October 1, a new month, a new project!

Well, it’s October 1, 2013 and while there are many topics I could comment on today, most of which would raise my normally low blood pressure to a steaming level, I think I’ll talk about my troubles tendency to suffer revel in startitis.

On the other hand, that has probably been well documentated and demonstrated, so let’s just get to the new project!  A while back I saw a quilt that I fell in LOVE (yes, in caps) with.  But every option I explored to make it was out of my price range.  The quilt is the 1847 Bride’s Quilt.  Have you seen it yet?  It’s a wool applique quilt with a very symmetrical layout, black background with medium bright wool applique and an interesting corner applique treatment.  Here’s a pic I grabbed off the web if you haven’t seen it yet:

But, as I  mentioned, I couldn’t afford the price tag on the options I was finding.  Thanks to a good friend, who is also a superb enabler, I was able to find an outlet for the patterns without purchasing all the fabrics to go with.  A great step in the right direction.  And while I have a small (but ever growing) stash of wool felt that I’ve purchased over the years from Annie’s Keepsakes I didn’t have enough to make the quilt.  And I wanted to try out this idea of reclaiming wool garments for wool felt or felted wool.

My first stop was to the second hand shops where I’ve collected a bag of used wool blazers:

Removing each blazer, I started by taking off any buttons that were on them:

Then cutting out the lining and cutting the seams apart so I had a basket of blazer parts:

At this point I realized, while taking them apart, that this was going to be a bit more work than I anticipated as most of them had fusible interfacing applied to the fabric.  So I set myself to ripping off the fusible interfacing as best I could, leaving me with a basket of miscellaneous lining, unusable parts and interfacing bits:

And while I’m not totally through the bag yet, I have most of the red toned blazers into what I hope are feltable pieces now:

I’ll continue this project a little bit at night until I have all the blazers hopefully felted.  And if it doesn’t work (that fusible interfacing has me concerned), I’ll break down and purchase more of the felt I need to make this quilt.

This won’t be a short-term project, it will be a long term handwork project that I can take with me to my sewing bee or when I need to sit and wait somewhere (like the car wash or the Dr’s office) and I need a different project than knitting.  My theory is that with the arthritis in my hands I need several different handwork projects to work on so my hands aren’t always stressed with just one motion.  (hey, that’s my theory excuse!).  And while I’m at it, I believe it may be time to implement a sidebar with projects in progress on it for easy tracking of exactly what I’m working on.  Perhaps that will cure my tendency to startitis……then again I seriously doubt there is a cure.  😉