100% OK

In this post last year I proclaimed that I was too pathologically lazy ever too make patchwork out of small pieces.

So why did I just end up hand-making a quilt out of 462 one-inch squares?

Because I hate myself. It’s the only possible explanation.

But perhaps my self-hating streak knows me better than I know myself, because it turned out I LOVED working with the tiny patches, and I also love the result:

This is a present for my friends Racton and Eleanor. ‘100% OK’ is a stock phrase of Racton’s, a synonym for ‘whelmed’.

One of the delights of small patches I discovered is the opportunity to play around more with prints. In patchwork I’m always seeking a slight jarring effect between one patch and the next, and when there are 462 patches, that’s a whole lot of potential jarring for me to enjoy. There was room for far more variety, making fragments of prints appear out of context. Plus, if I found one patch boring, I knew another would be coming along within ten seconds.

Here are a few details:

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I mentioned before that whatever I’m making becomes forever associated in my mind with whatever I was watching whilst making it. In this case: Arrested Development series 4 and series 3-6 of the American Office.

Sound Women podcast: episode 2

Behold, here is the Sound Women podcast episode 2: Attack of the Clones featuring numerous exciting people who spoke at the recent Sound Women Festival, such as Fi Glover, Anita Anand, Angie Greaves and Jo Good. By all accounts the festival was an excellent day, but, alas, I didn’t get to go; it was my husband’s birthday, which he commemorated by walking from Rotherhithe to Crystal Palace via many of South London’s unloveliest industrial wastelands.

If you want a lovely walk through South London, though, I wholeheartedly recommend the Green Chain route. And naturally I wholeheartedly recommend subscribing to the podcast via iTunes or following it on SoundCloud.