The Winter Solstice and the Great Conjunction

December 21, 2020 is the Winter Solstice and the Great Conjunction. This evening, the two largest planets in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn—came within .1 degree apart from each other. They nearly overlapped to form a "double planet." In our evening sky just after sundown, it looked like a red star beside a bright white star... which then sank into the horizon.

Blocks from The Farmer's Wife sampler

This astronomical event reminded me of the border fabric I used in this quilt top WIP [work in progress]. The blocks are a subset from my Farmer's Wife sampler quilt I started in 2018.

Astrology quilt top.

With a renewed interest in slow stitching, I'm considering hand stitched motifs in the woven alternate blocks. 

This is one of the corner blocks. It looks like a tree during the winter solstice. This quilt just might become my astrology quilt with each corner block representing a solstice or an equinox. Even the background fabric looks like a starry sky.

Winter tree

The shadows are long on this shortest day of the year. 

Stitching Success Tracker, December 21.

I'm looking forward to more hours of sunlight in the coming days.

Stan Leigh. One of our backyard kitties.

Visible hand stitching with Stonehenge Solstice

One of the projects on my Make Nine Challenge 2019 list is one that incorporates visible hand stitching. I didn't know specifically what the project would be when I made the list, but trusted that something would cross my work table that lent itself to hand stitching. Here it is. 

Collar detail on Siena Shirt: hand stitching with 5 wt. perle cotton thread.

The Siena Shirt

This is another shirt using my go-to Siena Shirt pattern from The Sewing Workshop. (My third shirt using this pattern.) This time, the fabrics are from Northcott's Solstice collection—a collection of quilting cottons designed to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Northcott's Stonehenge blender line.

Siena Shirt [The Sewing Workshop] made with fabrics from Northcott Solstice.

The Solstice color palette is a complementary turquoise-blue-green/rusty-orange scheme with celtic motifs on several of the pieces in the line. It's a beautiful fabric collection in Northcott's top-selling color scheme.

Back detail: hand stitches with  8 wt. perle cotton below the yoke.

In addition to the decorative stitches on the collar and at the back pleat, I decided to do the top stitching along the seam lines by hand rather than by machine as prescribed in the pattern instructions.

Hand stitched top stitching along at a seam.

The hand stitched details are done with Eleganza 5 wt and 8 wt perle cotton from WonderFil Specialty Threads.

Today I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with needle and thread. Hand stitching a cotton shirt featuring celtic motifs.     #makeninechallenge #stonehengefabric