I recently held a class in hand piecing. Do you remember those days??? Making templates, tracing around them, and then that slow hand stitching along the lines. When I started to make the samples for the day it was a chore. I felt frustrated at the speed of the whole process, the slowness of it!!! All that work for one block. I began to feel I had made a big mistake suggesting running a course on this, something that seemed to show in the numbers that were booking on it. I had five in the end (I need to have four to run).
Then somewhere along the line something began to change. I started to enjoy it. I found I could sit and do these blocks in front of the telly; I could carry them in a little bag and whenever I had five minutes I could just whip them out and carry on; I became fixated on those neat little lines of hand stitching that just made me feel happy. I didn't care if I was slightly off the line on one side; I loved the fabric (Denyse Schmidt) and had been looking for way to use it; but most of all I loved the look of the block once finished and pressed.
I am on block 9 now and plan to keep going. They are simple blocks, nothing fancy but I love them so...here are four of them.
I had five ladies attend for the day and we had a brilliant time. We just sat and sewed, talked, laughed and ate cake (you can't have a patchwork class without cake in my opinion) - I almost felt guilty for having charged them for the day it was that much fun! I plan to continue making blocks and just see how far I can go; maybe even making a quilt completely by hand. Go on, do something that will slow you down abit - it feels good!!
