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 :-)

happy crappy scrappy

Chopped my hair off this morning. Ha! Looks a bit silly, but feels so much better. First thing Jude said was 'So you going to the hairdressers now to sort it out?' Pregnant women shouldn't really be allowed near sharp scissors in a hair crisis.

Last of the sun-bleached tresses

Jessie was four on Wednesday and has been having great fun with her presents. My parents bought her a keyboard with hundreds of noises on it, so she loves that. We splashed out on a little camera for here which she is thrilled by, though she can't quite figure out that the pictures she takes is what shows on the screen....

She spends a lot of time just randomly pointing at things and clicking the button whilst looking elsewhere!

We've all been horribly ill lately - me especially, like I need anything else to make me grumpier - with a particularly vicious cold which has literally had me by the throat for the last few weeks. I sound quite like a less smiley Mariella Frostrup. I spent the whole of yesterday in bed (thanks Jude) so I feel slightly more human today.

Bought a new (old) car at the weekend. Jude is continuing his happy bachelor tradition of buying crappy old cars and scrapping them a few months later. He can't even remember how many he's been through, whereas I had my trusty Golf for years, though it was decidedly worse for wear by the end with more than a few dents and a mouse living in it - I kid you not.

The quilt is coming along - three squares pieced now:

I spent some time today scratching through my scraps as I was starting to worry about not having enough material.... I think I might have enough after all.

Though now I need to spend a few hours checking through it and ironing so I can see what's actually there. The squares inbetween the ladders will be plain white, but I had originally thought it'd be nice to applique old embroidery scraps onto these:

BUT after frisking the house I can't find the damn stash of old linens I had in mind.

Granny and Grandad are coming down tomorrow to celebrate Jess and Jude's birthdays so we'll all go out for a nice meal somewhere.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend :)

Jacob's Ladder update

Ooooh, I LOVE my hour on my own when both girls are at nursery - it is blissful. I have quickly learnt to ignore absolutely everything that screams for my attention as soon as I walk into the house, from washing up the breakfast things to baskets of laundry waiting to go upstairs or come down. Milly's only in for two mornings a week at the moment, which is a pain as I have to do the journey there and back three times, which divides the whole day into hours between driving.

However, as a result of that little bit of time to myself, I have made good progress on the patchwork:

although I am a bit cross with myself for duplicating a print already by accident: a really silly niggle, as it will hardly show in the end! It was intended to be a different way round but I didn't notice until it was beyond rectifying - I really dislike going backwards. I may have to add some stitching to it at a later date....   English paper piecing is really growing on me, simply because once the hassle of putting the tacked shapes together is done, it can all be bundled up and worked on anywhere, without having to be constantly ironing seams: a winner for juggling handsewing & children!

Some other people's ladders:

https://dotcom1144.wordpress.com/category/patchwork/page/5/

http://quilty-cindy.blogspot.com/

Jacob's Ladder traditionally should be a more simple palette of plain white/unbleached cotton with just two shades, usually dark brown triangles and red squares, but I wanted it to look as scrappy as possible, whilst still having some order to it. I didn't quite get this one as balanced as I'd like, I didn't think it all through properly, but again, that's just my perfectionism interfering as usual. It's easy to get tied up in knots over fabric choices: I spend a lot of time squinting to see which are really light enough/dark enough to fit in. The name Jacob's Ladder comes from Genesis 28: 11-22, but it has also been called Stepping Stones, Road to California, Gone to Chicago, Trail of the Covered Wagon and Underground Railroad, all of which obviously refer to journeys with the latter in particular most probably referring to slaves escaping from Kentucky to Canada via Ohio's underground railroad. It's not recorded prior to the American Civil War.

Whilst I'm really enjoying using all these lovely checks and florals, I'm still hankering to release a wilder side of myself and do something a lot more free-form and random: I've yet to work out exactly what this will entail, but it will definitely involve lots of colour and movement and texture. I feel I have to get this old-fashioned stuff out of the way before I can really let myself go off exploring new territory: kind of like learning the fundamentals of drawing and then flying off into abstractism.

Jude rarely thinks of anything to say about my projects apart from well-meant niceties, but he said about this piece that it looked like it had been 'stitched by little elves', which I think is the nicest thing he's ever said.

Twelve more 9-patches to go and then I have to work out how I'm going to do the spaces inbetween...

Home again!

Slowly slowly we're getting back into the swing of things at home. We had a lovely time away staying with family, despite the girls' various ailments which all seemed to come at once and in quick succession over the Christmas break. Jude's mum said that her four were always ill during the holidays when she went home to visit her mum too. Nice to be back though. I appreciate our space when I see it with fresh eyes again. We enjoyed the last of Jude's holiday by going to the Eden Project today, which was a wonderful way to while away a ropey old grey blanket of a day. There was a storyteller in the Mediterranean biome wearing the most marvellous patchwork coat, telling an old Cornish story of Jack and a Giant called Burdock, which the girls enjoyed. Somehow it always feels as though you've been away in another world when you return to the misty Cornish country roads after a visit to Eden.

The fantastic storyteller in his patchwork coat

A gorgeously scented shrub - the fragrance wraps around you in the cold air - winter flowering Jasmine I think, but not sure.

I think this is the stump of a tree fern - I love the intricate pattern 

The dancers in the Mediterranean biome

 

 

I'm busy working on some new baby projects: a multi-coloured crochet blanket out of my stash of recycled yarn, and a patchwork quilt out of a pair of funky curtains I found in a charity shop in town. So far I've made up two squares just to test materials, but I may have to actually buy some co-ordinating fabric for once rather than just use random scraps. I think if you're using a very boldly patterned or coloured fabric throughout a quilt, it only really works with a set number of plain colours, or at most one equally vivid partner. So that may have to go back on the shelf for a while. As you can see in the pic, I'm pretty rubbish at getting my seams to match up neatly; I don't know whether it's me or my machine who is at fault - as I know little more than how to thread the thing & press the pedal - but my perfectionist side has to just take a break when I do something like this. Same with crochet: to get it done at all I have to accept the wonkiness and just take note of things to be improved upon next time. I can't be doing with unravelling and re-doing every single mistake - except for the size of the red/pink square on the second strip below, which I have now extended slightly to balance the squares up a little. The orange square next to it is overlong but I can't face unravelling that much! Baby won't mind.

Somehow my belly snuck into both pics...

On the plus side with the creative stuff, my homemade gifts were well received (now those I DID re-work to get absolutely right!) Here's a photo of Aunty Boo in her new head wrap thingy on Christmas Day.

And our few sunny days in winter always warrant a trip to a beach:

One of our gifts this year from Jude's mum was National Trust membership for a year, which is thrilling... when anything re-opens that is. 

Here's a random photo of an enormous tree in the grounds of Stroud's Stratford Park - sadly I don't know what breed of tree it is (though I could probably look it up)

And just by way of scale, here's a pic of Jude and the girls beneath it - I couldn't persuade Jude to climb it, sadly.

Happy New Year to you all x