Patchwork Pillow

Lately I’ve been crafting like a maniac, but I’m beginning to feel that I’m neglecting all crafts that don’t some how involve yarn. This is mostly due to the materials I currently have access to, but I also find that knitting and crochet are generally very soothing activities, requiring many repetitive motions, causing you to fall into the gentle rhythm of moving needles or a hook and allowing your mind to wander freely.

As much as I love the yarn arts and could do either one every day for the rest of my life, I’ve been getting this nagging feeling that I’m leaving something out. Wasn’t there something else I used to do?

Right, sewing! The obvious barrier to this craft is the massive and unwieldy sewing machine. Sure, you could sew by hand, but that’s far too tedious for me to handle throughout a whole project. Being away from home still, my trusty 1970’s Singer is far from reach, yet the urge to sew compells me…

Thank goodness for my dinky little mini sewing machine! Blue plastic, about 10 inches long, it can’t even backtack unless I manually swing the fabric around and sew in the opposite direction. I don’t even know how to change the thread, so everything I make from here on will automatically look best with white thread, I’m sure. It really sucks, but screw it, it’s better than nothing.

So with my pathetic battery-powered machine and scraps of remanent fabric, I pieced together a little patchwork pillow. Polka dots can be cute depending on the application, so I threw caution to the wind and hoped that the black portions in each pattern would be enough of a unifying theme to pull the pillow together.

Nothing special really, just enough to ease back into needle and thread appreciation. Hopefully I can get a better handle on this piece of junk before my next attempted project, and maybe even learn how to put in a different color of thread.