A Village Quilter

I'm back after 5 wonderful days of sewing and nothing but sewing. DH calls it Sewing Camp - but perhaps it should be referred to as a sewing retreat. It's a heavy photo edition this time - be warned. Lots of us from our village group attend these five days - but we can't share cars as when you take ALL of your fabrics and kit there isn't room for sets of it plus 2 people. You can see my car was rather full and my front seat had my machine strapped in. Luckily for us it's only a 25 minute drive away at Quorn Hall. Here's our room where 9 of us slave away over our machines. It's a very relaxed atmosphere - we have a good laugh and can top up with tea and coffee when we like. I'd hate to have to clean it after we've finished as the carpet is covered with threads. Each summer the week has a theme and patterns are supplied in relation to this - however you don't have to do any of the patterns supplied you can do your own thing - that's what I deci...

I didn't realise it had been a week since my last post - sorry about that. We had another great class with Brenda at the Bramble Patch. Luckily the brook at the bottom of the car park kept at the same high level and didn't break into the car park. The photos above a piece I worked on on Saturday. I traced the shape of bricks onto freezer paper and used a craft knife to cut out some of the shapes. I ironed the freezer paper onto the rust dyed fabric I'd made last week. Using the Castell Pit Artists pens I coloured in the fabrics areas and the freezer paper gave a nice crisp edge. I will probably embellish the piece more - but I'm pleased with it as a starting point. I used the pieces I'd cut out on another piece of the rust dyed fabric and coloured around those - again another good starting point. And here I am drying all of the bits of fabric I've bought over the last few shopping trips. Unfortunately the washing machine broke last week so I had to wash and wri...

It's surprising what you can get done when you ignore all the other stuff that perhaps you should be doing. But I've managed to get the main part of my quilt pieced now. I don't think the photo really shows the true colours - the band across the middle should be red and it looks a bit pink to me. I think it still conveys the idea of the colours moving across the quilt. Planning the border may take a few days as I like to work out what I need to cut - and then walk away and then double check if my calculations are correct and also check if I have enough material. I also need to have a think about whether to hand or machine quilt. At the moment it measures 39 by 51 inches - so even with a border it's not too large - well not compared to the last one. A huge thank you to all of you who posted such nice comments about my last completed quilt. It's so nice to know you're all out there. I do reply to comments posted but I know some have the settings so this isn't ...

I'm already cracking on with the next quilt. I find it really exciting to start putting blocks together and to see how it works on a stick sheet. I've just got one set of blocks to make for the main body of the quilt - I'll put those together and then start thinking about the borders - I've already got a few ideas. I went to Kisko (The Fabric Guild) and bought some really interesting fabric. I promise I'll take a photo and put it on the next blog. Hope you all had a good weekend. The weather her is really volatile. We go from having torrential rain (yesterday) and then bright sunshine (today).

At long last it's finished. My first large (96 x 78 inches) quilt. I'm really pleased with the pieced binding. It took a while to finish off - but I really like it. I've still got a bit of tidying up and I need to add a label - but the hard slog is finished. So I feel a bit lost now without a huge quilt to sit and stitch when I fancy. You can see from below I've already got the fabric for my next project from Strawberry Fayre. And yet again it was great service - really fast. I've washed the fabric and now it needs a good press. I also need to make sure I think about how the cut the fabric so I don't end up with lots of bits. The larger pieces I'll piece to make the back.

Last night was our quilting group Summer Party. And just like last year we ended up inside due to the rain. The worst part of it was it had been so nice and sunny during the day and about an hour before the party started you could see the clouds rolling across the fields and you just knew it would rain. We all took along food and our fabulous hostess provided the Pimms . It was a really nice evening - just sitting and chatting - and eating some really great food. I'm still at my large quilt - but I've only got 2 corners left to go now - so hopefully I'll get those done tonight or tomorrow and will then be able to trim it up ready for binding. I've worked out how to do the binding - but it'll be single and not double. Almost forgot to say but I've got a bit of an experiment going on in the garden at the mo. Not too sure how it'll work out - rust dyed fabric. I'll share the results in a few days time.

Honestly - we've had sun for a day and a half now. This means everyone has dashed out to mow their lawn - if they were anything like ours it was 2 foot long in places. As you can see from the photo above the garden is very wild. For those of you who've been watching the Tour de France from London you too will have seen that we've had sunshine. You can't believe how wet it's been - when it's rained it has rained for hours at a time and really heavily - there were even hailstones in some places. We have another show in the village and it had to be cancelled as the ground was so wet and it was thought too many vehicles (lots of horse boxes) would get stuck. Hope you're all having the right weather for the season you're in. Anyway I have been crafting. I've made another raggy cushion. This one is for a demo I'm giving at our sewing retreat at the end of the month. I've still go to write the instructions but I don't think that'll take too ...

Just thought I'd share a couple of photos of 2 of the cats. Flo - ready to pounce and Dennis doing what he does best - sleep. Why do they all l ove boxes so much and will squeeze into them what ever size. At least he's happy.

It's a minor miracle but I've actually finished a couple of things. The first photo above is the example that Brenda pinned up for our class last week. The idea is that we paint / colour pages and use these as our sketchbooks and use them to develop ideas and audition fabrics. As you can see - Brenda's are very good. Below is my completed four page sketchbook. The idea was to use lots of different techniques to colour the pages, acrylics , watercolour, pastel chalks, oil pastels and scrunched up tissues paper. Stitching on the paper was OK - if you went slowly - and of course I'll change my needle now as I'm sure it must be rather blunt. This page has a photo on with samples of fabric added. A photo with the picture extended by stitching - with a gauze to distort it. This page includes examples of stitch patterns on felt plus photos. And finally a page of threads corded to the page with some netting added and cut. The idea really was just to have a play - I've...