Hello Shadow

It's Groundhog Day! (Tuesday, February 2, 2016)  This year, to celebrate, I stitched a groundhog,  and mounted it in a frame with no glass. It's home-dyed fabric which I scrunched up a bit, inspired by one of Grace's recent pieces. 

I also had the idea of making a stuffed groundhog, sort of like the Christmas donkey (earlier post). With that in mind I made this fellow out of air-drying "clay" (it's not really clay but was easy to work.  The smell was rather poor though):

The plan is to drape the cloth around him (her?) and then stitch it up, sort of like molding a dress on a dress form. I'm not at all sure this will work, and I do want to find out, but ran out of time for now. 

Liz wanted to see some detail from grandson's quilt.  Here are 2 of the squares, hand-pieced and quilted:

This last photo is of the back, to show the family hand prints that were the quilting pattern. I quilted it once from the back and once from the front because it was a little too thick to make the stitches on the front look ok on the back. I learned so much on this project. What will be next? (Maybe some smaller pieces.)

Well, just to bring things full circle, here is Gilly with her groundhog--

There is another plan for tomorrow, which is to do some stitching in public.  That is, to go to a cafe to work on a stitching project.  It's so different from working at home, and I like to see the people on their computers looking a bit curious about hand-work.

Well, happy Groundhog Day to you and if you have encounters with your shadow, I hope they will bear good fruit. 

~~xoxo, s.