2013 July (first half)

 

Gold stuff Gone

Sorry, that alliteration was a bit strained.  The local fabric shop has my number and gives it out if their customers ask " do you know anyone who . . . "

A lady called a few weeks ago, could I make a replacement cloth for her  bedside table?  I imagined 12/18 inches square, not much work, so agreed.  She turned up with a circular tablecloth, 2m / 6 ft across. And 4m gold fabric. And 6.5m gold bias binding.

 I was not happy!  

Anyway over the last two weeks I have joined the fabric, cut the circle, machine stitched gold binding and then hand stitched the back of the binding, all 6.28m of it

It's horrible . . . But it's now finished and collected, and I have a pocket of cash, so (excuse the pun) this cloud had a *gold* lining!

Woodwork Wednesday

Not me woodworking, don't worry, my new friend Darren is a woodworker: he has done calico bags to put customer's purchases in, but wanted his logo added to the bags.

Cost wise it wasn't viable to post the bags to and then me to oust them back, so I made the logo as a badge (splash patch we used to call them when I was s kid) and posted them to him.

They should arrive with him on Wednesday, so Katy and Hadley, no sarky comments about my desperate need for alliteration resulting in me ignoring that today is Tuesday!

Go and have a look at Darren's stuff - it's awesome!!!!!!

Here are some pics I pinched from his fabebook page, I dont think he'll mind!

Huge Hexies

A few months ago one of my students at Chertsey Museum brought in a 3m (3 yard ) flimsey that a friends mother had made from big paper pieced hexies.

What could she do with it?  Nobody wanted it as it was, it was too big, and a real miss-mash of fabrics: cotton, corduroy, lining material, even crimplene!

Finally after a few months thinking she decided we could chop it into 6 children sized flimsies and make charity quilts .

So last night I quilted the first one, just free range lines in each direction resulting in a star burst roughly in the centre of each

then I washed it just to be sure the top wouldn't fall apart, And it came out fine!

I've got three more to go, two of the students took one each too

Too Busy to Blog

With end of term madness, extra teaching classes, visitors this last week and the warmest weather I can remember in years I've hardly managed to get any sewing done, so I thought I'd show you what the students did on Friday:

The embroiderers are now up to 40 of the 50 leaves

And the children who had got bored with embroidery did some weaving instead

Wonderful Wood

Look what I got!  After making these patches for Darren

He messaged me to say he had put some stuff in the post for me, and tonight when I got home from work it was waiting for me

A fab chopping board, a gorgeous seamless sweet serving dish, and the most awesome gnarled and knobbly serving tool, which he appropriately sells under the "witches kitchen" label.

Darren, thank you soooooo much, I love everything!

Saturday Sewing

Still not getting any sewing done myself, so I'm sharing a bit more from one of my classes:

On Saturday morning I taught one of two Saturday morning Fun With Fabric classes at my school: two new families came and attached a number of squares towards a quilt for the local neonatal unit.

The youngest children were a bit young to sew, so they did some sticking instead

Hole lot of Hexies

Not really much sewing, but at least I've got to the end of unsewing the yellow hexi top and am happy with the new layout.

It currently looks like this

There is a great big hole waiting for a whole lot of yellow hexies!!!!!

Therapy Thursday

Despite working a full day, and then working at the school production, and despite the sewing room looking as if an explosion had occurred recently, I HAD to do some sewing.

I dont know if I mentioned that the June meeting of the Richmond & Kew quilters was a Charity Quilt night.  At variuos desks around the room people were contributing to making charity quilts.  I know some Dear Jane blocks were being made, and I'me sure others were too, but I was chanied to my sewing machine for the whole evening and didn't see anything else.

I had teams cutting & counting out 42 x 2.5inch strips which I then joined into one (very) long strip, with others snipping off the triangles, and pressing the seams.

We made one top during the evening,

and I brought home one pack of strips, 

and one very long strip, so as a bit of therapy I have started joining the long strip.  Not very exciting but it's now 4 times as wide as it was, and 1/4 the length, and I have done *some* sewing

How's your Owl?

At Oakfield yesterday we gave ourselves a break from embroidering words onto leaves, and switched to owls instead.

The plan is to have one owl for each head teacher in the 50 years of the school.  I sketched them a simple owl and showed them how to break it down into body and wings, and gave them ideas for eyes, beaks and legs

Didn't they do well!

Sewing Saturday

Yesterday I spent the morning at school at the last Fun With Fabric class of the school year.  More squares got added to more strips

The family then went to my S-I -L's for a lovely afternoon of food, drink, fun and chat.

My M-I-L tried to take a nice photo of the girls . . . 

She didn't quite get the hang of the phone camera!!!!

Next attempts were better . . . 

(The champagne in the top pic is to celebrate this letter)

And then I bullied the girls and their boys into posing for a photo 

What a lovely group ;-)