Besides the Oingo Boingo Bowling shirt, I made great progress on projects until the International Communications Project this afternoon...aka calling tech support to fix internet and wifi problems. The Quest rep with the Bangladeshi accent was most helpful. Wish I could say the same for representatives with the British and and Indian accents working for Dell. That experience was so bad that DH went and bought me a bottle of wine. My applique has progressed rather slowly ever since.
Saturday night, I finished the applique for the Heron. It is both the Ancient/Modern Challenge with Ethne, and a sample for the Applique Addict Workshop in West Yellowstone, MT in May.
I'm not sure where I go from here. My friend Barb has been begging and groveling...threatening to pay me money ..wanting it to be hers. I'm starting to consider the offer, provided I can have visitation rights.
I've been studying the whole knitting thing for the past week. This morning I attempted to teach myself to knit using the Continental Method. This is my first serious attempt at knitting without someone standing over my shoulder coaching me. I'm still struggling with yarn tension with my left hand. I don't seem to be able to be able to manage both tension and stitches at the same time. After about 3 hours, I'd figured out casting on, knit and purl. (There were 3 mini swatches that were knitted and ripped before this one.)
Have I mentioned the tendency I have of delusions of grandure? Well, having gotten to a point that I thought my knit & purl were not truly hideous, I started the "Class Sock" from Charlene Schurch. I checked out her "Sensational Knitted Socks" from the library. Her practice sock uses all the stitches needed for the real deal, but in a mini format designed to be encouraging. Juggling 5 needles with a 32 stitch round was rather challenging. And my tension problems got worse rather than better. But those are things that should improve with practice. Right? (OK...I've only been knitting 1 day, it's hard to imagine things getting worse eh?) This was my progress for about 2 hours (most of a football game minus replays and interruptions.) I need to finish another 3/4" of K2P2 before I need to address the heel.
The center panel of the Ojibwe quilt is now finished. One of the reasons I was discouraged and quit previously way the annoyance of doing the same pattern x 4. I feel great progress (done with one of the side panels) only to discover that the other 3 panels are missing a couple major motifs. If I ignore everything else and just focus on a finish....I'm aiming to get that one done by the end of January.
Sorry I don't have more pictures to share. I'm blaming Tech Support.
A couple evenings of the news has netted this much of a heron wing. Unfortunately, I made a major mistake. I was hating the uneven basting lines that I had on the circles. I had, however, hand stitched the center circle. So I left the center circle and pulled the other basting lines, figuring I'd draw them by hand or just eyeball it from the center. After I had started cutting, I realized that the middle circle was supposed to be a "hole" not a "button". Ooops. Design change time. I'm going to wait until I have the surrounding applique done to decide if I'm going to try to fix my mistake with another circle (not quite enough room), a wonky-off centered circle (everything else is fairly symmetrical) or detailed quilting. I'm pretty happy with the way the rest of the lines turned out. The pattern lines are slightly wiggly and uneven lengths, which makes it easy to do 'correctly'. I can't tell you why...but that just makes me happy somehow.
