All About the Finishes

This last week the weather has been a bit up and down so this gave me the opportunity to finish some quilting, knitting and crochet.  I have a thin curtain rod in my room so I can change around wall hangings and give some an airing.  My Dazzling Diamonds quilt is now displayed.

This is alongside a rainbow wallhanging which was in our bedroom but changed for another wallhanging and a small blue bargello quilt which was made for the Quilters' Guild conference back in 2003.

I also finished the blue crosses quilt which I bound last week

That will go to the local Project Linus very soon.

I also finished my toe up socks.  These are my second attempt at toe up socks.  The cast on is easy once I got the hang of it and I also had a go at short row heel turning, which does need some concentration. The only snag with these is that the socks are a bit tight when going over the instep as there are no extra stitches before doing the heel turn, which one would have when making top down socks.  Another thing to watch is the casting off which I did doing a k2p2 rib and adding a yarn over stitch and cast off after each second purl stitch in the rib.  As you can see I didn't match up the yarn repeat, but it now looks as though I have reversed it with the second sock!  Funny how that turned out!

 The first pic was a 'sockfie' as requested by my sister, which I put on Facebook!

I also finished off my Vintage Sweethearts crochet blanket on Saturday evening and shared this photo on Instagram on the (tag)saturdaynightcraftalong which is hosted by a few Instagrammers including Lucy from Charm About You.

 I did change the colour order of the last 4 rows of the border on this as I didn't like the grey suggested in the pattern.  I felt it needed something more defined so I went for the purple colour, which then brought about different colour choices for the rows before it!  The pattern is by Sandra of Cherry Heart which was a crochet a long on Crochet Now magazine.

Both the socks and the blanket will need a wash before using, but I'm pleased to get these two items done.  I'm halfway down the sleeve of the pink jumper so that is in progress, which is just as well as I have bought some yarn for a cardigan!  I'll show that in the next post, but first I've got to do a tension swatch.

I went to West Country Embroiderers on Monday and there was a workshop with quilter Rosemary Yeoman who demonstrated her seasonal wall hangings.  I took my small Janome machine as the Juki I normally use is too heavy.  In spite of the Janome being a simple mechanical machine with not many bells and whistles it is surprising what it can do.  I even attempted to put thick thread in the bobbin case to sew from the back so as the make the bobbin thread feature on the front, which did work for a while!

Here are two of Rosemary's panels (of which we were invited to take photos)

Here are the panels produced that day (mine is the far left, bottom row)

Yesterday was really rainy so what else was I to do but sew.  I got my panel finished!

I was able to add some fancy stitches on my home machine and having added the yellow piping and binding along with the green border it does look spring like as it didn't seem to say it earlier.

Links will be added later to this post.