Friday Night WithFriends September

 Many thanks to Cheryll for another great Friday night - I have already seen lots of lovely things that have been worked on. Pop over to Cherylls place here to see who else took part. 

As it is the beginning of the month I was working on my RSC project. I am now working on my rainbow Dresdens for the corners of my quilt - one a month until December. I managed to get the first one made and in place yesterday.

Good use of my FNWFs I felt. Happy stitching. xx

Friday Night Sew In

 Well the old blogger seems to have disappeared without trace now so here I am back with the new version. Lets hope I can remember what I learnt first time around!

Many thanks to Wendy for kindly hosting us from ICU - I do hope that all is going well for Mr B, Wendy. Click on the link above to see who else was taking part and catch up with what they were working on.

I received a couple of packs of these papers

as gifts with orders from Lina Patchwork a couple of years ago and have been meaning to make them up for some time. Now that my RSC Dresden project is coming to an end I thought that it was about time to try them out. So I pulled out some pretty fabrics and here is what I got up to on Friday.

They measure 4" at the widest point and I am wondering now if I could use this size to make a border for my Dresden quilt. So I am going to put them to one side until next month when I put all my Dresdens together to see if they would work.

The rest of my Friday was spent working on my tablecloth - nothing new or exciting to show you there though so I shall move swiftly on. This week I made more hexie flowers which are now winging their way down under

and a new little pouch for my handbag.

 It measures 5" x 2.5" x 1" and should have been a quick little make, however, the first zip I used I cut with the pull tab in the wrong place (where was my brain!) and then while cutting the second one also managed to snip the end on my forefinger, ouch. There were various bits of unstitching and I am not toally happy with the zip but it is doing the job I wanted it to do which is the main thing.

We spent 5 nights away in the Pyrenees last week which was a lovely break. Good to be out and about in the fresh air and seeing some stunning scenery - just a few photographs!

This last picture was taken from the window of our apartment. The buildings on the left are the Thermal Baths, closed for the last three years, which means the little town of Eaux Bonnes is sadly dying.

On our last day we visited friends who have recently moved to a town about two hours from where we were staying. After lunch we went to visit the Abbaye de l'Escaladieu. Once a busy Cistercian monastery, the buildings are now mostly ruins but there is some restoration work taking place.

There was an art exhibition in the grounds a lot of which did not appeal but the one thing that we all loved was this enormous tree stump!

It is completely hollow so you can see how it was made using thousand of pieces of wood and even more nails with lots of struts inside - annoyingly I didnt take a photograph! - and we all squeezed in through the narrow opening for a look.

So here I am at the end of my post and I have not thrown any toys anywhere! They have changed the labels system which was my main gripe and everything else seems quite straight forward.

So with my fingers crossed I shall press the publish button!

A Finish - at last!!

In 1985 I was living in Rome and had been there for two years. I had started quilting in 1979 and completed my City & Guilds in Embroidery in 1983 as I left for Rome. Italy, I found, had not advanced as far as the UK in it's needlecrafts and finding materials was very difficult. Beautiful haberdashery shops but everything was hidden away in drawers so unless you knew what you were looking for and then what it was called in Italian you had no chance!
My lifelines to the world of P&Q were The Quilters Guilds newsletter from the UK and Quilters Newsletter Magazine from the US. In June 1985 the latest copy of QNM arrived just as I was looking for a new project. This page caught my eye.

I had some fabrics left over from my previous project and I thought this would be a good way to use them up. Of course, I had to order some more and so  I sent off an order to Strawberry Fayre who even then were providing an excellent service for expats.

A year later I returned to the UK and the completed flower blocks were packed away and forgotten about as I returned to my C&G studies.

Fast forward now to France and around 2001/2 when I decided it was about time I did some more work on this quilt. I machined the blocks together and added a plain border and then, as I had planned a larger quilt than the one in the original design I started piecing an outer border. Again it all got stored away when I started work on a P&Q C&G course.

Two years ago I decided that it was time this quilt was finished so out it came again, the pieced border was added and it was layered up ready for quilting which I decided was a good way to ocupy my winter evenings.

Now here we are with the finished quilt, 28 years later!

I wanted a quilt that covered a double bed with plenty of overhang so I made it square rather than the rectangle shown in the original pattern and also added a pieced border.

The quilting design I used is the one suggested with the pattern although I had to adapt it for the border which is smaller than the one in the original pattern.

The quilt is hand pieced with machine construction. Hand quilting with machine ditch quilting between the blocks and around the border.

Looking through my machine threads when it came to adding the binding I found this reel of Sylko which was a perfect match.

On a wooden reel, I am not sure how old it is but the sheen on the thread is still beautiful. I am trying to find out when Sylko was last sold on wooden reels.

And I love the names given to all the colours - so evocative.

Thank you for stopping by.

Lin