Tuesday's Doin's & A Smile

Yesterday saw yet another trip up to my sister's farm in Brookston. And while I did pick up some more block print fabrics, I also picked up this:

Tim's new saddle!

Tim bought Leslie's antique high back western saddle, and since I was headed up to her farm, I told him I'd pick it up for him.

Only I had no idea how heavy it was. I think it is the heaviest saddle I've ever carried. Just getting it from my car to the tack room was more than I could do - I barely got it onto the back of one of the chairs in the lounge as it was.

He is really excited about it and I can see why. There is a real sense of history about that saddle; you can't help but wonder where it has been and who has ridden in it. If only it could talk!

The Flint corn I'd hung on my front door is now in another spot. It would not stay - I could not get the twine wrapped around the shocks tight enough and the ears would slide through and fall.

Plus I have a really nice horsey autumn "wreath" that I wanted to hang. This will stay up until the day after Thanksgiving when I trade it out for my Christmas wreath.

In the meantime, the Flint corn is propped up next to the Sleepy Hollow pillow, and I kind of like it there!

Of course, I also spent time at the sewing machine yesterday and finished another garment for The Feast.

This is a women's bedgown with inverted side pleats

and a much smaller inverted pleat in the back. Made from a block print in India, I like this one so much that I may keep it for myself.

And a Smile:

Block printing fabrics is tricky as well as an old practice that is hundreds of years old. It is common to see places where the person doing the printing misplaced the block as they were adding a color. For an example of that, look at this elephant on a piece of fabric currently in my stash:

The red covers all the unbleached muslin on the left. But when the red block was placed again, the person printing shifted just a bit to the right leaving uncolored spaces where red was intended and overlapping red into the colors next to those spaces.

A lot of folks, including me, enjoy those little errors as they personalize the fabric and are evidence that this is not a mass produced fabric.