Sorry about the delay again, but this last one looks to be something that is going to make my family’s life a little better as my daughter is now planning to join my son in home schooling. She’s been frustrated with some of her classes in high school, sleeping through a few because she’s bored, and not really learning much. I’ve offered her the opportunity to work at home on the projects that really interest her, such as reading and writing, art, clothing design, science and ultimately math. We’ll see how it goes.

If you’ve been involved in home schooling, I’d really like to hear your input, just post here and tell me about your experiences. Thanks!

So here we are so far on the sashiko project. I finished sewing all the pieces together to make one rectangular piece, folded it in half, sewed it and turned it right-side-out. I left a small opening to pull everything through and now I’m using it to bring my sashiko threads in and hide the knots inside.

After that, more ironing. So far the fabric is behaving and looks very good.

I opened the sashiko thread skein and cut the threads in the middle. This gives you a uniform length to work with each time and eliminates the messiness that happens when you cut reeeeeally long threads because you were feeling ambitious. Or maybe that’s just me. *ahem*

I looked for large, blank spaces to work with and decided to integrate patterns adjacent to them and took into consideration what was on the other side as I want to stitch through both sides. There is no batting or lining on this piece and therefore it is fairly light.

The thread count on yukata cottons is lower than the quilt cottons many of us are used to using. You’ll be glad of this once you start working with the sashiko needles as they are quite thick. Dip the needle up and down along your line and push a row of stitches along.  I didn’t use a thimble at first and ended up with fingers numb from pulling the needle through. Not a good idea. From now on I’m using a thimble. Unlike western thimbles that fit on the finger tip, this one goes on the pad of your hand, around the middle finger. Adjust the elastic tie to fit.

Here’s how the work looks so far. If you’ve got any questions, please post here and I’ll tackle them tomorrow.