Now that Laura's quilt is finished, I've picked up the one that was for me, a simple half-square triangles in a selection of rather soft colors, not quite Georgian but nearly. I have been taken for some years with the quilt in a scene from one of my favorite Jane Austen movies, the 1995 "Persuasion," that little scene where Anne, having just met Captain Wentworth again seven years after she turned him down, is sitting on her bed cut to the quick after hearing that he had said she was so altered he would hardly have known her. The scene is almost heart-breaking, with Amanda Root's little gesture of touching her face, seven years older, tired and worn-out by her heartless family -- but indeed, I have also noticed the quilt on the bed, a simple thing of patterned triangles alternating with cream ones. Mine now is even simpler, with its half-square triangles -- and one in Anne's day would no doubt have been paper-pieced instead -- but I shall call this "Persuasion I" nevertheless. I've got most of the rows sewn, and some of the rows sewn in pairs -- a fairly simple matter, so pleasantly day-dreamy.
David has become very intrigued by hemp fabric, its ecological soundness, and so we bought some pieces and samples from Hemp Traders in Los Angeles -- this is their H-P4 hemp linen (4.6 oz.). I was thinking that I'd make a shirt for him, though when the fabric arrived I remembered why I dread sewing with linen fabric -- I love the feel and look of good linen, but it's so slippery and wiggly that I feel hopeless at even cutting it, let alone sewing it -- so I made a pillowcase. I made up for my cowardice by sewing the hem with the newly-discovered triple zig-zag stitch on my 1980s machine. On the bright side, the pillowcase is very nice, and already softening up with laundering. I think I will get some linen/cotton blend for that shirt ...
For a long time, I've kept my sewing threads in one of those plastic spindle boxes, which has vexed me the whole time for not being able to accommodate different sizes of spools. The photo on the box looks so organized with all of those slim Gütermann spools, but I have the fatter Gütermanns too, not to mention the Coats ones and assorted oddities. If I put one of the larger spools on a spindle, then at least four of the spindles next to it can't be used, which is remarkably inefficient for a thread storage box. One day last summer, as I shifted things around yet again to accommodate a new spool, a thought slowly dawned on me that a storage rack like a kitchen spice drawer insert would be just the thing -- it could accommodate different sizes of spools, which if you got a new spool would simply slide over to make room for the new one.
He fiddled around in the garage for a while and came up with a prototype, fiddled some more after consultations, then came up with this, which fits in one of the drawers in our tall Chinese chest-of-drawers, home of my yarn stash. There is a little lip at the front of each tier to keep the spools in place, and the tiers are tilted at just the angle to get both maximum visibility and maximum capacity.
It gives me a very librarian-ish pleasure, I must say, to open the drawer and see the neat rows!
I love all your photos. Well done on finding a solution for your spools. The zigzag stitch is very attractive too.
Persuasion is my favourite Austen novel, and I like the Amanda Root version very much. I have fond memories of a BBC version, that I always thought had Hannah Gordon as Anne, but it turned out it wasn't her at all.
Posted by: dawninnl | May 26, 2021 at 12:43 AM