- Christmas season continues: A return to Triangulation

Someone posted recently about gift giving (forgive me, I can't recall who it was). The gist of it was that gifts given spontaneously, especially upon completion of a handmade piece, can be much more satisfying than gifts given on calendar-driven deadlines.

Having already embraced the concept of "Birthday Season" it was a fairly short leap to "Christmas Season" ... which is what I am now calling the period of time it takes to complete all the gifts I intended to give last Christmas.

In fact, I only managed to get one handmade Christmas gift given on time: the kitchen towel All Roads Lead to the Beach. But I gave myself a pass on the Close Your Eyes books since my grandsons are still too young to mind the lapse.

So now that I have finished the books for Jace and Griffin, I am returning to a belated gift for Don: Triangulation ...

I'm actually glad I took a break from it since I learned a lot in the process of making the other pieces and in following other blogs. For instance, there is Grace's current project wherein she is intentionally stitching folds into cloth. This released me from the angst I experienced when I realized my insufficient invisible basting had led to excess folds of cloth in Triangulation. Now I'm embracing the folds, happily incorporating them ...

I also discovered during Close Your Eyes 2 that I prefer a single strand of floss to two in many cases. As a result, I am enjoying the rhythmic repetition of single-thread Kantha stitch combined with the mantra "om mani padme hum" (another gift from Grace ...but for those of you who have observed my spiritual pursuits in the past, this doesn't necessarily mean I'm embracing Buddhism) ...

And because my alternating horizontal and vertical blocks of Kantha were inspired in part by Saskia over at the Birdhut, I would be remiss if I didn't include a picture of the B-side for her ...

So settle in folks, I've got 13 squares down and 174 to go. It's gonna be a long Christmas season for sure.