Stitching Sunday on a Monday...and a Ta-dah!

Hello and apologies for not posting my usual Stitching Sundays post yesterday – I spent the weekend looking after Little Flower, who came down with a sudden sick bug early Saturday morning. Ugh. The world stops when a sick bug comes along - we weren’t sure if we were all carrying the virus, so we cancelled all plans and spent most of the time in the sofa nest.

Happily, she’s feeling much better today and eating normally, so I was able to put the finishing touches on my latest project:

Ta-dah! This must be one of my quickest WIPs ever, I was so anxious to get it finished! I’ve wanted to recover this bench for a while, and I had the Tilda charm pack in my stash (purchased with no project in mind, just my crazy need to own these beautiful fabric squares!). A match made in heaven.

Once a month on a Wednesday morning I toodle over to Jooles’ lovely home for a quilting morning, and last week I brought my charm pack along. We drank tea, nibbled on warm, wonderful homemade scones (complete with clotted cream and jam, she does spoil me so!), and arranged and rearranged the squares on her kitchen table. What better way to spend a Wednesday morning?  

This was the final arrangement, although I could have kept repositioning one square after another all day long. Do you ever find that with patchwork?

While Little Flower and Bunny were playing a board game Saturday afternoon, I sewed the squares together – which took me under an hour! I’m getting better at this sewing lark... This morning I tooled up and used my new staple gun to secure the fabric to the bench. Then I attached the pretty ice-blue trim with fabric glue. 

Time will tell if that’s enough to keep it all together! The bench is happily in its place beneath my growing wall of embroidery hoops

*sigh* pretty.

Now on to the embroidery part of Stitching Sunday on Monday:

I’ve started the green on the eggs and ham. I decided to fill stitch in a sort of curved direction for the ham - you can see the texture it produces on the left, as the shape of the ham curves.

I use guide stitches whenever I’m filling a space – those are the little stitches spaced farther apart on the left side of the ham. These will keep my fill stitches flowing in the intended direction without going astray and leaning too much in one direction (a common problem if you just use fill from one far side to another). I’ll take more photos as I’m filling to further illustrate this...

And the sewing machine cover is coming along, albeit more slowly than I intended – the distractions of Tilda patchwork and a poorly child!

I finished the ‘Stitch’ and sewed on the measuring tape ribbon; now I’m working on the running stitch and little buttons. I actually find doing a running stitch in a straight line quite challenging, I have to measure and add guide dots along the way!

Little Flower’s resting and watching a show, but now we’re going to bake some cookies. She's requesting chocolate chip...she's obviously feeling better! Wishing you all a happy week, and a big welcome to my newest followers from the Grow Your Blog party!

Chrissie x

P.S. Do link up if you have something stitchy to share!