Needle Felting, FLW and Dear Jane

The Elgin Piecemakers met this past week for the first time since June.  There was lots of catching up to do!  Pat P has been doing a lot of needle felting over the summer and decided to teach all of us how to do this too.  We were each given a small piece of felt, a block of foam and the barbed needle tool as well as our choice of colours of the wool roving used in this craft. You can see my small creation above before it was trimmed.

The back is quite fuzzy!  Here is my square after trimming:

And here are all of the little needle felted squares that we made:

I can see why Pat has found a new addiction!  She has been busy making pincushions and little landscape pictures over the summer.

My husband and I were away on vacation for 10 days and one of the stops was at the Bennington Museum in Vermont where I got to see this in person:

Yes...it is the original "Dear Jane" quilt made by Jane Sickle in 1863!  It is only on display for one month of the year and we happened to be in the neighbourhood at the right time!  5,602 pieces!  169 blocks plus all those triangles in the border! I stared and studied it for quite a while!

I took a picture of the information card for your reading pleasure. 

I thought all of the slow Sunday stitchers would be interested in seeing this quilt on my blog today.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks:

This quilt is a testament to Jane Sickle's perseverance in a difficult time period in history.  The fabrics, the piecing/applique and quilting had me in awe!

There was lots of time on the trip to cross stitch as we travelled.  I managed to finish all of the cross stitching on FLW on the trip.

I am now working on the silver metallic thread outlining.  This will take a while.

So, this is my hand stitching project for the next while...getting all of that outlining done.  I will be linking up with the other Slow Sunday Stitchers at Kathy's blog tomorrow morning.   Happy Stitching!