Wedding Quilt

Jack and I were so lucky to receive this beautiful quilt made by my Aunt Toni as a wedding present.



A close up of the backing:


The backing matches all the colors of the top perfectly, and I love the heart-shaped quilting pattern:


I love the quilt top pattern, with one large block to show off the fabric and an asymmetrical border of smaller blocks:



Thanks, Aunt Toni! We appreciate your lovely handwork and we will cherish this for many years to come.

You can see more of our beautiful handmade wedding gifts here and here. I will be posting about more of our handmade gifts soon.

Halloween Needlefelts

I know we are in the midst of the Christmas season now, but I thought I would show you my Halloween needle felts anyway.



I was beside myself when I found out that the Spin-Off Autumn Retreat was going to be held in Manchester this year. Called SOAR for short, it's usually out west. I'm pretty sure that it hasn't been in New England in the past 7 or 8 years. I took Spinning on a Drop Spindle with Maggie Casey and it was wonderful. She is a fantastic teacher and a very interesting woman to talk to. I learned so much and feel much more comfortable using a drop spindle. It's great to have learned this portable technique for one of my favorite crafts.

Of course there was a fabulous vendor's market at SOAR, and I behaved myself for the most part but I couldn't pass up these great needle felting kits from Blackbird Crafts Needlefelting (part of the Mocha's Fiber Designs booth; the items are also usually available on Mocha's website).
I got all four designs because I couldn't choose between the ghost;



the fabulous cat;


the adorable pumpkin;


and the spooky moon with a bat. Plus, they all look great in a row as a banner!


I like the way they came out, although they don't look like the pictures and that bothered me while I was trying to make them, but I got over it. This was my first time doing flat needlefelting (previously I've made 3D objects like the gnomes), and it was a little challenging but still fun.

Now back to my Christmas knitting and crafting! Several items are gifts, but I will show you things as I can!

Autumn Leaves Stitching

I started this embroidery project last fall with my stitching group, and I finished it up and had it framed this summer. I currently have this embroidery for fall, and my "Smells Like Snow" embroidery for winter. Eventually I'd like to have one for each season.



This was an interesting project. We collected leaves from our yards (I ended up taking some of my mom's leaves, from the Japanese maple in her front yard), and traced around three of them on the congress cloth. Then we took those same three leaves and rolled paint on them to print the full leaf near the traced leaves. We used hand-dyed thread to work blackwork stitches inside the traced leaves, then metallic copper thread to outline all of the leaves and their veins. It was a great introduction to some of the blackwork stitches and a fun project.

Happy Fall!