- Inching along

I was a strange little kid, made more so perhaps by my father's insistence that there be no TV in the house for the first five years of my life. He was a marketing director for a toy company, so I guess he knew very well how manipulative advertising could be. My mom was the stay-at-home parent who had to cope with two pre-school kids 24/7. Consequently, we visited neighbors (and their TVs) quite a bit, particularly on rainy days.

But we also played a lot of make believe, "helped" my mom bake cookies, and listened to records. We had one of Greer Garson reading folk tales, of which Dick Whittington and His Cat was my favorite. Apparently I memorized it because I recall my grandfather egging me on to recite it on more than one occasion. We had music, too, of course. And one of those songs, sung by Danny Kaye from the movie Hans Christian Andersen, has been going through my head as I stitch because I've fallen in love with little one inch square patches ...

One inch square linen patches on top of my first nine-patch

I have to confess that I don't make them exactly like Jude Hill does, although her ingenious paperless piecing is at the heart of it. Instead of cutting and ironing individual squares, I tear strips of old cloth and iron the long edges over a one inch wide piece of cover stock (see this post for details on ironing).

Then I finger-press the raw edge at the end and tuck a one inch square of cover stock into the fold ...

finger press the other end around the square ...

cut the patch ...

and voila!

At which point I follow Jude's instructions by removing the paper and basting the edges to secure the patch ...

The new inch patches will eventually join my less conventional rectangle patches for a dip in Prairie Tea, which has taken an interesting turn. I had dyed a bunch of patches and left them in a colander to dry ...

after which I found this ...

Oh, I liked that. So I set about making more intentional ones by deliberately pressing the patches against the holes to dry ...

which resulted in this ...

They haven't been rinsed out yet and I actually hope the marks mellow a bit, but I'm pretty pleased with how things are going. Where the patches will all end up is becoming clearer, 'though still some ways off.

So I'll leave it at that and end with a piece of patchplay that Don just finished ...

2" square cedar post cut into 1, 2 and 3 cm blocks, some colored with milk paint

because two can play at this game!