A Cardinal Pincushion

This past October I paid a two-day visit to my friend Lindsie's house. A few days before I was due to hop the bus that would take me there, Lindsie messaged me asking if I could make her another pincushion. I had made a paper pieced pincushion for her back in 2017, and she said that it "was always in the wrong place" when she was sewing, and that she wanted a second one so she could keep one by her sewing machine and one on the ironing board for convenience's sake. I agreed to make her a second cushion, but said I didn't know when I would get around to it. Then, the morning I left for her place and was deciding which project to take along, I realized that my current knitting project involved too many annoying little bobbins of yarn to be portable.

I raced upstairs to my attic workroom and quickly picked out a few remnants that would be nice for the pincushion -- I used some of the fabric left over from making supersize Christmas stockings for my family in 2018. The red fabric and cardinal print wasn't too overtly Christmassy to be useable, and it was certainly a pretty combination.

When I was cutting the fabric pieces, I carefully centred each piece on cardinals and whatever those two little brown birds are. The result looks pretty and reasonably intentional.

I orginally didn't intend or expect to finish the pincushion during my visit to Lindsie's place. I had taken it because it made an easily packable project, and because I thought it might be interesting for Lindsie to see the manufacturing process. I therefore didn't think to take polyfil stuffing along with me. But then I did finish it, and when Lindsie had no stuffing on hand, and I said I would have to take it home to stuff it, and give it to her the next time I saw her, her facial expression was that of a child who'd been offered an ice cream cone, and had it held temptingly out to her... only to have the offer and the cone retracted until "next time". In other words, she was not letting that sucker go. She promptly dug up a little airline pillow she had from a recent trip and told me to use the stuffing from it. So I finished the pincushion and gave it to her on the spot, and she said she liked it even better than the first one I had made for her.

I'm not thrilled with my stitching on the project. The pieces can and should be sewn together so that the stitches don't show, and as you can see from the close up, they are embarrassingly apparent, not to mention uneven. It really is best not to rush when crafting.