Bits and bobs...

Bits and bobs...that is one of my favorite British expressions. And it is the best way of explaining my sewing the past few days. A little of this a little of that but not a whole lot of anything! I have finished some small projects. Last weekI made a "sewing partner" with the group in Fairford...imagine that a one day project that we all finished in a day! I made quite a dent in my Mary Englebreit fabric box since once the group saw it they all wanted a piece. They each used a different complementary fabric though so we could tell them apart! These partners have both a pin cushion and a little bag to toss your scraps while you sew. I have one on the sewing table, one on the cutting table and am about to make one for my ironing board! Can you tell I like them?

Yesterday we did another one-day project and made these little traveling jewelry bags. They are really fun to make and used up about 1/3 yard of fabric. I may make the next one a tad larger. (It looks a bit like a head a cabbage in the first photo but in real life it is pretty - promise!)













On the home front....my house passed it's inspection. She was only here for about 10 minutes. I don't know why I worry about these so much but I do. At the end of the day she really only looks at the bathrooms, glances at the yard and the window frames and then goes. My other inspection, my car MOT, did not go so well. Before I could get my sticker/paperwork I had to get two new tires, new wipers, and (sigh) a new exhaust system. The first two I suspected but the last was a shock. The car is running much better now so I shouldn't complain....

I have been purging the sewing room. I gave a bag of fabric to a friend's daughter when she came over on Sunday. She got a sewing machine for Christmas and hadn't used it yet. We made 4 placemats and a pillow. Pretty good for one afternoon! Hopefully she can practice with the fabric I gave her and get some confidence on her machine. The fabric I am not going to use for a specific project but I still like is sitting in my kitchen to be cut into strips (using Bonnie's method for stash control!) What I don't like anymore (like piles of oriental fabric with bits of metallic in it) is sitting in a brown bag to go to the quilt groups and find a new home.

So far it has freed up a shelf in the sewing room so I have space to refold and resort fabric. Organizing tip: you need space to make space.

Two top finish

My Dh is coming home on Monday so today was final quilting day is today...tomorrow I clean!

I put the final border on my Rose Sampler quilt. I am only putting the brown secondary border on the top and bottom of the quilt. I found it too brown when I put it the entire way around. (That is my story and I am sticking to it!) Now I have to think about finishing up the Cowgirl sampler quilt. I think I am sampler-ed out for awhile...

I have decided not to put a border on the repro star quilt top. I auditioned a lot of fabrics but didn't find anything that really hit me. I also looked at a lot of photos of quilts from the turn of the century and a lot of them do not have borders...also the one that I based this on didn't have a border.

I like how this came out. It gave me a chance to use a bit of my favorite fabrics all in one quilt. Sort of a fabric memory quilt. This may stay as a top for awhile. There is not bed to put it on here and the tops take much less space! Who knows by the time I quilt it I may find the perfect fabric for a border!

Not to be....

Some days no matter how well you plan you feel like just nothing is going to work out...this is one of those days.

Right now I should be quilting in Fairford - a town about an hour from where I live. Last night I packed the car up with my sewing machine, the basket with my projects, a box of books and patterns that I don't want anymore, a folder with directions for a new 12-inch bloock for the group, and a duffle bag stuffed with fabric culled from the shelves of my overstuffed sewing room. The back seat of the car was covered in quilting stuff! I even made a batch of brownies and a Peach Brandy pound Cake and packed them into tins for the group.

This morning I got up early...allowed myself an entire pot of my favorite coffee (friends just came back from the states and brought me a pound of Dunkin Donuts coffee...heaven!) So far I am on target.....

I drove for about 20 minutes...which puts me in the middle of absolute nowhere. The sun was bothering my eyes so I pulled over to get glasses out of the glove compartment. The engine stalled...I turned the key...nothing. No problem - we have towing. I pull out my cell phone and dial the number...nothing. AHGGGGG.

Now why is it I go for walks/rambles across the countryside and love it. Faced with a two mile hike to the closest phone (at the animal park) I get all tense and angry! By the time I got to the phone I was better. A nice farmer gave me a lift back to the car on his three wheeler so I gave him some brownies (at least I knew I wouldn't starve out there....)

My car is now down the local garage...still full of my quilting stuff. I gave the guys at the garage the last of the brownies and walked another couple of miles through the fields home. All this an it isn't even noon yet!!!

We do have another car...my husban's MX-5/Mazda Miata. The problem is that is an american car so the steering wheel is on the wrong side for the UK. My DH acually likes it that way and can't drive my British car...I can't drive his car! I know some folks and jump back and forth but the one thing my DH and I agree on is that neither of us are one of those folks!

So I have all this time to quilt right...wrong! My machine is in the car...both my machines! I told you it was full. So I guess I am destined to spend the day playing in fabric again. Maybe I will cut out a new project or baste a quilt top....

The photos are of a current project. About 5-6 months ago Bonnie showed a vintage quilt on her site. I really like it so have been making half-squares and cutting out 3-1/2 inch squares of repro fabrics. The past fews days put together a few more rows and now am past the halfway mark! I'm really starting to like it again....

The original didn't have a border. I'm debating if I should add one to mine. I generally like borders but am unsure on this one. I guess I have all sorts of time today to audition fabric no?!

Time to build an ark...

The last 24 hours have been very, very wet and worrisome. It has rained, rained, and sometimes just poured. My DH left work at 4 yesterday afternoon. It usually takes only 20-30 minutes for him to get home. He walked in the door at 9:30!

The highway was blocked with cars and the road from the M-5 to our village was flooded in two areas. The roundabout about 1/4 mile away was the end of the line for many folks...the road was closed in all directions. We ended up with 3 visitors overnight...the man Dh carpools with couldn't get into his village because all routes into his village was closed and a young women and her 3 year old daughter whose car ran out of gas at the roundabout. The guys took pity on them and brought home. She had been on the road for 7 hour! The little one barely finished a bowl of soup and fell asleep on the couch. It made for an intersting night. The cats and the dog were happy for the company!

It stopped raining for long enough for us to get to them home this morning. It just now started to rain again. Good thing I did lots of shopping this Wednesday! (Wow, just watched two huge rescue helicopters go overhead!)

While it rained and I worried about my DH on the road I worked on my rose sampler quilt. These are the blocks I made with the group up in Fairford. The brown homespun was from an abandoned project. I really like it....wish I remembered where it came from?!

Medieval Festival

The weather here has been nice the past few days so I haven't spent much time on the computer.

Last weekend we went to the Medieval Festival in Tewksbury. It was really fun. I thought this little boy in costume was too cute. My DH got a new walking stick so he was happy.

I did spend some time sewing this weekend. I put together a baby quilt (to be shown later) and a table runner as a sample for out all day sewing event later this month. The fabric was from my stash (I even had enough to kit up another!) I'm going to make a potholder and a tea cozy to go with it.

Sorry so short. Mac is bouncing against my leg begging for a walk (his buddy dogs just past the house....)

High Tea

Sorry it has been so long between posts this time. Life has gotten in the way of blogging and at the risk of whining for way too long I'm just leaving it at that.

I did go to my first British High Tea at the Queen Hotel this week. Very nice. It gave me incentive to get out of my pajamas and dress like a big girl for a change! I took the bus into town so I wouldn't stress about parking. I wandered through some stores hoping to find something to wear to the races Saturday...that is just another depressing post that I will leave to another date (it is cold in this country so why I ask do none of the dresses have sleeves...heck most barely had straps to hold them up!) I ended up buying a hat that mad my husband laugh so hard he almost choked - do you think a jury would convict me for that?!

For the Americans - High Tea was served using the really nice three tier servers: on the top were the little sandwiches (salmon on white and egg salad and cress on whole grain - both with the crusts cut off); next came the sweets (fruit cake, pound cake, and eclairs); and then finally, the scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. I am very partial to scones and these were very, very good scones. It was a nice afternoon.

The photos are of two of the blocks we are doing in the Fairford group. I am doing two sampler quilts - one red, white and blue and the other in pinks and greens. Unfortunately I don't always get each block finished in both colorways so this was a bit of a catch-up week for me. Next week we will do paperpiecing which I love but I know it takes a bit of getting used to...somehow seeing things backwards never quite bothered me but I've worked with folks who end up destroying the paper because they have to "unsew" so many times! We'll take this one slow!

Call me sneezy

I've lived in some areas of the US. that are renowned for pollen (for instance Georgia where you have to brush the yellow pine pollen off your car in the morning so you can see out the windshield!) however I have been fortunate to never really having a problem with allergies...that is until now!

About three days ago both my husband and I started to sneeze, sniffle, and generally wheeze. These hillsides of blooming orchards, hedgerows of white hawthorne, lanes of queen's annes' lace, front yards full of lilacs, and field upon field of who knows what is killing me! Poor MacBeth (my black scottish terrier) comes running out of the fields looking nuclear - there is so much pollen on him he glows!

On top of this I did a really stupid thing. Hearing me sniffling the woman at the organic farm stand suggested I try some of the unfiltered local vegetable oil. She said it would help me build up an immunity to the new pollens. Sounded good. When I got home I tasted the oil. Tasted good. So I poured some on my salad thinking I was helping my body defeat the allergies. A few minutes later I could feel my throat closing and was having troupble breathing. Not good. Fortunately we had lots of Benadryl on hand. A few of those, drank lots of warm water and wore steamy towels around my neck and I am still here to write about it...what an idiot I can be!

I know some of you will say that the field in the photo above is not supposed to cause allergies. My only arguement to that is a) the amount of rape grown in our area has increased 5x since the studies were done b) a major reason given for it not causing allergies was the seed is too heavy to be blown far by the wind...I wonder if they really checked the wind streagth coming off our hills and if they considered the effect of a small blcak terrier running through the plants (it took a bathtub full of Dawn detergent to get the sticky stuff off of him.... (by the way ours is the hill on the far right in the photo which was taken from halfway up Breedon Hill.)

Enough whining (or sniffling)...on to fabric and fun stuff. The photo on the top is the second basket with my quilting group. This will be the first bit of applique for them. The photo on the left is of another block (hidden star I think) that we will do. I'm not sure if I like this one very much but I don't dislike it enough to make it over in different fabrics! Besidesit may be one of those blocks that looks better when joined up with the others in the sampler quilt.

Craft Trail

Growing up the Adams house, which was built by John and Abigal, was only a couple miles from our house. Everytime we drove by my sisters and I would say, "some weekend we should go tour the house." To date I still have not visited it. Now this comes to mind because this is a bank holiday weekend and my friends are all talking of going to Holland, Poland, Italy, Turkey, Spain....my DH and I are going 10 miles down the road to a food festival then are going to do the craft trail around Breedon Hill which you can see from our front door. We've decided to be local tourists.

The photo at the top is of a local potter's shop, Toff Milway's Conderton Pottery. His work is beautiful and he and his wife are two of the nicest people I've met in England. His workshop is one of four that make up the Breedon hill craft trail. My DH hasn't been to any of them so this weekend we will make the curcuit and find a anniversary present for us!

Today I have to focus and get some blocks and directions made up for the Fairford group. Tomorrow we are doing baskets. Below is the Harvest Basket. We will also so the Scrap Basket and the Stamp Basket. Of course I have the directions written up for the last two which I haven't made a sample yet. The Harvest BAsket I have made a sample but have not written up the directions....focus, focus, focus! (it is a great day for a walk though.....)

Sampler Quilt Virginia Star

For some reason my other blog is not cooperating at all...I've lost posts midway through and must have to ask for my password ever other time I log on! So I am posting some directions for the Fairford Quilters here until I get it figured out.

This is the 6-th 12-inch block in our sampler Quilt. The blocks are starting to have multiple shapes in them so it is good to begin breaking them down to the sub-components. For instance in this block we have 1 squre-in-a-square in the center which is surrounded by 4 flying geese. When you construct the block you will make the similar subcomponents at the same time then put the final block together.

Fabrics: This block uses three fabrics. The center square (roses) is 6-1/2. The b fabric has eight 3-1/2 squares. The background or light fabric is a bit more complicated: four 3-1/2 inch squares, four 3-1/2 by 6-1/2 inch rectangles, and four 3-1/2 inch squares.

Start with the center square in a square. Place the 6-1/2 inch square and one of the 3-1/2 inch background squares right sides together with the corners aligned. Draw a diagonal line like in the photo. This is your sewing line. Repeat on the opposite diagonal corner. Trim 1/4 inch then press with the seams towards the center.

Repeat with the reamaining two corners. (note: I immediately take the halfsquare triangles that are cut off the corners and sew them together. This will give you four 2-1/2 inch squares that you can use later in the scrap basket or pine tree block.)

Next construct the flying geese. You will need a 3-1/2 by 6-1/2 inch rectangle from the background fabric and two 3-1/2 squares of fabric C (here brown fabric) Place the fabrics right sides together and draw a diagonal line on the C fabric square. Sew on that line. Cut 1/4 of an inch from the seam.

Press then repeat on other corner on the same long side of the fabric. Press.

Finally, we lay out the block. In addition to the subcomponants we have already made you will need the four 3-1/2 inch squares of the background fabric. Sew the blocks together one row at a time. Remember to alternate the direction you press the seams so that they will nest together.