Moran among them, though I saw my first wonky log cabin blocks in a magazine twenty-plus years ago.

The improvised black and white triangle borders are from the online class. I like their stark graphic nature. In one style, the triangles are added one at a time to the end of a growing chain. The other type is chain pieced using a flip-and-sew technique. Both are very tedious to make

I also made a huge pillow top out of nine "floor sweeping" blocks (six of which I sewed in the last two days). I love making things out of scraps and bits that would otherwise get thrown away.

I draped it over our armchair to photograph it, but I like it there so I think it will stay there until I add its back and stuff it. (I still need to add the backs to all of them, but for now my sewing machine has to get put away.)

I also tried my hand at English paper piecing and I made a small pincushion out of two-inch hexagons and some scrap fabric. I don't know that I would ever have the patience to make anything substantial via paper-piecing. Again, the tedium is killer.

Anyway.

On Sunday Dave and I went to lunch with my brother and mother. We had Italian food.

I also slept as much as I could over the weekend. I'm still fighting off whatever virus is coming for me (and I'm slowly losing the fight, I fear, as I am feeling it start to colonize my throat and move down into my chest. I'm not overwhelmingly sick--yet--but I can feel it coming.