Do other bloggers find that, through this writing process, a seed is sometimes sown for a new project? In December 2020 I wrote a post about a work that I had made from the silk scraps of my wedding dress and ended the post by saying: “Having taken it out of storage and looked at it with fresh eyes, I am tempted to add a few more stitches and refashion it a bit.”

The section that has been refashioned is the bodice. It took a long time to work out how to do it and, in the end, the solution was simple. I had made a camisole from the same fabric as the orginal wedding dress and, luckily, had kept it for all these years. The idea came to me while writing my morning pages and so I unearthed the camisole, unpicked the side seams and threaded my needle to appliqué it over the patched original bodice area of the work.


It is still a strange piece but I confess to being rather fond of it. I did, afterall, originally stitch it to mark our 25th wedding anniversary. The new bodice is only stitched onto the background at the top end, so one can lift it and see the original patches. You may notice that I snipped off the frayed muslin bits on the side of the dress.

Of course I looked up the word ‘refashion’ and was once again delighted to find that it means what I intended : “once more, again, afresh, (esp. in order to alter or improve or renew” (OED).
Finishing Line

You may recall that I am making a flower each month as a block for the proposed quilt Brash Flower Garden. May is marching on and I had not had an idea of what to stitch for this month until yesterday when I saw some bold nastursiums blooming and brightening my garden. (We are moving into winter in this hemisphere.) So I am, of course, itching to start work on that. Shall I make the flower orange or a deep maroon red? Nastursiums bloom in a cheerful range of colours, from yellow through to red.