Summer's end

The weather changed suddenly overnight and I woke to a blustery day and rain. A perfect day to get my sewing machine out if only for a short while. This afternoon we are back to summer but I am not sure it will last.

I settled down to finish the flower pot blocks which will be on the outside of the cutting mat bag that I am making in class. The flowers are saw-tooth stars with machine appliquéd stems and leaves. The green fabrics were scraps from my stash and I used a simple zigzag to outline the leaves.

The inside of the bag will be Kaffe Fassett Shirt stripes- I just love saturated colour!

We were asked to choose some highlight fabric to add a border to the group of 4 flower blocks but I decided that since I had so much bright colour I would use a dark colour to frame them. The following is an example of how not to take a photo- please excuse my shadow! The border will be squares of the gold background and squares of the dark green with black squiggles. It is  Pheasant Hill by Kanvas Troubles for Moda. The green matches the flower pots and the green in the Kaffe Fassett fabric perfectly.

I love autumn with a passion. Maybe it is because this is my birthday month or maybe it is the rich colours around in the garden. I picked a few dahlias for the table in the sitting room. We finished off the last of our ripe tomatoes on bruscetta for lunch and I labelled my green tomato chutney for the cupboard. There is something so satisfying about filling the cupboards with preserves for winter.

My friend Jane gave me 4kgs of green tomatoes last week. The recipe contains onions and sultanas with brown muscovado sugar. The house reeked of the spiced pickling vinegar for a few days but the results are worth it. Six huge jars to accompany cheese and meats. I'll leave it to mature for a few weeks before we sample it. I might give a couple of jars as presents at Christmas.

Lastly, I have made some progress with my Coastal ripple crochet blanket. It is becoming quite heavy to manoeuvre on my knee but is lovely and snuggly. 33 ripples done and only 51 to do.

I have been fairly busy this weekend visiting family and I am enjoying spending today pottering around the house and catching up.

Have a great week,

Catherine

I'm linking this week to

and 

Two quilt shows and my new project

It has been an interesting week with plenty of quilty news.

I have taken all your advice and started a quilt for myself at last. My fabric is Printemps by 3 Sisters Fabrics for Moda. The palette is a mix of duck egg blue, pale yellows and corally pinks and has a slightly more traditional design.

I chose a pattern by Melissa Corry of Happy Quilting called Summer Breeze. I've been following Melissa for a few months and love her style. She offers masses of advice and tutorials on her blog. Check it out here. Summer Breeze was her first published pattern and is one of many available from her Craftsy shop.

I think this design will show off the fabrics I have chosen. The pattern is layer cake friendly with instructions to cut from 10" squares. I decided the queen size quilt was large enough and this size required almost 2 layers cakes plus 5.25yards of background fabric. Again I have gone for Kona Snow. Luckily Moda manufacture one of the designs in the range in an extra wide width(108") so I have ordered this for the backing. Still not sure about the border though so I'll wait until the top is finished before deciding on colour. I spent a couple of hours cutting and preparing this afternoon and ended up with the prettiest pile of scraps!

Earlier this week I visited the Kaffe Fassett exhibition at the American Museum in Bath. In all honesty I was slightly underwhelmed. It could have been because there was so much hype in blogland about it. I much preferred last years exhibition at the Welsh Quilt Museum. However it was a lovely day out with fellow quilters from Busy Bees. There was plenty of needlepoint and knitting and clever arrangements of various artefacts but the quilts lacked impact despite the colours. The gardens were looking pretty and the Museum itself is worth a visit.

Buttoned hats

Needlepoint chair

The quilting highlight of the last week was the exhibition in my local town of Penarth by the Penarth and District Quilters. This group meets regularly in a local church hall and have years of experience in all kinds of quilting. The exhibition was a real delight.

Marvellous trapunto work on Japanese fabric

There were too many photos and too many beautiful quilts to show. What's more, there was tea and home-made cakes. A fab morning.

I'm sorry if the post is a bit photo heavy but it's been that kind of week- lots to see and admire.

I hope you are enjoying the summer wherever you are. It is going to be a warm week so I might enjoy the garden a bit myself.

Catherine

A very nearly successful trip to Bath with a couple of quilty links

January is such a dismal month so I planned a day trip with Mike to the wonderful city of Bath to see an exhibition at the Holburne Museum. The exhibition was by the artist Joseph Wright of Derby who lived in Bath between 1775 and 1777.
Everything went well until we arrived at the museum to find that the exhibition starts tomorrow, Saturday January 25th and runs until 5th May. I will be returning! We had visited the museum before and seen most of the permanent exhibition but I spotted the following large oil painting of "The Stapleton Family" by Thomas Beach, painted 1789.

In the close up you can see the detail of a pale blue quilted petticoat.
If you are ever in the Holburne try the Garden cafe which is fab. We had very good coffee and florentines to cheer ourselves up.

Then I decided that the Fashion Museum in the Assembly Rooms would be worth seeing. It was only about a twenty minute walk. However when we got there we found most of the costumes were being arranged for a new exhibition starting,… you guessed it… tomorrow! The exhibition is called "Georgians - Dress for Polite Society" and I am sure will be worth a visit. We saw a very small selection of costume and I loved the details on the following.

jacket with Wedgewood medallions, beads, crystals and embroidery

Beautiful cross-stitched Georgian gloves

Embroidered and embellished gloves

Dior cut-off ball gown, silk flowers, pearls and gemstones.

Mike had booked lunch at Allium,  a restaurant in the Abbey Hotel. We had taken the train so decided to have a drink in the ArtBar before lunch. It was meant to be an alcohol free January for us so that was the end of my New Years Resolution. Wonderful martini in a very comfortable bar. The food here is super and I can highly recommend the set lunch menu at £15.95 for 2 courses.

While I was in the hotel reception I picked up a leaflet for a Kaffe Fassett exhibition which is to be held at the fantastic American Museum in Britain from March 22nd-November 2nd 2014. The title of the show is "The colourful world of Kaffe Fassett"  This will be well worth a visit  (as long as you get the date right!) I saw an exhibition of his work in Lampeter last autumn and I will go to this even if it is the same. There was too much to take in on one visit.

There was just time to fit in a visit to Country Threads in Pierrepoint Place. I was looking for some low volume or plain fabrics to tone with my Nel Whatmore Secret Garden fat quarters for the Hummingbird quilt. I bought fat quarters of Stof quilters shadow style in a bright raspberry, an orange spotted fabric, and Moda grunge in Rosemary (a shadowy lime). There is a good selection of notions and threads in this shop too as well as my favourite Kaffe Fassett.

We flopped into our train seats having enjoyed a good day out despite missing our exhibition.
I'm all set to continue on my patchwork this weekend.

Happy sewing,


Catherine.

Frustrations and some progress with quilting

Struggling with blogging!  

I hope no-one saw the above sentence which I published by mistake this morning. Still trying to add the Bloglovin button properly but other issues resolved blogwise.

I spent an hour this morning folding the edges of my Sampler quilt in and tacking down. Then I tried multiple distraction techniques in order to put off the dreaded start of hand quilting.

Quilting techniques had been covered in the last lesson of the course I attended at Busy Bee Patchwork in Newport. I had practised for an hour in class on an orphan block with very little success. I could not seem to catch the backing, the thimble kept coming off my middle finger and I felt like I had no hope of ever conquering my demons.

I am determined to make this quilt totally by hand even if it is the last time I do this. I tried a few different marking techniques and decided to use 1/4 in. tape for most of the blocks. I will do some echo quilting around the appliqué shapes with outline quilting of the geometric shapes.

It was as well there was no-one else around for the first hour as I got increasingly annoyed with my attempts. The stitches were now catching the backing but were uneven and too large. I kept referring to my books for tips and eventually I got into a rhythm and my stitching improved. I managed to quilt just about half of one of the 12in. blocks and once the quilting is finished I may return and re-do the first bit.

Quilt top at last session of beginners course

Quilt top after basting

The colours look quite different in the two photos The basted top is nearer to the actual quilt as the photo was taken in the conservatory. I used a daylight lamp as the weather has been so awful today.

I chose Kaffe Fassett fabrics with some Moda Crackle in green for the background. The Kaffe Fassett fabrics are Guinea flower in yellow and Lotus Leaf in antique. On reflection it was not the easiest colour palette to work with for a beginner. In fact it was challenging! Bright colours seem to appeal to me. These fabrics just leapt off the shelf and I could not put them down. I chose a Kaffe Fassett broad stripe for the backing. Fortunately this goes surprisingly well with the top.

Enough for now, time for dinner…...