UFOs and a Bernina

I had a day off work yesterday to join my quilting group on a trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC in Birmingham. As always it was a busy, enjoyable and inspirational day and I'm sure there will be lots of photos and news about it here in Blogland. I bought a couple of bits and pieces but my main aim was to get a new sewing machine. The one I have is at least 20 years old and doesn't have many of the features and attachments that would save time and give a good finish. I'm planning to do much more sewing in the future so felt it was time to invest in a new machine. One machine looks much like another to me as I haven't had much experience with newer models, but with the advice that Bernina were good quality, I negotiated to buy one of the demonstration models of this (the 230 PES) machine at £100 off. I'm looking forward to receiving it after it's finished with at the show and had a service back at their shop.

In the true tradition of Blogland, I've taken a couple of photos of my Unfinished Objects (projects). Some bloggers show their UFOs in order to motivate themselves to get working on and maybe finish them. I don't quite know if I have an ulterior motive for showing these as I can't see me having time to pick them up any time soon. I only have 2 but they're time consuming projects and getting back into the right mind set for continuing will take quite some time.


This is a cardigan pattern and yarn I bought to knit about 3 years ago and started with enthusiasm. It's the only time I've bought a book of patterns and exactly the yarn specified, and it cost around £50 at the time. That's more than I've spent before or since on a similar project so I should really get it finished. I seem to remember that as I knitted the back (which is all I've done so far - up to the armhole shaping) it began to look as though it was going to be too small. What I should really do is get it back out, measure properly and if it's too small, un-run it and start again.

(The correct colour of this yarn is somewhere between the 2 photos)

This cross-stitch kit is probably even older than the cardigan project. I love the picture and know where I want it to hang when/if it's ever finished. The reason I lost interest in this was because I got to a point where I realised I'd made a mistake somewhere and the pattern is so small and complex it was impossible to find it. This means I'll have to adapt the colours as I go until the pattern gets a point where it's correct and the thought of that puts me off picking it up.

This weekend is, I hope, going to be a quiet one with some time for stitching. I've got a few quilt blocks ready to put a border on and another paper foundation block to finish. Some ebay watching time will also be spent because I finally got around to listing some items to sell for the first time last weekend. I've got quite a few watchers and couple of bids so I'm hopeful for a reasonable result. It'll be quite exciting watching what happens but I suppose that wears off when you've done it a lot!!

Bye for now

Teresa x