I started work on this triangle while I was visiting family last month. I hadn’t seen my Mom in about a year, and many of the aunts, uncles, and cousins in much longer than a year. Just being face to (masked) face with family and chit chatting on the patio about nothing in particular was such a gift!
At one point, we started talking about craft projects, and my aunt mentioned that she still used the little plastic canvas box I’d stitched for her in grade school; it turns out another aunt still has a piece of embroidery I’d made her around the same age. I was so touched that, for decades, they had not only kept these dorky things I’d made as a child, but actually used them.
It just goes to show how much hand-crafted items matter. I mean, look how many people are making this Dear Jane quilt and feeling a connection to Jane Stickle 150+ years later.
This triangle (which gives new meaning to the traditional “tumbling blocks” pattern) looked like it would be tricky to piece, so it was originally intended to be my “challenge” block of 2021. However, it turned out to be one of those blocks that is marked as advanced difficulty mainly because it features set-in seams. Since those are much easier for hand piecers, this one was not as difficult for me as advertised. In fact, I think that the actual challenge block for this year might have been the one where I didn’t read the instructions.
This time, I made sure to check out the That Quilt site, where I received excellent step-by-step instructions. To make the block even easier, I combined those little sliver pieces at each side of the triangle with the pieces next to them … if they’re adjacent and made from the same fabric, what’s the point of adding another bulky seam?
With detailed instructions and that simplification (not to mention Avery labels to keep the pieces accurate), it turned out to be not that scary at all. Here is the block in progress, assembled into sections as instructed by That Quilt:
When I got to the end and tried to press the block, I was thankful I’d eliminated those two seams. Even then, there was so much seam allowance going on that it was tough to get the block to lie flat. It looks almost as dizzying on the back as on the front:
This was the only Dear Jane block I completed last month, but I did make progress on the other two projects and met my September UFO Challenge goals (1 Dear Jane block, 4 leaves and 2 berries on the wholecloth holly quilt, and 9 triangles on the rainbow quilt):
I feel like I cheated a little because I didn’t set the rainbow quilt goal until I could see how fast I was able to quilt those triangle shapes. I was looking for an amount of triangles that would take about three hours to do … and the verdict is 9 triangles, so that will be my monthly rainbow quilt goal for the rest of the year.
I tried to make some new masks for the family last month too, but my child (and future recipient of the rainbow quilt) announced that we had plenty of masks and that the rainbow quilt was far more important. It seems to be a future hand-crafted treasure in the making.
During my visit with Mom, there were more hand-crafted treasures from the past to unearth. Mom has been cleaning out her garage and asked me to go through some old boxes. While digging through them, I found my first ever sewing project, this lovely polka-dotted fish (artistically displayed on a backdrop of the spectacular Doctor Who scarf that my sister knitted me in junior high):
The story goes that Mom was cutting out pattern pieces to make a shirt from this polka-dotted fabric (it was the very early eighties – don’t judge), when I noticed that the leftover pieces where the neckline and shoulder seams had been cut out looked like a fish. So, Mom indulged me and showed me how to use the sewing machine to sew around most of the edge of the fish shape. Then I turned it right-side-out, filled it with stuffing, and hand-stitched closed the gap where the stuffing had gone in. The final touch was the sew-on boggly eye* (that’s right, I’m so old that this project predated stick-on boggly eyes).
It may have been my first sewing project, but it most definitely would not be my last. And now that I’ve seen firsthand how these hand-crafted items are treasured, I’m feeling inspired to make even more of them.
* Apparently everyone else in America calls them googly eyes, but they’ll always be boggly eyes to me.