Friday Night with Friends and RSC

Great to be joining in again with FNwF - thanks to Cheryll for inviting us round even though she is off on her travels! You can see what everyone got up to here.

I started off my afternoon by machining up these two blocks for April and May's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.

Yellow is almost non existent in my fabric stash but I managed to find these gold and mustards in my box of squares so they will do. The selection of pinks was a little better. I am linking up with Scrap Happy Saturday

Next up were some swap hexies - I finished one during the afternoon and the other in the evening.

 

After a cold spell last weekend it has started to warm up again and we were able to spend some time in the garden yesterday afternoon planting out our tomato, pepper and aubergine plants. They all had to be mulched with grass cuttings too to try and stop the soil drying out too quickly around them.

 

Come the evening I was very happy just to sit and sew. After finishing off the second hexie flower I cracked on with my next pink block.

 

 

And am very happy with the progress made.

Thanks Chez for an enjoyable FNwF's.

It's been a while....

.....but hopefully I am now back on track and will be posting regularly! April has been a busy month with two visits to UK to see family but the suitcases have now been put away until the autumn and we are busy getting the garden tidied and planted up for the summer. I have also some decorating to do before our first visitors of the year at the beginning of June.

There has been sewing time and I have a couple of things to show you. First up, quilting on my pink BOM has continued - only five more blocks to do now.

I am really loving this QAYG - each block is so quick to quilt and it does not seem so daunting as quilting a whole quilt.

I have also finally finished the Winterberry embroidery that was in my winter Craftpod - you can read my post about the Craftpod here
I usually avoid satin stitch like the plague so am really pleased that these little berries do actually look like berries!

The patchwork girls met this afternoon and here are our EPP blocks for the Mystery Quilt.

As you can see they have all done really well. Don't they look effective!

This month their new technique is curved piecing and I am interested to see what they will come up with for this. Here is my block all quilted up so I am ready to start on the next block.

Just noticed that a fly flew into my picture! How annoying.

We had a frost last night - hopefully it will be the last one now until the autumn. Just hoping that it was not hard enough to damage the blossom and our walnuts. A late frost last year did a lot of damage.

It's Friday Night with Friends this week - sign ups are here and I hope to see you there.

Friday Night with Friends

Many thanks to Cheryll for inviting us all around again - you can see who joined in and what they got up to here

We are in the UK at the moment and our Friday afternoon was spent at the cinema with a young lady watching Peter Rabbit! What a great film, she loved it and so did I.

But with some time to myself later in the evening I was able to finish an Easter stitchery. Before we came away I saw some lovely Easter displays around blogland - which made me think that I have nothing to decorate at Easter at all! As I was looking for a project to bring away with us I decided that perhaps now was the time to work on an Easter themed stitchery to make into a mini quilt for next year. Having wasted a lot of time trawling the internet and my bookshelves looking for just the right design I realised I would have been better off designing my own. I knew vaguely what I wanted - it needed to include tulips (daffodils have finished in France by the time Easter arrives) eggs and possibly a rabbit.

I remembered that one day last year I had done a few sketches in one of my altered books of the tulips in our garden.

So I traced off some of the nicer shapes and popped them in a vase.

The vase seemed like a good place to add a few eggs and then I added a little rabbit and there was my design.

This has stitched up fairly quickly over this week as I have kept the stitching simple and clean - all I needed to add this evening was the rabbit and decorations to the eggs.

Not the best picture - our little cottage does not get much daylight. I am pleased with how this has worked up and am looking forward to framing it when we get home.

After two nice days we have woken up to another wet grey one! Hope you have a good weekend.

PYT Tuesday is here again!

Those two weeks zipped by!

Thank you Anthea for keeping me on my toes - pop over to Anthea's blog here to see progress on her lovely hexagon quilt and to see what other EPPers are up to.

I took my blue and yellow Grandmothers Flower Garden out of it's box again for a week and have made good progress.

Here it is when it first reappeared

I spent a couple of evenings basting yellow hexagons.

And then cracked on with my cloth.

It has all gone back in the box now until my next burst of enthusiasm! I have enough blue flowers to go all the way around again so another big push should see it finished.

Meanwhile another UFO has surfaced but I will save that for my next post.

It's raining again here - I am sure we must have had more than enough rain to make up for the dry summer we had last year!

March FNSI

Many thanks to Wendy of Sugarlane Designs for hosting us again for our Friday night get together - you can see what everyone was working on here

In 2015 I worked on a BOM - here are my twelve blocks laid out on some dark green fabric that I was thinking of using for sashing.

Well the twelve blocks have been languishing in a bag for the last two years so I thought that it was time to get them out again. As I really do not need another large quilt on my 'to quilt' pile I have decided to quilt each block separately and then join them together with the sashing. I still have that piece of dark green but am wondering if a softer mossy green would be better. Anyway, no need to decide just yet.

Friday was a horrible cold, damp day here and so it was lovely to start my FNSI in the afternoon, sitting by the fire while I started hand quilting the first of my blocks.

And then I got another one completed in the evening!

How satisfying was that! Only ten more to do.

I hope everyone else enjoyed their FNSI.

Ripples and a Mystery quilt

Couldn't resist sharing this picture again!! There was a large quantity of yarn left over from making Lily Pond - just over 550g in fact. And as we were still in Spain and I needed something to do, I started crocheting ripples!

I used a pattern from Attic 24 - her lovely Woodland Ripple blanket pattern

And so it grew on the beach and on the roof - I was enjoying it so much.

And then we came home. But I couldn't put it down and after crocheting away in front of the TV and by the fire (what a change!) I soon had a lovely shawl.

 

I managed to nip outside between showers to get a few photographs - notice our lovely broad bean plants in the above photograph.

 

In this one you can see where I have been busy digging.....

 

 

....and here our lovely pink Japonica blossom.

A close up of the ripple and the picot border I added to the two long edges. I must say that I am very pleased with this bonus make.

My little patchwork group met on Wednesday afternoon - there are four of us. Towards the end of last year my three friends were all coming to the end of projects and wondering what to do next. One thought it would be nice to make a lap quilt and our newest member wanted to make a sampler quilt. So I suggested that we all make a sampler lap quilt and that I would design it as a mystery quilt. We included a member who now lives in UK and so in January we started our mystery with Pat's Star. Here are our five stars.

I do love this star. On Wednesday I showed them how to make tumbling blocks for our next block. You will have seen mine in my last post. Today I have been cutting out our next block - but I am not telling yet!

Have a great weekend.

EPP Tuesday

Well, it has been a while hasn't it!

Computer problems followed by a cold (which is still hanging around) have meant no posts from me. But, I am back and hopefully I can do a bit of catching up.

First of all though it is EPP Tuesday which means  Anthea's   Piece Yourself Together link.

While we were away I put together these 1 1/2" tumbling blocks for the Mystery Sampler Quilt I am working on with my patchwork group. I have used my hand dyed stash which really needs reducing!

I also made my swap hexie flower for February and sent it off.

These lovely flowers came in the post for me while I was away.

Ooops! That last one is a bit of a dodgy picture - sorry.

If you are working on some EPP why not pop over to Hibiscus Stitches and link up, we would love to see your work.

I have decided not to continue with the little tumbling blocks that I was doing for the RSC for a while. I love them but they are time consuming! Instead I have been putting together some simple blocks using the squares that I cut when I bought this book a couple of years back.

I have used many of the squares but there are still plenty left to chose from. So I have made one block for each month this year.

Blue for January

Purple for February

Green for March

And finally, before we get into the realms of total picture overload, the picture of my completed Lily Pond Cherry Blossom blanket that I could not load to my last blog post.

I shall be back soon with some pictures of our travels and more about the Mystery Quilt.