Christening

A very special girl had her big day on Sunday. The sun shone, as the mini-heat wave continued my own mum, had picked up a bottle of Pims for me, what a great drink that is for summer parties, so very English!

Eloise, was christened where her mum and dad were married (I was married there too as it happens) and William had his Christening, what seems only a blink of an eye ago. I'd swopped out the blue ribbon on the gown I'd made for him, with a pink ribbon, actually there is a lot of the blue still under the pink....

so baby number three is pretty much good to go :) ~well a grandma can dream eh?~

Em liked the bunting, she said it was pinktastic!! it graced the table and it will end up in El's new new bedroom. My poor girl is moving house in the midst of this chaos. Shhhh dont tell her but she never fails to amaze me and make me proud of all the hard work she puts into her beautiful little family. She is my best friend as well as my daughter, its my wish for her that Eloise becomes her best friend as she grows up.

Birthday

What would a loving son get his mum for his birthday?

why.... supernoodles of course! Methinks some cupboard raiding took place, the Christmas wrapping paper was one thing but hmmmm the rest? never mind it really is the thought that counts..

The china mug says it all really, out of the mouths of babes and all that..they did have help I'm told

you get the idea

may take me a while to find the perfect lay out but you get the idea.

60 degrees

This mess will hopefully turn into a quilt. I had to buy a 60 degree quilt ruler (I did really I had to buy it) to make my grandaughter some pink bunting for her up coming christening

Not brown in sight

So it is my duty to use it some more right? yes thats my feeling also. hence the mess of batiks in a myriad of colour that now litter my ironing table. Any normal person would wait and let the last quilt be savoured and the WIP (the carpenter star) progress to the next stage but I am not normal, or maybe I am and all quilty types are this daft? Suffice to say a lot of fabrics that I have had sitting neatly on my stash shelf ended up in a mess of equilateral triangles yesterday.

Chain piecing on my Janome which is really not a well machine.It has to pay a visit to cambridge via Bury st Eds soon, disconcertingly, I am getting mild electric shocks off the metal work, but umm you are okay if you wear rubber soles on your shoes right? Im grounded ! NO? sighs oh well its out with the new in with the old for now then.

how pink is that?

Not too displeased with the bunting and it certainly made things go smoother having the right ruler. I did try to make do but it really was worth the cost.

my poorly Janome

finally finished

finally a finish.

bound it with a vibrant fresh spring green which I felt would stop it being too pink or blue. The hand quilting was a lazy girls version of the baptist fan design I say lazy because I just made it up as I went along. it works for me

Not one of the boyes

Well one of my favorite cheap shops is called Boyes, its a very northern shop not unlike woolworths, you know sell everything but cheaply! it always had a good haberdashery department, nothing spectacular but if you wanted cheap fabric for nothing too precious Boyes was the place. cue sad face:( the much reduced stock is now woefully disappointing and I ended up buying a fat quarter bundle of baby pinks and whites to do an upcoming project my single follower will eventually receive.

But she is worth it even if she isn't one of the boyes ;)

fingers and thimbles

I don't do change very well, oh I like to think I am quite an adaptable kind of girl, but the reality is new throws me out of kilter. The new (behind the scenes)look of blogspot is unsettling.Still that is a minor gripe compared to how life has been lately.Fear not I'm not going to elaborate on the down sides of life here. What I was going to write about before I was distracted by changes in blogspot was thimbles!!!!! I have very sore finger ends right now, and I know if I sewed enough consistently my fingers would form their own thimbles but heckythump its not a pleasant process. I cheat! yes yes I do, I often use my thumb nail and run the risk of the needle sliding painfully under my nail. its a risky business this sewing lark. More than once today I have stabbed my thumb with the blunt end of my needle.a far more painful event than the sharp end seems to be.I swear I actually hear the skin pop as the eye of the needle punctures the by now sand paper like surface. I have tried the usual metal thimbles, and clover leather ones that are meant to be a snug ring but nothing seems to suit my fingers, I have even tried wearing them about the house just to get used to them ..nope doesnt work for me, nor I hasten to add does substituting elastoplast or electrical tape for skin! Any bright ideas?

old and new

I spent a wonderful afternoon this week with Kate and Caroline, both expert quilters and inspirational ladies in their own right. The official purpose of the get together was Kates recent acquisition of a Victorian quilt top.

At least large enough for a double bed the top had been constructed in hexies, stunning fabrics that had almost a modern look about some of them. Of course you know me and brown and purples right? Can’t seem to really shake them off when it comes to quilts. With splashes of red the quilt top had also achieved another of my often attempted never quite succeeded goals, randomness. Despite a definite even spread of colour, with a vivid red and blue unifying the whole piece the maker had some how achieved randomness with harmony

Many of the edge papers were still (wisely) in situ and with care Kate has been removing and storing them in acid free plastic. Small details jump out at you, there is one with what appears to be a list of horses probably due to run at York races. Perhaps some where a stud book languishes or a race meeting catalogue that would illuminate that more. Kate has discovered that the papers come from The York Herald circa 1870 something.

Along with beautiful copper plate writing and a less well executed hand writing which along with a variation in tacking stitches give the impression that more than one hand was involved in the preparation of the hexies. The actual stitching however is all of the same calibre. In fact it was the stitching that most drew my attention at first. Mainly, to be honest because it is not the perfect immaculate stitching that you feel you must aspire to, it has a far more natural homely feel about it, as Kate said “it wouldn’t win a prize at the WI. I like that, it would scandalise the quilt police but it is honest, some one has carefully collected enough hexes to make this huge quilt top, got it all sewn together and then for a reason we will never know it has been relegated to the WIP pile for over a century. If anything of mine lasts half so long I will be dancing in my grave with glee.

I am looking forward to a full historical review of the quilt top, Kate’s got all the skills to produce that and learning more about it is some how inspirational. We need to be prefect, we can make mistakes and minor “man on a galloping horse” type decisions about what we sew and yet some how the effort and (is love too strong a word?) care, endless hours sat keeping hands busy and productive don’t go to waste and perhaps in some way carry us forward into a future we may never see for ourselves, there’s our immortality ehhh?

If one quilt wasn’t enough Caroline also brought her stunning stripy quilt up to show us. The stitching in her quilting is superb I have no illusions I will ever reach her standard but hey I can dream and practice no?

Do pop along and visit the quilt in question. http://churchmousequilter.wordpress.com/

what quilts are for

Best ever use of a quilt

Kahlil Gibran

"Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes."

as random as i get

It is impossible to be random!lord knows i try but its impossible. the human brain likes harmony. my human brain, likes harmony yet can neither achieve pattern perfection nor complete chaos!

blocks laid out ready to juggle or sew. i'm mulling it over.

I made this today.

Daisy made these.

now 3 weeks 3 days all 6 girls are doing well..

excuses excuses

I have not really been up to doing much of late, the seriously horrible cold and tummy issue coupled with overwhelming tiredness really put a crimp in my joie d'vive (is that how you spell that?) anyway I am looking forward to vast improvement now, thanks to thyroxine.

But before starting that I had tried to galvanise myself into some sort of action and in the process come across a very old friend. Lone is one talented lady, we were at school together and both had an artistic bias to almost everything we did. To my delight she was the tutor at a small sewing class predominantly patchwork and quilting based, a smattering of Scandinavian knitting took place also as an aside. Lone's Danish roots very much in the fore there!

It was very social, and enjoyable much like the get together at the vicarage, which I profoundly apologise for not having managed to drag myself to of late.

sewing was ensuing

I will be pottering along with my own WIP's for the foreseeable.

Its not easy getting old

and some times its not that easy being young!

2 generations sew

With Em's visit we got a bit of sewing done together.

there was two generations hiding behind that quilt !

A star and coffee

Can only mean one thing!

I end up scratching about for ways to describe which quilt top I am working on, when I talk to anyone about what I am doing. The rather witty and clever AJ came up with the name for this one. Well that is to say hinted so accurately that even I couldn't not see where his mind was going.

Voila starbucks quilt.

The sun light makes the red look much brighter than it is, Id suggest seeing an earlier picture of the carpenter square portion for more accurate colours. Unfortunately though winter sunshine is great for picture taking winter wind is not. Oh well you get the idea anyway.

(Edited to add: actually on my lap top the colours look closer to reality.)

I will soon be starting on a "not brown" quilt, in fact two. Two small quilts to go on white bed linen covered bunk beds. My first real quilt request/commission(?). Now there is a scary and exciting thought.

Purple and hand quilted, OK not expertly but still done!

Little apples and pretty purples

No officer I dont know how those browns snuck in there!

Oh okay if you want colour heres some

Baby Boom

Finally I have finished the hand quilting on the purple. Ironic eh one day to make the top and goodness knows how many months to do the quilting. It will be going to my new great nephew Noah! Not a really baby style quilt but hopefully it will be serviceable and enjoyed by him and his mum.

Of course I am itching to make a girly pink quilt now that the most beautiful girl in the world has arrived. Eloise, made her début Dec 7th, it was a joy and a privilege to be down there with William while poor parents were going through the painful part. Ice pink and white fabric with I love Grandma all over it? no? Just as well clever Em has steered me into more purples. Fabric for Christmas what more could a sewist want? OK apart from a new sewing machine! There's always next year.

Soon as I figure out how to upload pictures from the new camera on to my laptop I will, I will really I will! no really I will get to it!

Far as the hand quilting, I still haven't found and thimbles that really suit me, so sore finger ends tended to slow the whole business down. I think I maybe cheated too, since the fabric was so busy I quilted from the back, not very conventional of me I know, but I am not known for conventionality. I doodled really, trying out feathers and wreaths of feathers and hearts and circles and wiggly lines. The actual quilting took on an organic look which I dont think the pictures I have taken will show too well. The main thing though is that I did do it!!!! and while it isn't the biggest quilt in the world, I seem to have a natural size, it was a good way to develop my nascent technique.

The red, grey and cream top is still a WIP as are the hexies. so plenty to be going on with.

whats that button?

Im still working on the hand quilting of the stash and slash purple quilt. Its slow..I am slow..but its is happening gradually.

As an interlude my darling daughter asked me to take up some rather expensive PJamas for her..now short is a feature in my family, we reckon long as our legs reach the floor that's okay. These lovely Mama's and pappa's PJs were long! nice fabric so setting to cut a few inches off the bottoms and hem them was no real problem. Interesting little button down here says I as daughter models them with me scrabbling about on the floor..well at 7 month pregnant she isnt climbing on any tables to let me hem them..cant say I blame her tbh. coming to the conclusion that this pretty little button detail is nice but odd we proceed and turning a nice hem discover that nice little button had a nice hidden tab with button hole to roll up those long even by our diminutive size length legs.....long story short they look great but not as the designer intended ..OOOooopssssss.