

What does one do while overdue? Sashiko embroidery was my answer for keeping sane this week. I found a kit in my local quilting store. I had such a hard time picking my favorite design and ultimately went with this one. The pattern is printed right onto the linen in a water soluble ink. All you need to do is follow the lines and make little straight stitches and, in this case, a few French knots. It is easy as pie and good to do while keeping swollen feet up! The kit comes with another piece of linen to hide the backside of the embroidery so it can be used as a pillow cover perhaps. I gave this some serious thought because this embroidery with the pretty variegated Sashiko thread, would match my living room precisely. But it wasn’t all that long ago that I removed 4 decorative pillows from my couches and stored them in the attic, leaving only the pillows that came with the couch, because this kids can not seem to resist playing with them. I swear that the couch pillows are among their favorite toys. They get stacked, jumped on, etc. and spend more time on the floor than on the couch. I decided that I couldn’t do that to my embroidery so I bought a half yard cut of Japanese fabric that reminds me of watercolors and sewed a 3 1/2″ border to the edges of the embroidery and to the backing fabric and then stitched them together, turned and edge stitched. I think I will just use it on the side table of my dining room or displayed hanging out of a basket. What a good find this was!