Picture This!

The conversation went something like this:

Me to OH: 'I have a little job for you. Could you please hang that picture in the bathroom'.

OH to me:  What picture?

Me: The one that's been propped on the back of the bench in the kitchen since we bought it in Malta about 5 years ago!

OH: 'I thought it was meant for the kitchen.'

Me: 'It's a picture of a bathroom. Why would it go in the kitchen?'

OH: 'OK'.

Job done!!

Why wasn't it that easy 5 years ago?

 That gave me the idea to show you some more of what adorns our walls. 

 This lady is in our sitting room, near a corner, with a window to the right across the corner, so it gives the impression she's gazing out of our window too. I love this picture and often wonder, when dusting it, what she's waiting for, or looking at (dusting???..... Well, maybe not THAT often!).

 This is the sight that faces me as I step out of our bedroom!!  It's DS's bedroom door, with the upstairs toilet door to the right. In the middle of the night, in the eerie light from the window, while half asleep, it could give one a bit of a jolt!!

And because this is supposed to be a stitching blog, here's my effort for the Tag Square Bee for July.  It's for Jo from Bearpaw who has a lovely blog here.  She wanted an aqua/red/pink colour scheme so I hope she's happy with this.  When I first laid the pieces out I didn't like it at all, but the next morning it had grown on me and then I loved it after it was all sewn together.  The red fabric with black/white flowers is left over from a dress I made for DD nearly 20 years ago.

OH and I are off for a long weekend in Dorset tomorrow so I'm very much looking forward to 2 days off work! 

Oh... and my friend loved her 'shoe' bag!!


Bye for now
Teresa x

Preparation

Just a quick post today. Here are a couple of pics of some preparation.

This is my progress so far for the ladybird I'm going to add to this months quilt block. Next stage will be to cut out iron-on interfacing and then iron him in place before stitching (I know ladybirds aren't brown and green but I didn't want him to be a completely different colour from the rest!). The inspiration for his design came from a single element of a cushion designed by Don't look now. I can't find the particular one but the lovely designs are well worth a look none-the-less.


And here we have the preparation for a pin cushion from diamond shaped patches. I've only sewn hexagons in papers before so this will be a learning curve. I seem to differ greatly from most other quilters in that I have only one small pin cushion (about 2 and half inches square) so this is my attempt to remedy the situation. Not sure how big this one will be when finished though!
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Bye for now
Teresa x
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P.S. There's still plenty of time to enter my giveaway in the previous post if you want to take a look!!

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