Unexpected Events

I had one of those beautiful holiday weekends where everything was going so well. Sunday afternoon, my daughter and I took the bus into Narberth to set up sewing lessons for her at the Cloth and Bobbin, then my son picked us up to grab a bite to eat.  We made plans to spend our day off on Monday to shop for a dress for her 8th grade dance and other summer items. It was a very relaxing time.

About 2 hours after we returned home, I went to the emergency room with a sharp pain in my gut only to stay in the hospital through Tuesday. I'm fine now, but my game is way off.

I'm healing, the meds are working, but they affect my concentration and working with sharp blades and needles requires a lot of concentration. I returned to the sewing room for the first time on Saturday to make myself a get well basket of fruit. Now I'm beginning to feel better. 

Soon I will be turning over the sewing room to my daughter for the summer while I spend my time doing handwork. There is one big project left on my design wall that I was hoping to finish up before then, and that was her teal and grey orange peel quilt. One evening, after finishing up the 20th paper pieced orange peel, she walked in, looked at the wall and said, "Those look like leaves. Can you make a forest instead?"

A forest.  How about a snake? I asked. That's an easy design with these blocks.  

She wrinkled her nose and said no, she wanted a tree. So I played around with rearranging them into a semblance of a tree and left it alone.   Since this week's illness kept me away from sharp objects, I had time to think about a new design for all of those orange peels I just made. I decided after a few false starts to K.I.S.S it, Keep It Simple, Silly. 

I settled on a simple background of somewhat straight, almost vertical lines. The background will be a series of crumb blocks with the teal ranging from light to dark. The tree trunks will be chunks of light grey fabric with dark sideways triangles to give the suggestion of birch trees. 

After I make the background, I will applique the orange peels at the bottom of the quilt to look like fern leaves in a forest. I'll keep you posted on its progress.