35 years & a food mixer

35 years ago I got my left hand into a food mixer at school; don’t ask me how; the mixer started before it should, and it took the teacher 45 minutes to get the hand out. Anyway, this spring a bone fragment that was undiscovered all those years ago, started acting up and pinching a nerve or something. The x-rays showed that it’s jammed into a joint somewhere between my index- and middle finger. I can’t say getting the hand into the mixer was a pleasure, but it surely hurt this summer as well. I got to use these very cool finger straps for weeks, but the hand was still pretty much unusable. Well, I could use the thumb, but it still was kind of depressing.

What I usually do when I’m down? I quilt.

Now, I could not use a ruler and cutter, and precision piecing was out of the question anyway, so I got some yarns to play with instead. You’ve got to do something, right? I set some rules for myself: I would not unpick anything, just add to the pieces (I find that keeping some experiments that do not turn out so great, reminds me what not to do). I prepared some foundations - small sandwiches with scraps of batting basted together with scraps of fabric. After the yarn was in place, I added some fine tulle, and used free motion quilting to keep everything in place.


These yarns are incredible. Each skein is made from lots of different strands of yarns in different shades and textures, just knotted together. The first two test pieces were made from these yarns.

The very first; I tried making a binding from one of the yarns; not very successful though, but hey, no unpicking

This one actually turned out great


I got some more yarn, and added some scraps of fabric

These pieces are missing something; maybe some beads?

(Seriously, what's wrong with my camera??)

Now that I finally have two working hands, the quilts have been finished, bindings and all. That’s 4 UFOs done, although they were not on my list.