UFOs -- Again!

I've been trying to finish things up and move them off my list, both at work and at home.  I'm enjoying a bit of success at both places... feeling rather virtuous about the work pile (although it never seems to get any smaller, people keep sneaking things into it), but I'm really excited about the 'home' pile!

While at my aunt's one Friday, I was assigned with my cousin Amy to sort through four large black trash bags of donations from another cousin, who got them maybe from her mother-in-law or grandmother-in-law, I'm not entirely sure.  Non-sewers just classify anything as 'material', so we were unsure of what we would find.

I should have taken a picture of our process but didn't.  We opened the first bag and found things that were suitable for small projects like doll clothes and things that could be used in quilts and a LOT of stuff that just needed to be tossed back in the trash.  We also found many sets of the pieces of raglan tee shirts, kid sized, already cut out and with a piece of ribbing attached.  Those were interesting...

We culled down four bulging bags to two bags, each about half full, one for Amy and one for me.  No one else wanted anything.

I found a set of nine square hemmed cloths, five of which had embroidery on one edge.  No one except I knew what they could be...although some of them made good guesses.  There were also two skeins of floss.

The squares had hand picked hems with beautifully mitered corners.  There were two red, two green, and one white linen embroidered with a three-barred cross, and two purple and two blue with the aforementioned floss.

Have you guessed?

Now they are not quite as fancy as the altar cloths above, but I'm sure they were intended for such a use.  Our church has a preschool with a small altar that is used for both preschool and Sunday School activities, and it only had one cloth, a plain blue one, that is on it all year.  These various colors would be great to use to match the season in church.  I asked the preschool director if she'd use them if they were finished.  She said she would be thrilled to have them, but doesn't embroider.

I do!  Last week Saturday while Miss A was in the pool, I sat at the patio table and worked on them.  I used these plastic q-frames that I had in my resource center.  They hold well and don't mark up the project.

 The floss was already provided!

I measured the location and size of the existing crosses on the red cloth, and used a white quilt marker to draw in the lines.  The crosses are four inches in height and width, with about 3/8" between the bars.  The embroidery is a simple running stitch.

I like this frame, it's easy to hold, even for someone with arthritis, and the sewing went quickly.  I finished up while watching TV on Saturday night, and delivered the package on Sunday morning.

Another UFO crossed off the list, even if it wasn't mine originally!  But I'm still counting it.

Sew on...