Holiday Week 2

Last week combined a visit to the Festival of Quilts, the big event in the UK's quilting calendar, held at the NEC in Birmingham where I went on Thursday and Friday

Had a quietish start to the week, playing around on the trial version of the embroidery software, Embird and trying out a couple of designs, one a freebie another came as a free download when I purchased another design.  Getting on a bit better with the embroidery unit on the machine, but still fascinated by the machine working on its own!

While at the Festival I also wanted to see the Pfaff dealers so that I could get some machine feet - a quarter inch seam foot and a free machining foot too.  Also asked about some stabiliser to use under to embroideries, which Barnyarns didn't have on their stall but could order from them.  Surprisingly I didn't buy any fabric as I have a fair bit to use at home and don't have a project to get started on at the moment.

Aside from all the wonderful quilts on display, I also enjoyed the galleries from professional quilters, especially work from Annabel Rainbow, Lynne Edwards, the International Quilt Block Swap.  I like seeing the work of the Virtual Workshop with members of Committed to Cloth painting and printing their fabrics.  I also liked the work of Hilary Beattie, who also demonstrated her method of working with crayons, print blocks, masks and using dye as paint, really fascinating.

I've put photos on my Flickr site temporarily so you can link here to see my photos

I took a couple of Quick and Easy workshops one with Alicia Merrett about her map fragments technique which I finished yesterday

Another workshop was called An Apple a Day by Catherine Nicholls about free machining, especially writing (the apple shapes were already printed).  Now that I have a free machine foot I could have a practice at that too yesterday.

As we were away (David came with me to Birmingham, but didn't go to the exhbitions) we went out and about and the first evening had dinner at The Boot, in the village of Lapworth.  We since found at the lock on the canal near to the pub is part of a flight of locks (which we found on this site here after we were at home!).

On our way home on Saturday, bearing in mind the time of year and how busy the traffic would be as get nearer to Dorset because of the holidaymakers, we took our time and visited a couple of places on the way down South to get home a little later in the day.

First off was a stop at Bramble Patch.  It is surprising that with the Festival of Quilts, how many people stop off there, not just us!  Spent a little time looking at their long arm machine in action, quilting a quilt sample for the shop, I also had a look at the summer exhibition with work from Jan Hassard, Stephanie Redfearn and Hilary Beattie and also a few purchases too. 

Not too far away from there was a National Trust house called Canons Ashby, a place we've often passed by on our trips to and from the North of England and had lunch there and enjoyed the gardens and house.  A visit around the house revealed a quilt "opportunity" with quilts on the beds of Alice Dryden the daughter of the last Baronet (sorry I hadn't rotated the photo below).  The quilt is a wholecloth one.

 The housekeeper's bed with patchwork diamonds on.  It appears to be attached onto a bedcover and the tacking stitches had never been removed so I'm wondering if this quilt was found like that.

And one in the parlour maid's room.

All the above photos were taken without flash so that's why look a bit drab.

The gardens were lovely with views across the Northamptonshire/Oxfordshire countryside and

The lavender bushes were amazing, just buzzing with bees and the white flecks? Well they are butterflies, so many of them.

So a lovely end to a few days away. 

Holiday Week 1

I finished my contract officially last Wednesday, but actually finished work the Friday before so I am treating last week and this as a holiday.  It's been quite nice to pootle around and do odd bits and pieces.  Last Thursday David and I decided we'd go out for lunch and had a really long lunch break - about 4 hours!  First of we went to Wimborne, just a few miles away and have lunch at the Wetherspoons pub there and it was quite pleasant sitting outside under the shade of a parasol.  After a wander around the town and stopping off for an ice cream close to the Minster I didn't feel like going home so we went to Kingston Lacy, an NT house just outside Wimborne.

On our walk around found some wicker cattle

Wooden toadstools

Views overlooking the Japanese garden

A couple of "squiffy" photos, yes I did mean to take it at an angle, but not that steep!

Colourful acers

One of the lion statues on the steps leading to the garden.

On Saturday I joined friends at my friend Brenda's house for a sewing Saturday in her garden.  I kept busy with some hand sewing hemming a binding onto my Dresden sampler quilt.

Still have a bit more quilting to do on this, but it looks nearly done.

I didn't get time to make it, but on Saturday evening I made this. It's a thread bin, which I'd seen around as friends Ann and Linda had them and I found a tutorial here from an embroidery group's blog.  Instead of using an embroidery hoop for the support at the top of the bin I've used the rigid packaging tape that Linda gave me and wrapped that twice before joining and putting inside the casing.  I used the top of my mug for the size of the circle

And just to finish off I put some ribbon with buttons on around the top.

Here it is squashed down

Neat, isn't it.

Today (the start of the second week of my holiday) I decided it was time to think about Christmas (oh no!).  I got some postcards prepared for a large swap, there are 12 people listed at the moment and I've got 16 cut out and ready to make, with fronts, backs, pelmet vilene and fusible web all ready to go.

Looking forward to Festival of Quilts at the end of this week - I'll be there on Thursday and Friday.  Have a good week.

Not a Nine Patch Pizzaz

Maybe a Four Patch Frenzy or a Four Patch Fizz?  I'll let you decide.  I went to the Quarterjack Quilters Exhibition at Merley House, near Wimborne.  I bottled out of taking any photos and now think afterwards that I should have done as it was a lovely exhibition and the venue itself (which was new to the group) was really lovely.  The group had worked on several projects which looked really good. I had taken away with me one idea though as several members of the group did quilts called "Nine Patch Pizzaz", which I later Googled, was from a book of the same name written by Judy Sisneros.  This uses large scale prints as large blocks arranged with nine patch blocks.

Last year I took part in "Another Little Quilt Swap" organised by Kate North and had a lovely little quilt from Mary in California, who also enclosed a fat quarter of "Welcome to Hollywood" fabric and this fabric seemed ideal.  You can read about the Swap here.   Nine patches seemed the wrong scale for the fabric that I had so reduced down to four patches, which worked better with the fabric

I originally pulled out 5 different fabrics to use, but got that down to 3 which seemed to work well with the colours

I cut out 6.5" squares from the quarter and also a couple of 3.5" sqaures.  There are also 3 rectangles that are 6.5" x 3.5" (made to 3.5" with the addition of one of the three fabrics) in different orientations.  I then made four patch blocks from the mix of all four fabrics. 

This improv piecing on an improv design board (a piece of fleece clipped over a dressmaking cutting board), I then sewed the blocks together in groups, then it quickly became a whole quilt top.

That kept me quiet all afternoon!  I've ended up with a quilt top of 24" long x 15" inches wide.  Compare with the arrangement I had to remove the blue/yellow four patches on the right hand side and cut a 6" square in half lengthways on the right because the bottom half was wider than the top half.  The fabric quarter had Welcome to at the bottom of the fabric and Hollywood at the top, so now I've brought the two together.  I used as much as I could and apart from the trimmings this is all I have left of the fat quarter

Not bad is it? I did rescue one of the balloons which will be appliqued on later and the flowers in the square I had to trim will come in useful for the quilt label.  I even found the perfect sized backing too

Quilt at the Museum

A few months back I made a quilt for a regional Quilters' Guild challenge called "Coast" .  I have just found out today that it will be making an appearance at Topsham Museum Exeter, from tomorrow until 1st September, so I hope we can manage a trip there to see it, along with 19 other quilts

I was sent a copy of the poster, unfortunately it's a pdf file, which Blogger doesn't like.  Managed to copy to a Word doc, but Blogger wasn't too keen on that either.

Here's the link to the Museum, which is also holding an exhibition about Vivien Leigh too, so a bit of an eclectic mix.

And here's my quilt

Have a good weekend

 An edit to this post

Thanks to Benta I have now been able to upload a jpeg file of the poster

Still Playing

with the new machine.  I've tried the embroidery unit with patterns on the USB stick that comes with it.  This was the first one I tried on Sunday

Bit of a mishap with the thread (I hadn't threaded up properly so the first stitches ran without any thread!) and I couldn't figure out how the tack around the image so the fabric was puckered, mainly around the pink flower, but pleased that I managed it.

Later came this design.  This was one that Pauline (from whom I bought the machine) supplied on another USB stick.  By this time I figured out the tacking before doing the embroidery, a much better result.

Afterward I took the unit off and went for some general sewing on a sample that I made a few weeks back.  The Pfaff has this IDT system which means that a walking foot isn't needed for quilting.  If you think the block doesn't look square, it's not meant to.

It was good to try out the straight and fancy stitches on this to see how well it quilts.  Not bad.

Today is my day off and last week at work so decided to stay in and have more play

This was one of the Pfaff designs.  I've made this into a postcard holder.  Then I used the same pattern in purples and made it slightly larger by editing the size on the machine, so in this next pic it doesn't look any larger but then I have made a large item which has made the design look smaller.

Not sure what it'll be - maybe a cushion?  That was this mornings little effort.

Pauline had suggested using Embird software for embroidery designs and that could be installed on the Mac using a programme called Parallels.  David ordered this last week and he picked it up from the sorting office today.  So after installing Parallels I'm now trying out a trial version of Embird and see how I get on.  I did, however, find on the Secrets of Embroidery website (from where I downloaded the software) a free coaster pattern by Artistic Designs which I added to the USB stick and it was sewn this afternoon.

I've still got quite a way to go with this machine embroidery malarky, but enjoying the experience so far.

Been Too Busy to Blog

I have been doing things and going places, but my attention at the moment is taken with this

A new (to me) machine.  It's a Pfaff Creative 2, a sewing and embroidery machine.  The embroidery bit is new territory for me.

I haven't tackled this lot on my own yet, that is still to come.  I spent this afternoon getting to know the stitches and the feel of the machine.  It was too hot (shouldn't complain) to go outside and practiced on the dining room table because it was too hot in my room and my Janome is still in the Horn cabinet.

 Some of it on calico with stabiliser backing, look I even programmed my name on the machine

I liked the variety of quilting stitches too. A lot bigger variety than I've had before

I bought the machine second hand from Pauline who advertised it on BQL Swap site a couple of weeks ago and last weekend, when David and I went to Peterborough (to see trains), we visited her in Nottinghamshire, where she very kindly demonstrated the machine and embroidery unit and supplied a lovely lunch.  And gave me a gorgeous little square bag for the bits and pieces

Its really lovely!

Next task is to get to grips with software and using the embroidery unit.  It has a little USB stick with some designs but a lot of it is Windows orientated and we have Macs,  but David is working on it....

But so far I'm really liking this sewing machine, I think we'll get on well.

Ribbon and Lace Postcards

Remember the swap that I took part in June?  I made these postcards in what seemed like ages ago, here they are again

All but one, the bottom one, were sent out.  That one may become one of the birthday swap cards.

And these are what I received by the end of last month

From (the top, clockwise) Alice, Pauline and Jacquie.  All such gorgeous cards.


My tickets came for the Festival of Quilts last week.  Wasn't too sure I could make it due to circumstances and didn't want to miss as I didn't go last year but now I can

  So, tickets ready, hotel booked for a couple of nights and I'm going!!! YAY!!

I also had a couple of workshops booked too (to break the days up).  Only just over 3 weeks away.

Sewing Wednesday

For now, Wednesdays have been my regular day off, until my contract ends at the end of this month.  After then who knows what I will be working, but making the most of my day off.  Having done the Tesco shop this morning I used this afternoon to do some sewing.  Last week I bought Molly Makes Magazine and had to have a go at the Betty doll featured on the front cover.  Here's mine.

Although it was a job to turn through the skinny arms and legs and stuffing the upper part of her body, she was fun to make and deciding that she needed some 'jewellery'  - well she had to be properly dressed! So sewed on a sequin 'earrings', put on a little pearl necklace and sewed a little ribbon flower.

I've also got around to making a new bag for my camera and in red, the right colour to go with my little red Samsung.  I've made do with a bag that's been too big.  The pattern for this came from an issue of the Quilter magazine which took just an hour to make, why I hadn't done this before I don't know.

I also went to a sewing Saturday (last Saturday) and made another bookwrap to add to this growing collection.

Last of all here's a pic of the new bathroom suite, quite a change from the old.

That was Wednesday, back to work tomorrow.

Fresh Sewing Day and Small Blog Meet

As it's 1st July it's Fresh Sewing Day at Lily's Quilts, so welcome if you've come by to visit from her blog.

In June I didn't think that I got much sewing done.  Last month included a trip to York to the Quilters' Guild, a family gathering and also work to our small bathroom (looks very smart now, I will share a pic soon).  I have managed some small things though, having had a go at some techniques from Sarah Fielke's Craftsy class here

Had a go at Anya Townrow's pattern (as I couldn't go to her workshop)

Made a few bookwraps for the Festival of Quilts tombola

(and made another since then). I've quite enjoyed making those.

So managed more than I thought.