Workbasket – Layette & Succulent Wall Hanging

The layette project is almost at an end.

Being that I had started this project as a gift for someone else, but it was no longer needed, I hadn’t initially had a hard “finish by” date.  When DC had mentioned that she’d like it for a baby shower gift, I had to speed things up a little bit. Because I also have other things to do in life besides just knitting, I wasn’t able to complete the entire layette. I explained that the carriage cover (blanket) wasn’t going to be finished in time.

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She was happy with that because she could gift it at a future date.  😀

The hat,

booties

and sweater

all being complete I took them over to DC’s house in time for her to take them to the baby shower.

 

The gift was a success!

The carriage cover is now my “portable project”. I take it with me for breaks and lunchtime at work. Sometimes I am lucky enough to be able to work on it while passenger-ing in a car! 😀

At home, where my sewing machines are, I am working on the initial construction of the background piecing of the wall hanging.  This isn’t the sexy part of doing any applique project, but it is necessary to do it well and correctly for the background to be a suitable recipient of the appliqued pieces.

I decided to start with this cacti because it had the most fiddly leaves, each two layers of felt.

 

The instruction said to blanket stitch around each felt piece with a color matched sewing thread. I went to my extensive collection of sewing thread.  I knew that I didn’t have anything to match the color of the pot, a orange-yellow color.  I picked out all the spools of any shade of green that I had.  I took it to a  room with better lighting, only to find out that despite having 7 shades of green, none of them matched any of the felt leaves.  :-/

I could go to the fabric store and purchase numerous new spools of thread that I would probably not have any use for after this project… or I could go to my, even more extensive, collection of embroidery flosses.  This was much more successful for thread matching of the felt.  The orange yellow color was easy and obvious, so that is where I started.  I pulled all the greens that were close to the greens of the felt.  I set them aside for matching a little later.  I am not sure if I found enough greens for all of the colors of the felt.  The cool thing is, when I have matched all the greens in this cacti then I will have all the greens in the whole thing matched because this cacti has all the greens. 😀

 

The hand stitching is my favorite part.  It is soothing and makes me feel connected to all the generations of hand sewists (seamstresses and/or tailors) that have come before.