Happy New Year

 Happy new year to all, We finally got snow in time for Christmas which was nice if a little inconvenient as our road was a bit like a skating rink.
I 'tweeked' the tree as I was not happy with it and then felt the house looked quite festive. My new Santa (remember him?) looked a bit too big for the mantle-shelf so he spent Christmas sitting on the top of the stereo speaker where he seemed much more comfortable and I hung a up little 'Origami tree which I made last year in the porch, these are really easy to make and only take a few hours I made this one while watching T.V.  It seemed a of a long holiday this year with all those bank holidays eh?
Still! today I went to a sewing day with some of the girls from Severn Valley Quilters, we hold them 3/4 times a year and it has really broken the 'quilting drought' for me, it is so good to spend time with like minded people, I was beginning to feel like I was really outta tune somewhere! I have come to the workroom several times this week to sew and ended up not doing anything sensible. 
So today I finished hand sewing the 'tramlines'on a Trapunto project I need to find some trapunto wool, does anyone know where I can find some? I have trawled the 'net' but to no avail and am beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea. I am using some pale pink silk (that I bought in 2008 at the Oakshott Fabrics sale) with a Charles Rennie Macintosh Rose design from a patchwork magazine.

Its been really nice to just hand sew for a while I was a bit machine stitched out with all those cushions I made for the children. They did not receive them till about a week after Christmas as I went down with a flu like virus on Boxing night and did not want to pass anything on to the family. When they came over, having been given their presents they were thrilled, the twins just carried theirs around for the duration of their visit and the older ones sat cuddled up in front of the TV with theirs. Eli (7months) just grabbed his toy elephant and proceeded to explore it all over with hands and mouth, so I think that was a success also.


I thought I would share some items that Harriet (my granddaughter) has made with you, I sent off some pictures to Fabrications Magazine and they were published in the December issue, Which she has not seen yet! She had been quite busy quilting wise during the last year completing a cushion, a bag and some Halloween projects.
These are the picture I sent to the magazine.

Bag front     

Bag Back

This is her bag made from some Charity shop jeans, it has a long shoulder strap made from the cut off legs and she had great fun planning all the embellishments.

And this is her cushion.
All her own design and her first attempt at raw edge applique by machine,
These projects were made over the summer on her visits to stay with us. She is fast becoming a 'fabriholic' (just like me!).





 She was here again in October and this time wanted to make a 'Goodie bag' to take Trick or treating with her friends. She did some rough drawings and chose some fabrics and we set to, a spider seemed to be a 'must' plus some lettering, and she had some purple starry fabric in her stash so with some stitching and gluing she made this bag, she also covered a head band with red fabric and made some sparkly red fabric 'horns' which with a little help she stitched on, if you look close you can see her wearing them in the picture, apparently she and her friends had a great time on the night and Harriet had to call in at home part way round to empty her bag of goodies!

Monday night will see me off to give a talk to a local WI group, unfortunately it means I will miss the meeting at Westbury Park Quilters which is a shame as I really wanted to do the workshop to make a Log cabin Chicken door stop, but a friend will pick up some instructions for me and I will to make one at home.
Well that's about it for this time so I will sign off till next time.
Happy stitchin'
Lorraine

Back Again!

Hi all,
At last I am back! I have had trouble logging on to my blog recently (probably still getting it wrong somewhere) it's all very frustrating when I have soo.. much to show you.:-)
I finished the cushions and the toy I have been making, and I am pleased with the results, just hope the children like them. Here they all are, do let me know what you think.
                                                  

This is for J, I used pictures from a larger panel with sashing and backing in the same fabric.

This is K's cushion, he shares a room with J so I thought a common theme would be nice, some more pictures from the panel and again I used the same fabric for sashing and backing.

These 2 are for the twins L & E, again they share a room and at 31/2  years old I decided on Nursery rhymes and nice bright colours.

 

Last but not least this is the elephant I made for Eli, I found this nice bright fabric in my stash with some corduroy on the inner ears (see previous post and 'sleepy' embroidered eyes. I think he's rather cuddly.

The cushion I made earlier for their sister is on a previous post so I have not put that in here.

We have been rather lucky with our weather so far, all around us seems to have snow but we have only had  continued very low temperatures (-5 or 6) with really hard frosts, everything looks so pretty I just had to take some pictures to show you, we 'share' a huge silver birch tree with a neighbour which on Wednesday morning looked like a huge fountain, while the leaves of our Apple tree seemed to have had all the edges painted with white. In the last picture the Pyracantha bush looks very pretty with all the orange berries caontrasted against the frost.

 

Last friday saw me and 2 friends off to the sale at Oakshott Fabrics (www.oakshottfabrics.com) it was a great day out and YES! I did buy some fabrics and patterns etc. I love the colours and patterns of their fabrics and they don't have a shop and do not exhibit at Malvern so it's a treat to go to the warehouse and have the chance to browse, This is what I bought, the patterns and some fabrics will be used as raffle prizes at Severn Valley Quilters but the rest is for me. :- )))

Well that's about it for now folks! so I'm off to get the evening meal and settle down for an evenings TV.

See you soon

Lorraine