A Work in Progress

Here are some of the fabrics I won in a giveaway from Nancy at Patchwork Penguin . Since I rarely win anything, it was a very pleasant surprise to find this box on my doorstep yesterday. I'll be using the fabrics to make some charity quilts and including some of them in scrappy projects. Thanks, Nancy, for being so generous!

Jane Longstreth! Jane* has been a work-in-progress since 2005 or so and I finally put the last stitches in her during the June 17 Friday Night Sew-in. We've had our ups and downs along the way, including frogging of some of the over-one verse and restitching the basket twice (miscounting) as well as the lower left border (again because I cannot count). Those over-one flowers on 36-count are tiny ! But the stem-stitched leaves caused the most anxiety and kept me from working on this piece for quite some time. Those leaves got ripped out a time or two, but I think they are passable. One of the other things that was hard for me about this sampler is that the motifs are not always symmetrical. I had to let some of my sense of order go! I'm so glad I persevered. *A little history about the sampler: Jane Longstreth is one of a group of well-known pieces from Chester County, Pennsylvania. Jane was the youngest of seven children and she stitched this sampler when she was 14. The origi...

You can still sign up for Friday Night Sew-In here . I'm planning for a finish or two tonight. Jane Longstreth is soooo close to being done and I have a quilt that just needs three outer borders to be completed so perhaps I'll have a couple of pictures for you tomorrow.

I clean out my needlework closet once a year on a carefully chosen day. It's a task that has to be done when I have the entire day free and when there are no other family members around. I simply refuse to let anyone else see the extent of my stash (not even you, my readers, and thus, the picture of the backhoe). This past Monday was the day for the 2011 clean out. My husband was playing in golf tournament at a course 45 minutes away from our house. Our two college-age children were out of the state on their summer adventures. Let Unearth Day begin! However, the day did not start as planned. I'm a morning person and even though it was my first weekday off from work for the summer, I was up and going at 6:00. I was more than ready to dive into the closet by 9:00, but my husband was taking his sweet old time getting out of the house. I thought he'd never leave! Eventually, I had the house to myself and pulled everything out of the closet, dusted shelves and scrubbed the floor...