End of an orange month

 And I have enjoyed my oranges, lovely to play around with some different threads and how warm and cosy orange is! Probably not appropriate for some parts of the UK which have seen high temperatures but here it's been in the low 20's. Very pleasant it has been too. Dry though and cracks are appearing in the garden and the grass is browning in places.

Anyway, back to orange and here is my Stitch Journal orange page completed and pressed ready to go away.

It is nice having different shapes to work in each month - next month is ovals but no RSC colour yet, hopefully it will come by tomorrow so I can make a start!

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on my Boro flower panel and it has progressed nicely.

I have finally finished the blossom on the tree

and added some flowers to the right hand side.

It's filling up just as I imagined. Going to start on the left hand side next. 

I have had it in mind for some time to make a table runner for some friends. They are keen Magic Lantern collectors and I thought a lantern would make a great design for the runner. This week I finally planned out my design on squared paper and have most of the lantern put together using EPP. I just need to get to an LQS for some brassy gold fabric to make the lenses that need to go on the front. The doors also have 'portholes' which need the gold fabric too. Anyway, here it is so far - I plan to applique it to a cream background.

I have been busy knitting in the evenings whilst TV is on - football is back! Two pairs of socks on the go - I may have a finished sock or two next time I blog.

In the meantime

Happy stitching!

This n That!

 Well the big excitement around here is that we finally have a nice, shiny new kitchen! What started out like this

now looks like this!

No wasted space and the ugly boiler all boxed in - I am very happy.

We took a day out last week to visit Montacute House. When I first moved to Somerset many years ago I lived nearby and visited regularly but had not visited for nearly 30 years, so it was a real pleasure to spend some time wandering round again.

There is a very impressive drive approaching the house from the main road - visitors arrive now via the village! The house is built from Ham stone from a local quarry at Stoke sub Hamdon. It is a lovely warm yellow.

There is a lot of topiary in the garden and I especially love the wibbly wobbly hedges

This side of the house had the sun on it so you can see it's lovely colour.

Two sides of the same wall

Inside the house is furnished and there is plenty for the embroidery enthusiast. A couple of the beds have bedspreads covered in embroidered slips. There is a beautiful stumpwork box. Not easy to see because it is inside a box in a darkened room! But you can see enough to appreciate all the beautiful stitchery.

Another bedroom is given over to a splendid exhibition of samplers from the Goodhart Collection. Click on the link for photographs if you love samplers. I could have spent all day in there!

Then up to the top floor for the piece de resistance - The Long Gallery.

The gallery is the longest in England. Some of the rooms leading off of the gallery contain a selection of Tudor and Jacobean portraits from the National Portrait Gallery which are fascinating for their attention to detail on the costumes.

Two final views - thank you for making it this far!

Now for some sewing. I have been wanting to do some clamshell patchwork for a while and having decided to make another Sew Together Bag to hold my EPP templates and papers I thought it would be nice to make the outside of the bag from clamshells.

It is many a year since I did any - these examples are from my Super Scrappy Quilt and were probably done for City and Guilds but whether that was embroidery or patchwork I have no recollection!

Those fabrics are certainly from 'a long time ago'

Anyway, having checked my Avril Colby and dismissed her method of making the patches instantly, I turned to Google for help and also received some very helpful advice from Michelle . Working with some of the offcuts from my lovely Tilda stash, this is as far as I have got.

I am loving them and am a little bit obsessed so have nothing else to show although I have done a few more inches of knitting.

I think that is enough from me for now, thank you for staying with me.

Friday Night with Friends, June

 June already and summer is here. Well at least it feels like summer as the sun has been shining and it has been several weeks since we had any rain.

Good to join in with Cheryll and friends again for FNwFs - pop over to Cheryll's blog here to see who else took part. Thank you Cheryll.

I spent an hour in the afternoon working on my Boro panel which I have started embroidering onto. I finished adding the twigs to my tree and started adding in some blossom.

There will be leaves added and possibly more twigs as I go along. The plan is to fill the rest of the panel with lots of flowers but I can see that I could be some time working on this tree!

Earlier in the week I needed something simple to work on during a zoom chat and wanted to start on my RSC hearts. However, Angela's suggestion of dark and bright blues I have already made this year so I decided to go for red. In the end she suggested adding in some green for teal but I will do that when the red month comes along! Anyway Friday evening saw me watching T20 cricket - Somerset are doing brilliantly so far this year - and sewing down the second heart. So here they both are.

Nice to have these done early on in the month and I can press on with a few other projects - I may just have been led down the garden path to another new project!! More next time.

Have a great weekend.

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!

Catching up

It's now a week since we returned home from Spain and March is starting to zip through already! So time for a catch up on what I have been doing.

The Pansy Scissor Keeper that I stitched in Spain is now complete - I forgot to pack any stuffing so it had to be completed when we arrived home.

This was a kit from Sue Hawkins Needleworks and as with all her kits the instructions were clear and easy to follow, plenty of thread and a gorgeous colour combination. Very happy with this.

While we were away I bought some yarn and started crocheting squares to combine into a blanket. I had lots of fun trawling the internet looking for free granny square patterns - some simple some more complicated. Most of them were written with US crochet instructions which it took me while to come to terms with! So here are all the blocks I made while away.

This project has now been stored away until our next trip. Ooops! Just noticed that my heart is upside down in the picture!

Since our return I have started a new cross stitch project - sorry, I don't seem to have any pictures - and been working on the next round, brown rose, of my 1797 revisited quilt.

This #weebrawbag was completed in January as a birthday gift which has now been gifted.

It is a while since I have made a postcard so I have really enjoyed designing and embroidering this card for a special friend. It just needs ends sewing in and then it can be posted on it's way.

It has been fascinating to watch how the garden has changed over the last week with so much early spring colour around now. So I will end with a few pictures from the garden.