Moths have good taste. They chose to place their offspring on my beloved cherry sweater,
which I knitted by hand from Sasha Kagan’s Big and Little Sweaters. On their way to adulthood, the baby moths nibbled more holes than I wanted to repair.
So I put the cherry sweater with an oversized red sweater that never looked good on me
anyway, and made this crazy-patchwork vest.
After machine embroidering the red sweater I stabilized the knitting with
fusible interfacing.
I cut the stabilized sweaters into patches and arranged them on a lightweight cotton foundation
cut from a commercial vest pattern. I sewed them in place.
Oh no, the patchwork didn’t look good! The bright reds, blue, and white looked too busy and choppy. What could I do?
Decorative stitching along the join lines helped a little. I tried various tricks to tone down
the stridently contrasting colors.
Finally I saw what was in front of my eyes the whole time. The vest had a circle theme (the
red cherries and the embroidery motifs). What (usually) circular item do I love and have in
droves? Buttons! To tone down the white, I added red buttons (an echo of the cherries). I made the busy pattern even busier! Much better.
If red buttons on the white areas looked good, would white buttons on the red and blue areas
be even more wonderful? I tried it out. Yes! This is one of the happiest projects I’ve ever made.
It makes me smile every time I see it.
This vest was accepted into the Small Wonders exhibition at the 2005 Spring Quilt
Festival in Chicago