I've been sewing again!!!

...with a little knitting thrown in of course! Yes folks I've had a great time since I last talked to you all, first up the  proper yarn arrived for the BIG knitting project which you may be relieved to hear is going much better and actually looks like it will fit DH when it's done, Whooo Hoo!! I'm now on week 7 of the Rowan Mystery Knit Along (see previous posts) About three weeks ago I decided to randomly pull out a project from the WIP's pile, this turned out to be my Row Robin, set as a group challenge at Severn Valley Quilters in 2005 (Yes really! that long ago) The Row Robin project was a group of 7 quilters of mixed ability, we decided to set some guidelines so that we all worked to a common theme, and the rows were passed around anonymously, I'm sure you all know how these things work so won't bore you with all the details. I had originally thought that I would hand quilt the easy bits and machine quilt the rest, so not being able to remember how far I had got and leaning towards a bit of hand quilting I decided that it would suit the purpose. The weather was still warm so I took it to the conservatory to establish what needed doing. Well! It turned out that there were only 2 more rows to  left to quilt and as I had already hand quilted most of it I decided to continue and complete the whole thing by hand. After a couple of hours I had made some good progress, but the old fingers were aching so I put it away, then later that week I did a bit more. I was due to visit the American Museum to attend one of their sewing bees with some of the girls from SVQ, and thought it would be a great opportunity to get a bit more done while talking to the visitors. At the September meeting of SVQ I met a young woman who with her husband and children recently moved to the village from California, she was looking for a quilt group and came along as a visitor, unfortunately our group is at capacity so she was unable to join, but we had a chat and she's really missing her quilting friends from the U.S. I later emailed her to suggest we might meet for coffee and to invite her to a small local quilt show. We had a great day, the show did not take us long as it was very small and so having gone to the pub to get lunch we ended up staying there chatting all afternoon. Then she invited me to her house for a sewing day last week, again we had a good time and I managed to get more done on the quilting, so now my quilt is almost all done and looks like this...I'm currently working on the final bit of quilting on the row at the top.

Row Robin ably displayed by DH 

During the process I decided I would keep a diary as I worked and looking back it makes interesting reading as I can now see what I was thinking as I worked on each row of the various quilts and how I solved some of the things that cropped up.
Last week on a very wet Monday DD, DGD and I set out for a day at the West Midland Safari Park, we had a great day despite the weather and as there was hardly any other visitors there we were able to get a good view of all the 'residents' including this litttle cutie.

Isn't he just the cutest thing on 4 legs?

Some of the other animals were not enjoying the weather at all as you can see here, all the Lemurs were snuggled up to one another and looked totally fed up!

On Saturday I'm off to Malvern for the Autumn Show with 3 friends, I'm hoping to do some of the workshops, (I did some last year and they were great fun!!) as well as see the quilt displays, I am not 'planning' any shopping as I am trying not to put any more fabrics etc in the workroom, that way there will be less to pack up and move when we get the new workroom built which at this rate is going to be sometime next year! Now I know that seems a long way off but all things considered I probably have just enough supplies to keep me going till then and there are quite a few WIP's waiting in the pile to work on, so I'll try to concentrate on that for the time being and hopefully the workshops will keep me occupied from looking at tooo many traders. Well folks it's well after midnight here so I'll say Night Night.
Lx