Friday Night with Friends

 We had a busy day with not much spare time so I was determined to get something done during the evening. I managed six rows of this Tied Knots hat which I am making with the gorgeous merino and silk yarn that I bought from Perran Yarns at the Great Wool Weekend.

The yarn is knitting up nicely on my new Knitpro needles.

Many thanks Cheryll for organising our Friday night get together, you can see who else took part here.

Earlier in the week we visited Dulverton in West Somerset for the day. A pretty village to look around but our main reason for being there was to visit the gardens of Hollam House which are only open for one afternoon of the year. As it coincided with my birthday it made for a very pleasant day out.

The gardens are stunning. They are on the side of a hill and well laid out with water gardens, pond areas, formal gardens and more open informal areas. Just a few pics....

Sadly not a sunny afternoon but still very worth while the visit.

Friday Night with Friends and RSC April

 Yesterday was FNwF's hosted by Cheryll - thank you Cheryll and hope you are having fun on your travels.

As a wet day was promised - but of course didnt materialise! - I decided to start decorating the kitchen. Always a mamoth task as there is so much to move so I tend to work on a section at a time. Fortunately after lunch there was time between coats of paint to make a start on some secret stitching. The design was ready so I just had to trace it up and sort out some thread which is what I did.

This is just a tiny section. After all that moving and cleaning and painting I was very happy to sink into my sofa and spend the evening with a good film and making a start on embroidering my design.

Click on the link above to see what everyone else working on.

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This months Rainbow Scrap Challenge colour is light and bright blue and so last weekend I went through my scrap box and pulled out all the bits of blue.

Not a great variety of fabrics there but I managed enough for my little Dresdens, some scrap therapy squares and six crumb blocks which have now been added to my collection.

Linking up with Angela at ScrapHappy Saturday

Have a good week.

FNwF's and RSC 2021

 Well, what happened to Friday I have no idea, but all I have to show for my Friday Night with Friends are these coffin hexagons that I cut out for the next stage of Wings and Pretty Things.

  These are for a border and I have cut way more than I need but there is also an outer border of these so they will all be used. Lots of basting to do this week which will be a nice antidote to quilting my tablecloth which has begun. No exciting photographs yet though.

Thank you to Cheryll for hosting our Friday night get together - I have already seen some lovely work from Friday night.

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The new Rainbow Scrap Challenge colour for March is green and so I pulled out all the green scraps from my box earlier this week - sadly I forgot to take a photograph! However, I now have two little flowers for my quilt, some ScrapTherapy squares and six and a half crumb squares to add to my collection which nicely cleared up all my green scraps.

I have to say that most of my greens are pretty dull! Not my favourite colour.

Linking up with Angela at  Scrap Happy Saturday where you can see much more interesting greens than mine!

Have a good week everyone.

Friday Night with Friends...

 ...has come around again, oh so quickly! Many thanks to Cheryll for hosting our gathering again - you can see who else joined in here

My plan for FNwF's was a new project - this zip around pouch from Bad Banana Patterns which has been tempting me for some time.

To try out the pattern I wanted to make something for me and so I chose some of my precious stash of pansy fabric. Here is the quilted piece that makes the top and bottom of the pouch.

At that point, this happened!

So I had to down tools and help stack. An hour later and I was back with the sewing.

I thought I had a picture of the two circles cut out and the zip inserted into the side panels but obviously not! Anyway, that is how I left it for the afternoon and I spent the evening quilting and working on my swap hexies for the month.

This afternoon I got the pouch sewn together and the seams bound and her is my finished pouch!

It's not a good afternon for photographs - wet and horrid outside. I am very happy with this pattern - a few tweaks I will make next time but there will be a next time!

So I am looking forward to seeing what everyone was up to yesterday and will be back soon.

Friday Night with Friends

 Many thanks to Cheryll for getting us together again for our first Friday in 2021.

My day started with a walk around the garden - it was frosty and sunny, just perfect for a photograph or two, or three, or.....

During the afternoon I was able to spend some time playing in my sketchbooks - having collected a few nice bird pictures I found homes for them and splashed a bit of paint around.

I spent the rest of my time by the fire, quilting on my Red Manor House - it's coming along, slowly!

I am looking forward to seeing what everyone else was working on here on Cherylls blog.

Friday Night with Friends

 Our last FNwF's for 2020 - many thanks Cheryll for organising us all of this year and hopefully we will all be back again in January. Pop over to Cheryll's blog here to catch up with what everyone was working on.

With a change in the weather here I am no longer able to sit my sketchbook outside for 5 minutes in the sun to dry paint or glue. So I have pulled out some older books and am now working in four books in the hope that at least one is dry enough to work in at a time! So my Friday afternoon was happily spent painintg, drawing and sticking.

I have moved on to the Irish Chain border of my Red Manor House and am quilting round each block. This is my least favourite part of the quilt and my least favourite quilting so it may take some time to get this border done!

As I mentioned, the weather here has changed and it is now cold and wet although at the moment the sun is just peeping through. We have been out for a few walks now that we are allowed to go upto 20K from home and for up to 3 hours so it has been nice to see some different scenery.

My Christmas decorations are out and mostly in place. My tree is decorated - sadly does not photograph at all well! - and we have demolished my first batch of mince pies! And I am enjoying again the Advent Calendar that I finished last year.

I am off to catch up with everyone from yesterday - have a good week all.

FNwF's October

 Once again my thanks to Cheryll for getting us together again on Friday night - pop over to her blog here to see who else took part.

I had earmarked Friday afternoon for making a start on my RSC Dresden for October while catching up with the Archers. But - no news yet from Angela as to what the colour is for this month, so I had a much needed sort through some of my P&Q magazines while I listened.

This week I have been working on the quilting of my Red Manor House and that is what I carried on with on Friday evening. Having quilted around the manor house I have now moved on to cross hatching around the sheep, doves and flowerpots. Happy with my progress so far.

I seem to be a bit short of photos! Not nice weather today for taking pictures. I did spend an hour outside this morning in a brief spell of sunshine collecting walnuts. But it is raining again now with occasional gusts of strong wind. Knowing the wind and rain were coming I went out with my camera and took a few flower pictures earlier in the week. We have new borage plants popping up all over the place and I love the brilliant blue of their star shaped flowers.

Also thought I would get a few pictures of my fushias before they finish flowering for the season.

I am off to catch up with what everyone was working on last night. See you soon.

FNwF for September

Lovely to get together again virtually with friends around the world. Thank you Cheryll for inviting us - you can see who else took part here.

Friday was a lazy sort of day as we went out to lunch to celebrate friends 55th wedding anniversary. On yet another 30degree plus day it was very pleasant sitting socially distanced under a very wide tree and eating delicious food. Having given our hosts a lift to the venue it was late afternoon before we returned home and I spent an hour or so catching up with blogs and mail plus half an hour talking Paw Patrol and the return to school that didnt happen with my great neice in Ghana!

Then it was time for cricket and I finally got around to doing some sewing. Having completed the applique of all the vine and basic leaves on my tablecloth earlier in the week I was able to make a start on adding the flowers.

Not many done but the cricket got exciting! And having written England off early in the Australian innings there was a nailbiting end with England winning! Whew. And then it was time for bed.

In other news this week I have my autumn hanging in place with a selection of my favourite autumn postcards

My swap hexies for the month are winging their way to Australia.

This months RSC colour is red.

Just one more month to go and then I will have the twenty I need for a quilt. I may need to play around with placement of my Dresdens before next month to see if I have any gaps, or if I go with the colour of the month.

So thats me all caught up for this week. Things are winding down in the vege plot now with just courgettes producing and the odd tomato ripening. Philip has cut most of the grass that we leave long during spring and early summer for the wild flowers, and so we shall soon be pruning and tidying for the winter. Lots of digging to do but that might need to wait until we get some rain (?) as the ground is very hard.

Covid numbers are on the increase here in France - as indeed they seem to be everywhere and it now
seems odd to see someone out and about without a mask instead of the other way around.

Stay separate and safe and have a good week.

Friday Night with Friends for August

Many thanks to Cheryll for getting us all togeher again yesterday. Pop over to Cheryll's blog here to see who else took part. I shall making some visits later today.

It was 40 degrees here yesterday afternoon and so I shut up the front of the house early on and settled down to work on my Red Manor House BOM. The final part of the BOM arrived last Saturday and I have been working steadily during the week on making lots of Flying Geese. This is where I was at when I started out yesterday afternoon

and this is where I was several hours later!

I now need to make eight dark blue Flying Geese to make the centre X at the middle of each side and then they can be added to the quilt. Not far to go now!

During the evenings I have been working on the applique on my tablecloth. The vine and basic leaves are all sewn down now along one side of my cloth.

Not easy to get the lighting right but you get the idea.

Trawling through my inbox recently I came across a link to a pattern I had bought back during lockdown. No idea how I found the pattern, anyway, as it happens it was a timely find and of course I set about instantly making a Zip Up Tray Pouch

I soon realised that the finished pouch was considerably larger than it looks in the picture



To me that looks like a pencil case whereas opened out it is 11" x 7" x 4". What I actually wanted was something square so it was quite easy to downsize the pattern so that the opened tray is 7" square.

Next problem - no opened ended zips in my stash! Never mind I thought - I will just add a tab and button, much easier than fiddling with a zip too.

To stiffen the box double sided heavyweight fusible interfacing is needed but I dont have any of that. I do however have some heavyweight pelmet vilene that is fusible on one side so I decided to go with it. Although double sided fusible would probably have made the end pieces easier to put together, I found it worked well and with the unfused side inside it means I have a looser lining which I quite like.

So here is my finished box

The lovely linen spot on the outside has been in my stash for some time waiting for its moment to shine! The contrasting fabric is a pretty butterfly print.

Everything went swimmingly until I got to hand stitching the binding down to the end pieces. I think it took me as long as putting the rest together! It may be that my pelmet vilene is stiffer than the suggested stiffener but I still think it would be difficult. In the end I was stab stitching through to the edge of the binding on the front of the box using tiny stitches.

Should I ever decide to make another of these - at the moment, highly unlikely! - I would use 1/4" seams on the two ends. I find those 3/8" seams bulky. And I would used doubled over bias binding rather than her single as I think it is stronger.

Well, it is marginally cooler today. I am off to make some more Flying Geese. Have a good week.