Daria,

You were a very clever girl to have gathered the bits you sent me from charm packs, to go along with our theme of “square”. I loved each of the prints and actually had in my mind a finished piece very similar to yours, using them as squares within the larger square. But when I sat down to work on them I decided on strips of them, all mixed up. I am sticking to my commitment to myself of doing each month’s eight by eight project in one sitting (which sometimes leads to, um, interesting effects), so in an afternoon I had several strips of pretty prints, all kind of loosely based on this pillow I saw in one of the magazines I got recently-

I thought it would be interesting to combine these into strips and zig zag stitch them on to the beige large swatch, similar to that pillow in the photo. I wasn’t loving my result until I added the teal blue binding-

I don’t remember where I got it, but it has got to be the most narrow width of binding I’ve ever tried to sew over an edge (which I’m now thinking it wasn’t meant to do, but whatever). Once I added it, it all felt much more cohesive to me. This was good practice for me, I’m always trying to get nice sharp corners. As Melissa once said about her (always lovely) quilt binding, “Next time will be perfect.”

The charcoal embroidery thread you included added a little more handwork, which I liked adding to this piece. I just roughly marked parallel lines and handstitched a running stitch across them.

As I said, you totally got my April package to you, it is perfect!

Is it May already? Okay, your “post” May Day package of “green” is on its way (can you guess I’m behind).

For anyone joining in, you can check out our entire gallery of past month’s eight by eight projects in our Flickr group.

Dear Blair,

Yeah, I’m totally the black-clad kid slouching around in the back of the eightbyeight classroom, hoping that the assignment wasn’t actually due until Monday.  (Also, I have not posted in so long that there’s a whole new generation of wordpress interface, so give me a minute, here.)

But, look how cute, my assignment!

I know from experience how hard this box was to put together (yes, drunk on coffee HAS to be the excuse for square!), but I think the set of fabrics you sent is just charming, all crisp vintagey colors & patterns, plus I am impressed by how many different types of square patterns you have in your stash.  I thought I knew what I wanted to do, but then I had a different idea!  No, wait, a different idea!  It’s much easier to think of a project than it was to think of materials for this one — now I think I remember why we thought square would be a good idea.

(By the way, the way the fabrics I sent fit into the theme?  They all come from charm packs.  Square, see?)

D

Dear Daria,

April’s theme of square threw me a little, did it you? Were we drunk on coffee the day we decided that? Anyway, I took an afternoon to concentrate on what became the contents of the box I sent to you. And once again, I am delighted and surprised that you sent me a totally different set of square things to play with. There is a really nice feel to these patterns when they are all together like in the photo above. Big and little…blues and greens…and browns… (and I didn’t forget the darkish gray embroidery floss you included that I just realized is not in this photo). I think I’m forming an idea, I’d like to really play up the patterns against each other. I’ll ponder it further while I eat the square of chocolate you included. B