These beautiful pink roses were from my husband yesterday on my birthday. I had a lovely day except for getting a tummy bug.
My 9 year old son who also got the tummy bug in the middle of the night last night got to stay home from school today. He has improved as the day has gone by and borrowed the grown-up camera and took the above perfect shot of my birthday bouquet. That is the nice thing about tummy bugs, they can be quite intense but generally pass quickly.
This morning while my husband slept until nearly noon (yes, he got the birthday tummy trouble too and stayed home from work.) the children and I spent a bit of time going through fabric for a little tiny project I am going to do. My son took this photo too of me looking trough some treasured Japanese fabrics.
These are the two Japanese fabrics I chose for the 9-patch squares I am going to be hand sewing together. This is a very small project I am doing, from the Yoko Saito book, which I believe is called Square and Triangle.
By the way, if you ever want to preview or purchase Japanese books and magazines online I often use ebay. Many of the sellers scan a good portion of the book onto the site to give you a good idea of what you will get. I go to ebay.com, then I do a search for Japanese crafting magazine, Yoko Saito, Japanese quilting book, etc. You should get up a number of results and then when you click on one that looks interesting, give the page time to download and you can browse to your heart's content. Here is a good peek into the Square and Triangle book!
And here I am sewing according to Yoko Saito's instructions. Using a water soluable pen I traced a paper square onto fabrics that I cut out leaving a .7 seam allowance around the blue marks. Then I sewed two squares together on one end. The stitches should start beyond the blue line. You can just see my knot on the outside of the blue lines. I did a running stitch all the way across. It goes pretty quickly.
As you can see I have sewn three rows of 3 squares together and have finger pressed the seams in alternating directions.
Yoko recommends pinning the pieces together as I have done here. Can you tell I am having a ton on fun?
Now I have ironed the 9 patch, cut out two layers of cotton flannel, several cm larger than the 9-patch. I cut the bottom layer of fabric the same size as the flannel. I have once again used the water soluable pen to mark where I will be doing my quilting stitches. Now I am ready to baste the sections together.
I look forward to working on this over the weekend. Perhaps you have some nice project to work on this weekend too? Wishing you a lovely one!
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