Lucky me!

The perfectly Pleasing Pincushion Parade is over but you can still go and look at all the beauties on parade here at My Sister Made Me Do It. Many thanks to Ida and friends for organising this great link and for putting together such a great list of prizes. I was very fortunate to win second prize! Which meant that this delightful Moda Jelly Roll - Amelie by Me and My Sister Designs - landed in my post box on Wednesday.

I have never owned a Jelly Roll before so for the moment it is sitting on my desk where I can admire it every time I walk past! Thank you Ida.

We have had a couple of days out this week. On Monday we went to Aulnay which is about 2 hours north west of here to meet some friends for lunch. The church is large and covered in very ornate and beautiful carvings.

Inside I spotted this wall hanging.

Poor photo - sorry - just wanted to give you an idea of size. It is much taller than me.

It's a very simple piece but I think very effective.

Anyway, the town itself is very unremarkable so I wondered why it had such a large Church until I found this tower

- the only remaining part of an enormous chateau which would have dominated the town and brought much wealth to the area.

Yesterday we went to the coast with friends and had a lovely picnic in the sunshine. Afterwards we went to visit another friend who gave us a guided tour of the Cognac house that she works for. These amazing stills are made entirely of copper - there are two. She says that soon they will be polished and gleaming ready for distilling this years crop of grapes.

The onion shape is evidently a legal requirement for all Cognac distilleries. Just a beautiful shape.
The tour was of course followed by a tasting of Pineau (a by product of Cognac) and the five different Cognacs that they sell.

A couple of pictures of the courageous little flowers that have been pushing their way through our dry soil.

I hope you all have a lovely weekend with lots of sewing time.

EPP Tuesday update

Many thanks to Anthea for hosting us again - do pop over to Hibiscus Stitches to see what everyone has been up to and to admire the beautiful centre panels that Anthea has put together.

I have three Morris Hexathon blocks to share with you this week.

#19 Woodford Green

#20 Walthamstow

#21 Queen Square

Only five more blocks to go!!

We went to a vide grenier on Sunday morning and I managed to pick up some bargains and some curiosities.

First of all the bargains included a box of delicious beads, four embroidery hoops and this delightful pewter pincushion.

I am going to replace the pincushion bit as they use a nasty rubbery stuff for the insert. He will look lovely with a new puffy velvet back.

Next the curiosities. This 2.5" leather pouch caught my eye as I love the squirrel design.

Inside, this is what I found - a stocking repair kit!

There are four different shades of thread and a pack of three needles. One of the needles has been used as there is a little piece of thread in the eye but they are all now rusty.

Abel Morrall stopped making needles in 1984 when the company was taken over, however these are definitely from a much earlier time.

This little packet intrigued me.

These little match like things are used to stop runs in stockings!

Fortunately the instructions are on the reverse.

There are five tiny emery boards tucked in behind the Stopit sticks.

I spotted this little sewing bag on the same stall.

Embroidered mainly with wools on a linen background with a silk lining it is not the prettiest item I have ever bought but someone spent a lot of time putting this together and I couldn't allow it to languish unloved on the stall any longer.

Autumn is around the corner - the mornings are much cooler now but we are still having hot days and there has been no more rain.

I hope you have a productive week.

A Nice Surprise!

My copy of STITCH arrived this week and it was a nice surprise to find a picture of my work inside the back cover in the readers Gallery section. I had completely forgotten that I had sent in a picture!

I have not had much time to sew this week but did spend an hour finishing off this piece of work.

I lined it and then turned it into this little sewing bag.

Somewhere to keep my Slow Stitching kit.

We have had visitors this week and so have been out and about. First to Brantome.

To St Emilion

and home via St Aulaye to see their Felibree decorations.

We enjoyed a visit to Chateau de Puygilhem which had a brilliant exhibition about the curiosities wealthy people collected on their travels in the 16th and 17th centuries and how they displayed them.

It was a busy week as our visitors also helped us to move this delivery of wood which is now ready for us to use over the winter.

So when it does turn cold we should be nice and cosy.

Friday Night Sew In for September

Twenty-five lovely ladies got together last night to sew - thank you very much Wendy for hosting us and you can visit Wendy's blog here to see what everyone was doing.

I have been reading this lovely book by Claire Wellesley Smith.

Slow Stitch means working with recycled or organic fabrics and threads dyed with locally sourced, natural dyestuff and working slowly and rhythmically with the seasons. Threads and fabrics are solar dyed over days or weeks and fabrics might be left outside to weather in sun, wind and rain. Now, I don't think shall be throwing out all my fabrics and starting again but I shall be having a go at dyeing some threads with fruit and leaves foraged from my garden. I was also keen to have a go at some of the simple stitching ideas shown in the book and made a start with this simple piece of dyed wool felt and some strips of my own dyed fabrics left over from my Rainbow Log Cabin.

I love wonky log cabin and I stitched these down by hand. You can see I have drawn in a line to mark my first row of stitching.

Here is the finished piece - it is about 7" square. I love the way this has turned out and also enjoyed slowly stitching along with everyone else.

Piecing Myself Together again

Well here we are again on PYT Tuesday and linking up with Anthea for all things EPP.

So I have several Morris Hexathon blocks to share with you.

First of all #16 Hammersmith Terrace.

Having cut all the pieces for the mini version I chickened out of the tiny triangles hence the little hexie flower!

#17 Folly. Made a right hash of the centre so appliqued the little circle on to hide it!

#18 Parquetry

This weeks block is well under way but I shall save it for the next EPP post as I have this to show you

Yes, I have started to put together my blue swap flowers and am feeling happy with my yellow path so far. Can you see the brown grass and dead moss under my hexies? It's two and a half months since we had any decent rain and the garden is looking oh so sad. Here is one corner of what we call the little garden - dead grass and sad plants.

 

We have storms forecast for this evening but as they will be accompanied by strong winds they will probably do more harm than good! Any rain though will be gratefully welcomed.

Have a good week.