Postcards, a Banner and a Deckchair

The past week has seen some sewing in between work and playing with my new i-pad.  Haven't yet figured how I put on the photos into the blog using this so am writing this from the desk computer.

This postcard swap this month was curved piecing so I have taken my influence from the current Stitch magazine and a project by Chris Gray called Tribal Cloth.  This has a central stamped fabric appliqued to a backing with embroidery and beads, but for the postcards I've used some African fabric and pieced wide and narrow pieces with black fabric and embroidered with variegated threads.  The fabric came from a collection of pieces from the African Fabric Shop when I was living in Yorkshire and this seemed an ideal opportunity to use them.  When I did my prototype card it had one panel here. I didn't send this one - it's going in my sample folder. As you will see I had this bird upside down when working the stitches, although some might say it doesn't matter really.

Below are the actual cards that I sent out yesterday.

I'm quite pleased how they turned out.

On Saturday I received my package all the way from Clare in France

This is my name banner that I won in her giveaway that I mentioned here and it's lovely to see the result.  Just have to add some curtain rings on the bag to hang up.

David and I met up with his brother and sister-in-law in Bournemouth as they were visiting for the day.  Here we've had lovely warm weather which bought a lot of people to the beach as we saw when going to the Pier Approach to see a giant deckchair - there wasn't much space left on the beach!

And here they are taking photos and David being silly with an ice cream

Going back into the town through the gardens were some glorious flowers in the Lower Gardens

My sister-in-law and I did some shopping and I bought these, just a bit bright, aren't they!