Lovely inspiration

Look what the postman brought! A lot of inspiring magazines! I'm taking advantage of the snowy season and using it to gather my forces. My creative forces that is. So what if I'm not quite up to making stuff at the moment, at least I can gather ideas and get all geared up for a rise in temperature that will hopefully make my sewing area a tempting place to be again. What can be better than to get inspired by other people's craft rooms and blogging endeavours, so I can start shaking things up around here.

I'm enjoying some quiet time watching DVDs and doing some hand stitching. You might have spotted this in the background from time to time - I have been working on it for ages it seems, to the utter bafflement of my quilting friends... Why sit and stitch parallel lines on a piece of batting sandwiched between two layers of fabric? Well, it seemed a good idea at the time - I have been increasingly fascinated by texture lately, and just wanted to try my hand at making something simple where creating texture was the whole point.

And the good thing about the last couple of quiet evenings is that it is finished. I have quilted it with a deep turquoise silk thread in big uneven stitches. I just used a 1/4" quilter's tape to guide my stitch line, and stitched happily along, creating slightly wavy lines all across. It looks a bit primitive and simple, but I like it. I have a tablecloth in the same deep turquoise, and I'm planning to use this as a table topper. If I had been more fastidious, I would have centered the motifs on the fabric and all, but I just used the whole length of fabric that I had, and it turned out the way it did. Kind of an experiment really. And I'm fine with that.