And more holiday pics

On Thursday we visited Holker Hall, near Cartmel, just a few miles from where we were staying.Lovely house and lovely gardens too , to wander in.
Very nice fountain, slightly windy, so one could have a shower when standing in the wrong direction.And very unusual ducks, not sure what breed they are. Black with a green sheen - hadn't seen anything like them before.

Could not resist taking photos of flowers and here's a close up of a delphinium...


a slightly blurry pic of a clematis, above, and below is a photo of an orchid type wildflower in the meadow.
And below is an lily type flower, also in the meadow.
It was another fantastically sunny day out. The grounds of the Hall also houses a motor museum with replica's of the Bluebird vehicles used for land and water speed records on Lake Coniston.

More holiday pics

In my last post I said I would show more holiday pics from our holiday last week in Cumbria. Last Wednesday we travelled to the Ravenglass and Eskdale railway. We drove there instead of taking the network train over there, but although the scenery driving through the hills was stunning there were very few places to stop and take in the view.

The railway is a small scale one and runs trains from spring through to autumn. The first engine was a diesel, quite a new one having been built in 2005 which returned from running the first train of the day to Dalegarth station. The engine that pulled the train we were on was the River Irt, named after the river that the line runs beside. Dalegarth station has fantastic views of Scafell Pike, which is the highest mountain in England and we took a while to visit the mill in the nearby village. We returned on another train pulled by River Esk, a lot easier journey going downhill.It was a great day out and well worth the trip over west coast to ride on the trains.

Back from holiday

Our holiday started last week when we had a weekend in south Wales for a family get together as David's aunt and uncle visited the UK from Toronto, Canada and were staying with his cousin. We'd already booked our holiday in the Lake District so it was a quick dash down to Wales on Saturday, returning late Sunday (well, it was very early Monday) and later on Monday going to Grange-over-Sands staying at Bed & Breakfast accommodation there. We came back home yesterday and doing all the catching up jobs of shopping, washing, etc. today.

I'll post over the next few days with pictures of where we've been on our tour in the Lake District. I've not done any sewing during last week, but did manage to get shopping opportunities in Kendal (found a patchwork/embroidery shop there) and in Skipton, North Yorks, on the way home.For my first lot of photos, I've taken a view of Grange from the Promenade. Where's the sand, you may ask? Well the sea has receded so much that grass is now growing. This pic has been taken as a hot air balloon was seen in the distance (it's that little speck in the sky - however if you click on the picture then you can see it clearly).

The next day, Tuesday, we went to Beatrix Potter's house at Hill Top, near Lake Windermere and had to cross by ferry. The ferry may be smaller than the one we used to go on in Sandbanks, Poole, but the scene looked fairly similar with the boats moored near the lake's edge. This was also the start of the lovely weather that we enjoyed all week.
The third and fourth pics are of Beatrix Potter's house and the foxglove plant in her garden, which I could not resist taking. We were to see a lot of these flowers growing wild in the area.
Tomorrow I start a new job, still temporary, but this time I have a 6 month contract, so I should feel settled, workwise, for a while. Looking forward to it.

Potatoes, Poppies and Postcards

The above pic may not look very exciting, but this is the harvest from our potato plant that we grew in a bucket, so we're excited by this. Just over 1 kilo of potatoes grown from a supermarket one that sprouted and grown in just 3 months. We had two growing in buckets so had another bowlful just like this one. Near where we live is a lot of farmland and a few weeks earlier the fields were bright yellow with oil seed rape plants. Their flowers are passing over now, but some bright poppies are emerging and this is the view in the fields just a short walk for our house, with a slight tinge of yellow from the remaining rape flowers.

Here's a close up above, don't they look lovely?

And now the postcard part of this post. A few weeks back I played around with fabric paints and I posted some pictures here of some shaving foam monoprinting that I made. I've stamped with some more fabric paint on large foam stamps. I layered up postcard sized pieces and hand quilted around them outlining the shapes in thicker thread then echo quilting with matching thread. I used the remaining printed fabric for the back of the postcards, just enough in size to make backing for all 5 postcards. These are part of the BQL Postcard challenge swap on the theme of fabric printing.

I'll be taking a week off as I'll be on holiday next week to the Lake District. The week after I'll be starting a new job. So I'll be having a short break from blogging. See you again soon.

June Challenge Quilt

Here it is - almost halfway through the year and halfway through the challenge set by Kandy on BQL (British Quilt List). This month's was called "Transitions", where two strips of fabric are joined together and sewn into strips of the main fabric. Twisted by sewing the strips one way then the other produced this lovely effect. All the fabrics were batiks in my fabric stash and were quick to cut out and sew together.

There is now a blog for the calendar challenge quilts and you can see them here. On this blog are also the bags from last year's challenge if you have time to visit.

Not much else to report in this post, except that my daughter Sarah visited us on her way to and from Liverpool from her home in Bristol and it was lovely to see her. It is a pity that I am working at the moment so could take more time out with her, but we thought I might have had more time between jobs than I thought I was going to have!