Volunteering again

http://www.quiltersguild.org.uk/ This is the official site of the Quilters Guild of the British Isles, and I have been a member for a couple of years now, so it was a surprise to be invited to join the local Regional Committee, but I have accepted the challenge and hope to meet all of you soon at the Region 15 North West meetings.

I have lost my simple little camera whilst DH has it so I might have to resort to foraging around in his studio and looking for his new SLR: ha ha.  I wonder what he will say if he knows I have been using it behind his back: but I can't blog without the odd photo can I?

Flowers and Lace



A thank you for the quilt

My friend has sent me a bunch of flowers for making her quilt. I arranged them above with one of my 'Moorish dancing girls'. I used to arrange flowers much more than I do nowadays so I am a little out of practice, but bring em on I say, as I love the challenge.

What I really wanted to share with you though was some information on the lace which was attached to the Duchess of Cambridge's wedding dress.  I was browsing the news this morning and noticed it mentioned the lace, so after some digging around I found this page http://www.jeanleader.co.uk/articles/weddinglace.html so enjoy.

Gone to Glasgow

Well the new owner came to pick up her quit this week, it's going to be placed on the bed on cold nights in the winter.  I hope she enjoys using it and it brings her plenty of warm, cosy sleep.

I rather liked the simple quilting on it which seemed in keeping with the scene. However, I have a feeling this might not be the last time I visit this subject matter as I feel I have a new avenue to explore in the quilting field.



Noup Head, morning light, Orkney

This photo does not do it justice as I took it in the garden in a hurry and the sun was too bright really, but its all I have of the finished design, so here it is.

Bella's annoying habits

She is the perfect companion except when I am hanging out the washing, then my clothes pegs are chewed.  She always carefully selects what she wants and then settles down to chew and spit. So the lawn ends up with lots of little splinters on it. Sometimes she will chew at least 2. I could do with a constant supply of good pegs, anyone know where I can buy some?

mmm tasty

Sneak a Peak

Oh what a shock, blogger has changed the way you post, I hope this comes out ok.

Anyway, without further ado, let me show you a photo.

The drawing is compared to the fabric shapes

This first shot shows you a drawing of a lighthouse detail which I am representing in cloth. Basically this first stage was to break down a lighthouse into component parts and then to make them so they fitted back together. Quite long and involved it was too, I had to cut out the template shapes then apply them to freezer paper and then cut them out again and iron the freezer paper sections onto starched white fabric. Then I carefully cut around the fabric leaving a small seam which I turned under onto the other side of the freezer paper and secured it with pritt stick glue. I then assembled all of the parts together by sewing them onto a thin T bag paper backing.  Once the shapes were sewn down I could wet the T bag paper and cut away the backing of each shape in the centre to remove the freezer paper.
The result was perfect. The fabric was stabilised and turned under all ready to apply to my quilt, but before I did that I had to refer to the drawing and carefully mark on the white fabric the lines I wanted to follow for the stitching. I also wanted some permanent colour in there so used Inktense pencils by Derwent to apply the colour and then dampened it so it spread just where I wanted it.

I have started to machine embroider the railings on the lighthouse

This photo shows the stage I have reached with the lighthouse so far, I have placed stabiliser behind the quilt where the light house is and have started to embroider on with free machine embroidery the lines I want to emphasise. This is not quite complete and needs more doing to finish it off.

Hand coloured flowers with beads

I had made some flowers to go on the border of the quilt which are shown here, they were all cut out of fabric after I had coloured and tinted it with the Inktense pencils and some had a wash of pink silk paint on them too. It took 2 hours to do but the result is well worth it and they only needed a hot iron to set the colours so they will be colourfast. I used Bondaweb to set them onto the quilt and then machined around each flower to make sure it stayed in place. Lastly, I added beads to the centre of each flower.

Jammy

Made some blackcurrant jam this evening as the bushes were ripe with fruit and it was starting to fall off.  I am not convinced that this is a good year for fruit overall because the apple trees are not looking very over populated.  Sometimes they are bursting with apples. So perhaps the early warm spring and early cold winter have had a detrimental influence.

I also lost quite a lot of my gooseberries to a damned wood pigeon before I set up an anti landing device, actually it was DH he simply stuck a long flimsy stick into the top of the pole which the pigeon was using to reach the fruit, dah; why didn't I think of that.

I have opened a twitter account for my other blog which deals with work namely guided walks, and I have discovered that twitterers are very amusing and its also very informative, I don't know why it took me so long to try it.

I will not be able to indulge too much in that type of thing for a few days though as I have some sewing to do. I have to leave the garden to itself for a few days which is a shame now that the sun is finally shining in Keswick.