Red, White and Done!

I finished my Journal page for July! Yeah! Even though it's now August. The idea came to me soon after I got a book, Fabric Leftovers by D'Arcy-Jean Milne . I follow many bloggers in Australia, New Zealand and the UK and recently I was thinking about how expensive fabric can be in those parts of the world and also how ingenious these quilters are about using scraps and old clothing for quilts. With that in mind, I found some scraps I was going to toss and decided to be economical, green and ingenious like my fellow quilters.



I also love Tonya's style of quilting, especially her "threadies" and "crusties". In fact, I emailed her last week when I was having trouble finishing this piece. She offered a "kick in the pants" (Ton, I'll take a raincheck on that! LOL) but I ultimately didn't need it. You see, I was waiting for the piece to "speak to me"and frankly, it wasn't talkin'. I tried beads and fancy threads but nothing seemed right. As I was pondering it the other night, my DH peeked in to see what was going on and I explained my dilemma. He said "Maybe it's not talking because it doesn't have anything to say. It's telling you it's finished." And with those words, I realized he was right. Sometimes, less is more. So I added the twisted string binding and called it done.



Here is the result:

I know this isn't everyone's cup of tea but it was a really fun project. The technique uses rug hooking canvas and I just traced a basic design on the canvas and wove strips randomly through the canvas. After the weaving was done, I used a wide zig-zag to hold the strips down and then went back and did decorative star stitching in the white stripes and blue block and a wavy stitch on the red stripes. Here's a close up:

And now another project is done! Now, I'm off to finish a couple of bags for an exchange I have going on and a doll quilt!