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May 2005 - May Flowers
So I got to work. I new I wanted to make just a six-petal flower. I thought I would make the bottom of the pincushion using the same technique, but that was before I realized that you have to sew this pattern entirely by hand. So I decided to substitute a solid piece for the bottom.
Sewing the six petals to the middle of the flower by hand was more than enough for me. I lined the top and bottom with two layers of 100% cotton batting and filled in the rest using regular polyester batting. I am very pleased with the results and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of use out of this pincushion for years to come.
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April 2005 - Recycled Monster
Here is my recycled monster along side my original sketch. As you can see, I cut some corners, namely the snout. I just couldn't figure out how to make the whole thing work in the time I had to work on it. And then I found this wonderful bulbous piece of rubber in the parking lot of the Just Tires at Roscoe and Lincoln when I was walking to the El from my sister's house one morning. That sealed the monster's fate. My husband thinks it looks like a zombie lemur.
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For
this month's submission I decided to experiment with a quilt design
I have always liked but have been too intimidated to attempt -
Grandmother's Garden. I figured this would fit in pretty
nicely with the whole flower theme and yet if I made it as a
pincushion it might not be so scary. The biggest bonuses of
the plan were that I already had all of the necessary material and I
really did need a new pincushion. 
The
body is made from two different sweaters I bought at the
Salvation Army and felted. Coincidentally, they were both
J. Crew sweaters. The darker sweater actually has a cable
patterned, but it kind of disappeared during the felting.
The eyes are from two washers that for some reason were laying
on my sewing table. I'm not sure what they are from, and I
hope that I don't realize that I need them one day. I
bought the scarf that makes up the tail at the Salvation Army
when I was buying the sweaters. I had to cut it down quite
a bit because it is one of those horrible polyester numbers from
the seventies. I love the colors and the little red
mushrooms that are scattered on the yellow stripe. Because
the sweaters felted up so thick I had to sew it all together by
hand, but since the finished body is only a little under 10"
long, it only took me a couple of evenings to get him all
together. Adding the tail was another night, so it went
pretty quick.