Colour Therapy.

One of the main reasons I love to sew is that it gives me the oppurtunity to play with bright, colourful, cheerful fabrics. We're having a very dull, dreary November and even a quick glance at my unfinished quilt laying over a chair brightens my day and immediately makes think of sunshine and summer.

Last night when it was dark and cold outside I went into my sewing room and looked at my other bright quilt laying on the work table and felt so happy that I have quilting and fabric in my life. Maybe all us lovers of bright, colourful, quilty gorgeousness should start a new movement. I vote that we all make some bright, happy quilt blocks and hand them out to people in the streets to bring some sunshine into their days too!!

I've been plodding on with quilting the quilt I showed in my last post. It's getting slightly less frustrating but I'm still having trouble keeping the stitches the same length and also with manouvering the weight of quilt. Here's some of my progress so far.

Next I need to finish the blue triangles and then its onto the pink diamonds, just got to decide what pattern to try in the diamonds.

Last week I was very lucky to win a give-away by Rachel of Contended. Look at the lovely pressies she sent.

Don't you just love that cute owl fabric Rachel made the zippy bag from? The little heart now hangs from a cupboard door in my sewing room and I wore the flower brooch at my sewing group and it received lots of compliments. Rachel also sent these pretty cards.

There were also some jelly beans and bath bombs but they're both long gone! Many thanks for the generous gifts Rachel.

Well I better go and get on with some quilting, er sorry, housework now!

Bye for now, Maria.

Quilting frustration!

  Hi there, it's been a very long time since I've posted on my blog. There's no particular reason other than I've not had much new sewing wise to show. I've still been blog reading and I hope there is someone out there who hasn't forgoten me and may pop by to say "hi".

I've been working on a wonky log cabin quilt from a tutorial by John from Quiltdad who was the guest tutor (if that's the correct term) on the Old Red Barn Co. Quilt Along on fickr.
I used fabrics that I already had and wanted to use up. I recently did a direct fabric swap for some Park Slope strips with Viv from Highway cottage
and they went really well with the fabrics I was using so I added those too.
Here's some photos of the completed quilt top. I'm piecing the back too in a random make it up as you go along, let's use up some of the scraps style.

This is where I've spent some of my time this morning getting very annoyed and frustrated (you should see how hard I hit the key board when I wrote that).

I've been quilting a large double bed size quilt top, which I started making nearly two years ago, and my frustration is not the fault of my lovely new Bernina but down to the fact that the quilt is just too big to manouvre when free machine quilting. I'm not happy with how the quilting is looking but I'm just going to have to live with it.

Bye for now, Maria.