Raccoon 1.0

Okay Smitty! Come and get me.

Squirrel 2.0

Here's the revised squirrel. I did use a polka dot for the eye...and gave him a shifty look. He wanted to be looking backwards in case someone tries to steal his nut. I think he understands that my sewing room isn't a particularly safe place.

The temperature is supposed to dip into single digits tonight, so I lit a fire in the woodstove. Unfortunately I don't have Tommy to give me guidance. It used to drive me crazy because he would sit in front of the woodstove and yeow nonstop until I started the fire or added wood. When it got warm enough he would finally stop yeowing and settle down on his cushion (aka throne) in front of the woodstove. Now I miss the reverse smoke alarm. Even at 3 AM.

Revisions

If Tommy were around he would have told me that yesterday's squirrel didn't look right and that squirrel's are rats with excellent PR. He appreciated that adding a bushy tail and a hop makes a world of difference. That said, squirrels do not have round heads. So I modified the earlier sketch and happily it only requires a larger flip triangle (a square sewn on the diagonal and then ironed over).

This would also make an excellent mouse head. And for this version of the squirrel I am sewing in the eye at the beginning rather than at the end. I discovered that I could use starch during the first part of Dale Fleming's six minute circle and it made it much easier to fold and iron back the fabric back to make the opening.

I also realized that I could use a polka dot to give the squirrel some googly eyes. I hope this will encourage the squirrel population in the woods to flourish. We used to be able to look out at any time and see a squirrel. But two springs ago we had a cicada emergence where cicada's drill holes in the end of branches to bury their eggs. What I didn't understand was that in the spring following the cicada emergence, the trees so affected don't produce nuts, seeds and fruit. And the woods are just not the same without squirrels.

SQUIRREL!!!

After I finished the squirrel, I decided he needed an eye. I used the sewn insert circle method from Dayle Fleming to keep the whole block pieced.

Blue pup

I may be barking mad...but I'm joining another year of the Rainbow Scrappy Challenge, where this month is blue. Just blue.

This pup is a revised version from one I used in a baby quilt about ten years ago. Yes, those eyes are appliqued and the mouths are embroidered. This time everything is pieced. And the idea for the shifting eyes comes from the wonderful Hootie owls we enjoyed last year at A Quilt and a Prayer.

What If...

I started this blog in 2011 to document a "make something" everyday project. This overlapped with Vicki W.'s journal challenge which turned out to be a combination of miraculous and death-defying. At the end of it, however, I had 52 small pictorial quilts and much improved Adobe Illustrator skills.

I also had a small library of vector files that I could raid for other projects. This Carolina wren was making a fuss in my front yard one morning and was the source of inspiration for the day.

The wren then became a repeat pattern that I submitted to a challenge at Spoonflower, the digital fabric company.

While I am overwhelmingly grateful to Vicki for starting and continuing the journal challenge back in 2011, now on the front end of the challenge, I find it daunting to commit.

On a side note...I have always considered working in a series as a way to manage "what if" notions that crop up when you are working on something. It may not fit with what you are doing, so you save the "what if" idea for the next piece and this, as a by product, generates a series. I am endlessly fascinated by how Jude Hill masters this on her blog Spirit Cloth. And okay, I also have a major crush on her cat Soul-o (a series unto himself).

So don't ask me why, then, I find the notion of exploring "what if" exciting and "working in a series" inhibiting.  But given that, I'm rebranding this as a "What if" challenge. More specifically..."What if I go to Vicki W's blog each week, find a tutorial and follow it."

Happy New Year

Welcome to a new year! My goal for 2015 is to take back possession of my sewing room. Unfortunately, it seems to have been mistaken for a pig sty.