Despite living in Colorado and being surrounded by mountains, where I live does not usually get much snow. In the ten years we have lived here this is only the second time school has been cancelled due to snow. In addition, even though much of the eastern part of the U.S. has been socked in with snow and cold, up until Sunday we had been having spring like weather for weeks with temperatures in the upper 50s and lower 60s.
As the saying around here goes, if you don't like the weather just wait 5 minutes. Things changed drastically for us on Sunday when it snowed all day and into the night. It continued to snow off and on Monday too. I spotted this little bird stopping for a snack in our front yard.
He snacked for several minutes before moving on.
Our estimate is that we got a foot of snow at our house, again very unusual for us. When it snows we rarely get more than 2 or 3 inches of accumulation. We've had little to no moisture for far too long though so we are not complaining. But enough about the weather!
On to the sewing. I purchased the class Stupendous Stitching on Craftsy a while ago. I finally got around to watching it recently since my art group decided to use the technique for one of our 12 by 12 projects.
Last year we did a little round robin type exercise. We got six 15" squares of prepared for dye white fabric and put them in paper sacks with our names on them. Then we traded the sacks each month and did a surface design treatment on everyone else's square. In December we finally got to see our own squares. We put them all up on the design wall and decided that we would each do a Stupendous Stitching type treatment to our fabric and cut them down to 12" by 12".
I looked and looked for the photo I was sure I had taken of my square, but I can't find it. So here is what my piece looked like part way through the process.
I think you can still see enough of the background in this picture to get the idea of what it originally looked like. At this point I had couched some things down and done some machine stitching.
Then I did the hand stitching, trimmed it up and quilted it, then added buttons. Here it is finished.
This technique is really fun! I enjoyed pulling out all of my yarns and ribbons for the couching. Then I pulled out my collection of variegated threads for the machine stitching. I used a variety of threads from my growing hand embroidery threads collection. I collect buttons all the time but rarely use them. It was fun to dump them out and sort through them to find a nice range of sizes and colors for this project.