2020 in Stitches

Here are some Hard Truths™ about me:

1) I love embroidery.

2) I love long-term projects that build on themselves.

3) Ever since childhood, I have been consumed with documenting my life because there's this broken part of my brain that doesn't believe I'm real and that I don't matter so if I can create tangible proof of my existence, maybe my life will not be completely worthless.

4) I have never made a quilt.

Obviously 2020 is the year that I have to combine all of these elements into...

A HAND SEWN QUILT DOCUMENTING EACH MONTH OF MY LIFE IN 2020.

I mean, obviously. 

"Erika, for the love of God, why hand sew a quilt???"
Because I don't know how to use a sewing machine. Also, I don't have one.

Don't look at me like that! It's not gunna be that crazy-- At the start of each month I'll take a moment to reflect on how I'm feeling and turn it into an illustration with a few lines of text to accompany it. 

Like this one that I did for January:

Then over the course of the month I'll embroider it onto a square which will be sewn to four strips of white fabric around it to create a Polaroid-style frame. Honestly, not that many stitches!

At the end of the year I'll have twelve quilt blocks and then... either I'll hand sew all of them together? Or maybe I'll bribe a friend to do it for me with their machine. I dunno, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. That very first graphic at the top of this post is the template for the finished design.

Here's the finished January block!

The thread on the blue fabric is a metallic silver, which is an absolute bitch and a half to work with because it just frays and breaks like the world depends on it to disintegrate. But I needed shiny silver to complete my vision, so here we are. 

The fabric is from this t-shirt that Matt's dad gave him for Christmas that he is never going to wear. (Matt is British-American, for those new around here) With Matt's permission and his dad's unknowing, I repurposed one sleeve to be the base of my January patch because just look at that nice deep blue. It's exactly the shade I was looking for, to resemble a nighttime sky with dissipating silver clouds.

Normally my embroidered text turns out a bit... janky. That's because I'm tracing the letters onto my fabric with a pen, so obviously I can't recreate them perfectly. But now I've discovered WASH AWAY STITCH STABILIZER which is this sheet of dissolvable material that I can PRINT on with my PRINTER, so images come out on it exactly as they appear on my computer-- including text! 

So I print out my text onto this stuff and then I peel off the back and stick it onto my fabric like a big ol' sticker and then I sew directly on top of it and then when I'm done I run water over it and the printed-on-material just washes away leaving behind my perfectly placed lettering stitches.

Wash Away Stitch Stabilizer has been a real game-changer, I tellyouwhat. 

The white fabric is from some discarded IKEA curtains that we bought a million years ago. 

Literally: a million. 

So! Here we go! January's quilt block done. February's is started. I'm excited to see what this looks like in December.