Indian Lady

When I went to Gillian Travis workshop at the end of May I purchased an Indian Lady kit. It comes with a printed panel, some fabric for hair, skin and the pot she is carrying, some Bondaweb, baking parchment an block stamp and instructions.  Today's weather was awful as its been raining most of the day so just right for a having a go at making this panel.

This is the printed panel, above, before putting the applique on top.

The method of applique is to put all he components together ironing onto baking parchment then transferring the whole thing onto the fabric panel

Unfortunately the green I wanted to use was on the back of this lovel piece of African fabric.

I then added machine quilting and also some gold fabric paint to the piece. With the little block stamp and some blue fabric paint I stamped over it.

Some tidying up of stitches and some embellishment needed, but not a bad days work.

Sew what have I been up to?

I've done something different recently, the weekend before last I made two skirts. Not for me, I hasten to add but for my two granddaughters, Sophie and Isobel.  My Mum gave me some scraps, and amongst those were these two lovely flowery fabrics

I kept looking at these large pieces and thought they might make nice skirts, so following a texting conversation with my son with measurements for the girls I set to and cut out and made them on a rather grim Sunday.

The orange/yellow one for Sophie and the pink for Isobel. The following day I bought TShirts to match and presented those last Saturday. I know Isobel's fitted ok and she like it. I also enjoyed making something completely different.

This week I've been making a cushion cover. I've been using a Makower picture panel fabric which has been sitting around in my stash for a long time, and I've also used some teal blender fabric which has been lingering in my stash for quite a while too.  So this is what it's turned into.

Here's the back

I like using the decorative stitches on the machine to add a bit of something to take it from a plain cushion cover. I have enough of the teal fabric and using another part of the picture fabric to make another matching cushion cover.

I have some of the picture fabric left, however there is a problem which I have found with some of these picture fabrics is that they tend to be a bit 'squiffy' and slope off to one side as you can see on the pic below on the bottom piece, sorry the pic was taken at the wrong angle.

Any suggestions to use up the remaining pictures?

Festival of Quilts is just two weeks away, and I'm really looking forward to going. I'll be there on Thursday and Friday as part of our week long holiday in the Midlands.  Are any of you going??

My Mum's Quilts

I use this blog to diarise about things I've made and places we've been to and I don't often show the work of others, unless I've been to exhibitions.  Recently I've received quilts from my Mum that she makes for charity and they get passed onto the local Project Linus group and a local charity called the Youth Cancer Trust, via a local quilt group and I thought I would share them here. I think she's probably made many quilts over years she has been quilting. She is a prolific quilter and enjoys working out patterns for blocks.  All the quilts are 36" square, so nice lap or cuddle quilts.

They are really colourful she likes to work out colours that will go with a feature fabric. There is a polyester wadding and they have been hand quilted and they have been described as having a cuddly quality to them.  Here's the detail of one of the quilt backs to show the quilting.

Lovely isn't it.

So, Mum, I hope you don't mind me "blowing the trumpet" for you and sharing your work.  It some really amazing work and I know it's really appreciated.

More Sheep Hunting

The weekend before last we had a visit to Bristol as we wanted to make another visit to the SS Great Britain before our ticket (which lasted for 12 months) runs out at the end of this month.  We also wanted to see Shaun in the City, the sheep character created by Aardman Animations, of which several artists decorated sponsored models of the sheep, dotted around Bristol.

There are too many of my photos to put in the blog, so I've made a couple of collages.

The green one (top row, middle, was on Clifton Downs and we walked for ages to see this one, the Downs were crowded due to the Race for Life run taking place on the Sunday morning

This stream of pink clad ladies and girls as far as the eye can see.

Back to more sheep hunting, this time in Cribbs Causeway shopping mall.  There is a shop that sells Gromit (from 2 years ago) and Shaun goodies to help raise funds for children's hospitals.  There was also a schools exhibition of smaller Shaun models decorated for the Shaun in the City event.

Really fab aren't they.

Getting in on the act is Feathers McGraw, the criminal penguin disguised as a chicken in The Wrong Trousers, a Wallace and Gromit film, seated on a tractor.

It was great fun sheep hunting. If you get a chance during the summer do go and see them.

Sheep Hunting

This is what we did this weekend...

More photos to follow.