Sunshine Quilt

It's kinda blurry, but you get the idea! Still some cutting to do :-) And look! That's real sunlight on the floor!!!

Well another quilt is underway... I couldn't resist my colourful cotton scraps any longer! I have been saving these for some years now, all of them are old clothes or scraps I've been given or bought at car boots or charity shops. I finally tipped the whole stack out and started cutting up all the clothes that until now I'd still been dithering about whether to keep intact or not. Frankly the chances of re-making them into something wearable or trying to squeeze into them when the weather warms up are slim to say the least, as I no longer am ;-)

At first I thought I wanted to have little four-patches inbetween the larger squares, but (and this is the great thing about being able to lay the whole scheme out) once I could see the big picture it just looked way too much, even for me! And I would love to have stuck to my original idea of it being completely rainbow coloured, but that would have meant going out and buying fabric specifically for it, which goes against my ethos of just using scrap. Mind you, I had to go to Tavistock the other day and have to admit that the lovely Spring green was a skirt I bought just for this project! I couldn't resist the colour, and actually I think the whole thing would have had a completely different feel without it. I seem to buy an awful lot of pink and purple....

I'm still undecided as to how to actually put the whole thing together. I was very inspired by a raggy quilt I saw recently which had each square hand-quilted with a simple cross before being sewn together. I am going to have to bite the bullet at some point though and learn how to machine-quilt OUT of the ditch which, with such square pieces inevitably means curves (which I naturally do when I'm trying to make straight lines, but have a morbid fear of trying to do deliberately!!)

Along with the newly blooming snowdrops, we found a little feathered friend wandering on our track who we've persuaded to come and stay with us... I'm guessing some hard-hearted person decided they no longer wanted to keep a chicken and decided to release her into the wild. Luckily we have plenty of space for another hen in our mis-matched flock. Poor thing was starving. I think she might be called Lottie. She's very beautiful. 

I am very pleased that Spring has finally started to visit us at last in rain-soaked Cornwall even if it means I have to abandon my indoor pursuits for some long-awaited hard digging and weeding in the allotment! 

Happy Imbolc to you all (read more about this lovely pagan festival here)

Here's to Spring and sunshine in February :-)

New beginnings

I've been obsessed with these colours for a while now

so I put them together at last in a scribble

 then added some scrap/thrifted material

 to make this

 then these followed

 added a little white

and so far the colour demon has been satisfied with my labours...

...don't know yet quite how big, or who for, but it's definitely something quilty....

Mil's been busy with colour too

  and Big Sis started school this week

and is very very pleased with herself!

and I'm missing my not-so-very-little girl :-(

A zillion threads!

I wanted to share this lucky charity shop find with you - five boxes of threads all carefully sorted onto plastic widgits for the princely sum of £20! Although that is a phenomenal amount for me to spend on a single purchase I feel it is justified by the sheer glorious quantity of colours I now have for all my future projects.

I've been collecting thread for the last few years, mostly from car boots: usually they are like this, all carefully wrapped round cereal box spindles (fruit n fibre seems a common choice) so now finally I can transfer my tinful of these scraps to

this gorgeous spread, and then finally into their new, carefully organised home, where I'll be able to find and use them when I finally get going on all my future plans :)

I still have this stash as backup for when I get through the boxfuls!

There is something so joyful about such an array of colours. I also love the fact that someone worked so hard to put all of these threads into order and that they've come into my hands and will be cared for in exactly the same way. It represents for me what is missing from my own background; a history of women passing down their skills and knowledge to their children, and what is sadly missing from so many people's lives these days. I guess that is why there always seems to be waves of interest in hand-made goods as people periodically rediscover the value of creating objects with their own hands in this age of mass consumerism.

Happy days!

Change

White white white.... it is slowly coming together:

Since recovering my energy somewhat now I'm in the magical 2nd trimester, I have been on a mission to sort out the house. So I've been ordering shelf-making from Jude and sending him off for plastic boxes so I can put everything in order. I guess my subconscious is telling me that time is running out to do all of this before no.3 appears and I have to go back to sitting around all day breastfeeding... as much as I always wanted to be able to sling the baby round my neck and let her get on with it as I'm getting on with my day, it's never happened that way.

It's also very cleansing somehow to get everything in order: I've never been happy to wallow in chaos for too long, and when I'm pregnant it seems to drive me even more loopy, having to pull everything out of a cupboard to find that one thing you know is lurking in there SOMEWHERE. And even though my sewing projects have slowed right down since I started hand sewing the white quilt, I really want to be able to access my overflowing stash so I can alternate more easily between slow and speedy. I've rushed some parts of the white embroidery, which I kind of didn't mind too much at the time, but the more I look at it now, the more irritating it becomes. The white gets to me after a while too - I think especially when I'm feeling low in myself, a little injection of bright colour does me good: a bit of tropical warmth on a grey Cornish day.

So perhaps I need to get a little crazy again...

I've been playing around with the blog lately, sorry for all the changes, I should have got it all worked out before I started, but there you go... let me know what you think, my two lonely followers/wanderers and anyone passing by :) xx