Wednesday 24 September 2014

Autumns coming...

St Giles


September means the fair rolls into town, working in Oxford I get to enjoy the atmosphere at lunchtime and this year the weather's been fantastic.









Witney Feast



The week after, it travels to my hometown and brings a wave of nostalgia and excitement.




My ten year old went on this which brought a range of emotions from worry to pride! 




I like it as the evening darkens and the lights really pop.








Did I go on any rides? Oh course, the best one - the gallopers!









Wednesday 3 September 2014

Quilting


 I'm desperately trying to keep the momentum going to finish my second quilt, it's now all pieced and I'm at the actual quilting stage and that is why it's stalled.
For my first quilt - The Hungry Caterpillar, I did mostly stitch in the ditch using the walking foot, I tried to have a go at free motion but it was terrible and I realised it's not as easy as it looks and takes lots of practice!
So for this one I really didn't want to ruin it at the quilting stage but as it has a lot of background fabric I knew it would look boring without any, so I'm trying mostly straight lines, to accent the patchwork shapes and I may have a go at hand quilting.


 This is the back that took longer than I wanted as instead of using a large piece of backing I (stupidly!) decided on piecing the back using scraps and a fabric panel that was intended to be put together as a fabric baby book. It took a lot of maths, adding seam allowances to calculate what size pieces I needed.
With the smaller scraps I hand stitched some hexies and appliquéd them on.


 I also found basting tricky, not having a large table I had to do it on the floor and on carpet, it was really hard getting the layers smooth. I'm thinking of getting a large piece of MDF and mocking up a cutting table and using that to baste in sections.


Just need to finish off the quilting and get the prairie points on and it'll be done and we can use it on the sofa in winter. Then I can get on with the next one I've already started planning!