The Cozy | Stitching

After making the center layer, and all the basting and marking, it was finally time to start stitching on my Cozy quilt! Size 8 perle cotton was suggested, so I went ahead and chose a palette of threads I thought would go with my Cozy fabrics. Below is my first selection, though I have since added two different grays, and have yet to use the solid black and the dark green. I'm kind of choosing colors as I go.

I began stitching in the center, and am slowly working my way out to the edges.

Here's a closer-up view below! As you can see, I'm choosing to go with the 'tails on the front' method of beginning and ending my stitching around each shape. I've never ever done that, so this seemed the perfect project for it. Plus it's easy, though I do take the time to carefully trim the thread tails to 3/4".

I'm trying to stitch for an hour or two every evening, so it's going to take me a while! I'm still debating on when to start cutting away the excess fabric on my quilt front. On one hand, I'm not intentionally waiting until the stitching is done, but so far, the stitching has been enough. Just taking one day at a time.

Past Stitch Club posts, for reference:

The Cozy

The Cozy | Middle Layer.Basting.Marking

Original Stitch Club - November 2020

Stitch Club Kantha Quilt - June 2022

Mini Series Sew Along - November 2022

The Cozy | Middle Layer.Basting.Marking

It was back in November(!) that I joined The Cozy Workshop & Sew Along. I had never seen a quilt quite like the Cozy, and wanted to experience it for myself. I have participated in several sew alongs hosted by Alison Glass in the past (listed at the end of this post), and I always learn something new. 

So when I signed up, I ordered the Amber Cozy Knit Kit, four yards of 100% cotton jersey, which will be used for both the top and backing of my Cozy quilt. Other supplies I ordered included:

Pre-Cut Stencils - Falling Leaves 
Sharpie Twin Tip Marker 
Cozy Needles - Milliners 3 - Set of 25

And then for Christmas, I received a pair of Karen Kay Buckle 6" Micro Tip Scissors, which is also a suggested item. I'll also need #8 perle cotton, which I have on hand, but I have yet to decide what colors I want to use.

Back in November, I also thought I'd use my collection of Carolyn Friedlander fabrics for the quilt's middle layer, but I changed my mind along the way. Instead, my focus fabric ended up being Desert Wilderness by Boccaccini Meadows for FIGO fabrics, a dotted print I've had stashed for several years. I also included Hush Hush Gridlock by Amber Kemp-Gerstel and Forgotten Memories by Minki Kim for Riley Blake; Metallic Pepper Dotted from Collection CF for Robert Kaufman; an unknown Art Gallery black and white print, and finally a couple of strips of a cotton batik, which wasn't in my original layout above, but made it into my final layer, shown below.

It was highly recommended that both the jersey, and the center cotton layer be prewashed before layering. Since I don't routinely prewash my fabrics, I did that after the center layer was pieced. Not ideal. To safeguard the seams, I tucked the center layer into a pillowcase and sewed a long basting stitch across the hem to close it. I did make the center layer oversized to allow for any shrinkage.

Even safely tucked into the pillowcase, there was still some fraying of seams, though not too bad. My biggest concern was that the different fabrics used seemed to shrink at different rates. I think that's what happened, as the whole thing was a little skewed. Once I'd pressed it a few times and trimmed it to size (54" x 70"), I felt ok about it, and went ahead with the basting.

Pin-basting 12" apart is what was suggested, so that's what I did. The Falling Leaves stencil I purchased was one-quarter the size of the anticipated quilt size. I held it in place with pattern weights and a few pins, and interestingly enough, then proceeded to mark the design using a Sharpie, as directed. That was a first!

The stencil had to be moved several times to mark the overall pattern, but sliding the quilt sandwich around on my dining table made it all pretty quick work. Alison assured us that this is a very forgiving project, and I'm trusting that to be so. ;-)

So the prep work is done, and now I wait patiently until Wednesday when the stitching instructions will be released. That's the part I've really been looking forward to!!

Past posts, for reference:

The Cozy

Original Stitch Club November 2020

Stitch Club Kantha Quilt June 2022

Mini Series Sew Along November 2022

Stitch Club :: Wool Applique

Well November holds the final installment of the six-month Stitch Club hosted by Alison Glass. It's been good, and definitely delivered on my purpose in joining - to add more hand-stitching into my life. So the last focus was on wool applique. I'd done quite a bit of felt applique years ago, so this wasn't all that different.

After picking a project from the November Stitch Club Journal, I purchased a yellow Mill Dyed Wool Color Pack from Sue Spago, which consisted of six 1/32nd (9" x 7") cuts of wool in various shades of yellow to gold. For stitching, I used a variety of #8 Perle Cotton that I had on hand.

The project, as you can see, is a garland. I made mine with Christmas in mind, consisting of gold wool stars appliqued onto pennants cut from Kaleidoscope in Iris. I used the simple whipstitch to attach my stars, periodically adding a smaller star in the center of the first.

A bonus to the stitching was creating tassels from embroidery floss - something I don't think I'd ever done before! There are all sorts of tutorials on YouTube, from simple to fancy. This tutorial has several variations as well (I used #2). I kept mine pretty basic, but did use four different colors of floss for each one, then placing them randomly on my garland. The embroidery floss was purchased from Amazon, an "Old Gold" gradient.

The completed garland measures a tad more than five-feet long, and for now, I've hung it across the screen standing behind our bed. 

Thus Stitch Club comes to an end for me. Here are links to all my projects in case you missed one.

June - Kantha [pillow]

July - Sashiko [modern Japanese rice bag, table mat]

August - Couching [pincushion, flex case, zipper pouch]

September - Outline & Filled Stitches [cloth napkins]

October - Embellishing Printed Fabric [pincushion]

November - Wool Applique [garland]

So I obviously did a good amount of hand-stitching these last several months, just as I'd hoped. And I think I surprised myself how varied the projects could be. 

Stitch Club :: Embellishing Printed Fabric

Though I started out with larger ambitions for Stitch Club this month, I ended up doing a pretty small project. With a theme of embellishing printed fabric, I ordered up some Menagerie in Mermaid from Alison Glass' Sun Print, with the intention of cross-stitching its Xs and embellishing some pillowcases. 

But friends, those Xs are small, too small to stitch for long with my eyesight. But I did like the fabric, especially the bee. So I chose another project where I could highlight that one section. I revisited Happy Sew Lucky's Round Pincushion, a sweet puck-shaped pincushion pattern that offers a nice variety of shapes. I chose to make mine 2" tall by 4" across, perfect for my stitched bee.

Speaking of said bee, I stitched with size #8 perle cotton, backing the piece with a layer of batting before I started. The out-line stitches were added to define the design a bit more. 

So that's it. Small maybe, but still let me participate along with the club. Just for the record, I did complete a much larger project using a similar stitching on printed fabric technique a while back - so overall I'm feeling ok about things and anxious to see what's next.

Stitch Club :: Outline & Filled Stitches

Each month of Stitch Club has been so enjoyable and it's felt really good to be consistently hand-stitching again. This month's focus was outline and filled stitches, and I stuck to the program as they say, and did a project suggested in our Stitch Club Journal - embroidered cloth napkins.

For the napkins themselves, I used a lovely Kaleidoscope Bundle offered in Alison Glass' shop with six beautifully cool colors. Purl Soho has a simple fringed napkin tutorial that I followed to the letter (except the size), then added a simple doodle from Doodle Stitching: The Motif Collection by Aimee Ray. The stitching of the design was easily done with the use of Wash Away Stitch Stabilizer - I printed the design times six right on a sheet of the stabilizer, then cut them apart and placed one on each napkin.

As luck would have it, I had a partial spool of variegated Sulky 30wt #4021 [Truly Teal] "Blendables" that I used to hem the edge of the fabric squares which I had cut at 16". And then for the doodle-stitching, I used a spool of Wonderfil! variegated perle cotton in mermaid, and I think the consistency of having the embroidery the same on all the napkins really brought the set together.

The one finicky part of the whole project was that even though I tried to cut my fabric squares on-grain, invariably not all four sides were on grain.... some not at all. So that meant for some careful pulling and trimming of threads to make the fringe. I found my Tula Pink Large Ring Micro Tip Scissor invaluable in that trimming, so that certainly helped.

Anyway, that was of minor consequence, as I think the bi-color fringe adds the perfect finishing touch to these napkins, so it was well worth the effort.

Between the beautiful colors of the shot cotton Kaleidoscope fabric, the simple variegated embroidered doodles, and the fact that we use cloth napkins in our home every day, let's just say this was a very satisfying project, and I know we'll put them to good use. Definitely pretty, but made to be used.

If you missed my previous Stitch Club projects, you'll find them here [Kantha], here [Sashiko], and here [Couching]. A quick glance at all my Stitch Club projects can be found here.

Stitch Club :: Couching

So the Stitch Club adventures continue, with August focusing on couching. I already had some experience with this basic embroidery stitch, but there are variations to enhance it, and one thing I hadn't done was to do it using different weight yarns. Luckily Alison Glass had some yarn sets available in her shop, so that made it nice and easy to try some out.

My first project used Mariner Cloth as a stitching base-cloth, and that worked extremely well. With my stitched piece, I made a big ole 5" pincushion. I considered a variety of styles, but decided the most basic would be best, considering all the fancy stitches. I kinda love it.



Then I had another - much larger - project in mind. But after couching on a pretty good-sized piece of Kaleidoscope in Iris, I realized I'd rather make more smaller projects instead. SO I cut it up and first made another flex case using the pattern in Aneela Hoey's Stitch & Sew.

Lastly, I finished up with a Streamliner Pouch, a new-to-me pattern by Elnora Chambers/@elnorac. Gotta say, I love this simple little pouch with its rounded corners, and it went together in no time. I'll definitely keep it in mind for the future.

So that was really enjoyable, and I'm glad I got to try couching in a variety of new ways. Stitching over yarn probably won't be something I do alot of, but it's good to have done it. Trying various stitching techniques is what Stitch Club is all about, and gotta say, I'm loving it.

If you missed my previous Stitch Club projects, you'll find them here and here. A quick glance at my projects can be found here.

Stitch Club :: Sashiko

After exploring kantha-stitching for the first month of Alison Glass' Stitch Club, I was pretty excited to see what was up next. Sashiko! Something I have admired for sure but never ever dabbled with. I originally had three projects in mind, but ended up settling on just two, omitting the final one where I would actually mark a design on fabric.

So first, I used Alison's Observatory Pulsar in Meteorite, which actually has +s printed right on it. I chose the color I did as it was dark blue and off-white, a clear nod to traditional sashiko. I stitched right over the +s with #8 perle cotton, not traditional, but great for a first try. The design is called a modified Asagao, and I purposely stitched on an oblong piece of fabric - about 6 1/2" x 18" because I had a tentative final project in mind. And just for the record, I backed it with a length of Kona cotton for my stitching.

I really enjoyed the stitching! I suspect the distance between the +s was larger than might be traditional, and the finished stitching is somewhat loose, but it really was a fun way to go.



So having recently made a Modern Japanese Rice Bag using the pattern by @kzstevens, I thought that would be a perfect pattern to use with my very first sashiko piece. I forewent the boro patches and stitching and just let my saskiko be the focal point.

A favorite detail of this bag are the drawstring casings which are especially fun with a mix of fabrics.

And I was so happy that I had enough left of the Yoshiko Jinzenji fabric that I used in the first bag that I could use it for a bit of the exterior plus the lining of this new bag. The piece is Rose Petals - neutrals on gray. "arbre Rose" translated means "pink tree" in English.

For my second Sashiko project, I chose to purchase an all-over pattern printed on 100% cotton Sashiko cloth from a Japanese company. The one I chose was 12" square with a Kaku-Shippo design. I used an off-white Japanese sashiko cotton thread that I purchased from snuggly monkey with Tulip long sashiko needles. I enjoyed stitching this piece very very much.

Once complete, I chose a simple Table Mat pattern from Simple Sashiko by Susan Briscoe.

I used Essex Linen in Ivory for the backing, as it pretty much matched the thread I used. What drew me to this pattern, besides its simplicity and being something I would actually use, was the way the 'backing' peeks out on the sides by just 1/8", and is secured by hand-stitching. Something about that little detail really 'fit' for me.

So I don't expect that Sashiko will be my go-to stitching going forward, but I was more than happy to give it a try.

If you missed my June Stitch Club project, you'll find it here.

Stitch Club :: Kantha

A few weeks ago, I decided I really needed some handwork to work on in the evenings. My Teeny Tiny Trip had been a semi-long-term project (two years), and it was followed by a hand-stitched mini I started during our European vacation last year. Then I needed a new project, and I hunted down a Dropcloth Sampler I'd started many moons ago. I'd say I was about half done, and since then I've actually finished it!

I was already mulling over what to work on next when I saw Alison Glass post about her new Stitch Club. I went and read about it and joined right in.

"A Hand Stitching Club With a New Theme Each Month," Stitch Club sounded perfect.... some community via Instagram and a private Facebook group, which I really enjoy; and a chance to focus on a variety of types of hand-stitching. In fact when I received the first 'journal,' I was really impressed and excited to get started.

So jump forward a few weeks, and I just finished my first kantha-stitched project, a 12" x 24" pillow.

All the stitching lines were marked before I got started, with a hera-marker. Most of them stood the test of time as I did my stitching. Just the whitest of the fabrics needed a little extra marking midstream.

But otherwise, the stitching went very well, and I found it very relaxing. I used a mix of neutral fabrics found in my stash, and #8 perle cotton that I had on hand. I had in mind to made something that would coordinate with the quilt on our bed, and these quiet fabrics fit the bill.

Probably the most curious thing about this type of stitching for me was the leaving tails of thread to deal with at the end. Once done with my stitching, I went ahead and tied my threads off for added security.

For the back of my pillow, I once again used the lapped zipper tutorial by Pile O'Fabric. I would have loved an exposed metal zipper on this one, but I didn't have a workable size on hand, so opted for the lapped method with a standard polyester zip.

SO, I'm really happy with the finished pillow, but even happier with how much I enjoyed the kantha, or running-stitch, stitching. Totally hope to try it again.