Well it is Christmas over for another year, pressies have been opened and enjoyed. Lunch eaten and new gadgets (MP3 players) charged and downloaded.
My family all have new chairs to use, they have an interesting look to them but are good for the posture and comfortable.
They are called the Fitball chair and easy to assemble. Behind the chair is my new hand quilting frame now I just have to make leaders for the rods so it's off to spotlight tomorrow to brave the sales for some strong calico or canvas type material.

Here is a miniature I made for a quilter friend of mine who has moved interstate just recently. The red and white fir the christmas theme.  Good night all hope you have had or will have a safe and pleasurable christmas.

It's almost Christmas and I have been busy away from Blogs. I have finished a couple of table runners and have given one away and just sewing the binding on the other. Both have embroidery on them which helped with the speed as hand piecing would have taken too long.
This one here is taken from a quilting stencil and is embroidered with a lovely hand dyed thread from Cottage Garden Threads by Pam Spurway http://cottagegardenthreads.blogspot.com/
Beautiful and a very easy thread to work with.


This next photo shows the lovely shading in the threads. I used 3 different ones, a red dark to light, a lovely olively green dark to light and a pale gold.

The coon's now have matching trees (what else can you call a play gym which is nearly taller than me?At 5'7" I am not exactly short. This is Bess's, she is on top warning Spud it is all hers!

Last but not least I have grown Sweet Peas this year for the first time and I love the fragrance.
Here is a photo of some of my favorites

Fall into Fall Quilt Bloggers Giveaway

http://www.fall-into-fall.blogspot.com/

Goto this link and participate in a great Fall Giveaway you can enter until the 15th of october and it is open to us overseas residents too! enjoy
There are great giveaways tobe had fabric, vouchers, bags, notions have fun !

Dyeing

I attended our local quilting guild's symposium over the weekend and did some fabric dyeing with a local tutor. I started with a yellow at one end and a red at the other and this is the range of graduated fabrics I got. The bottom fabrics were placed in the original bags 2 hours after the top ones and show how much dye was taken up by the first lot of fabrics. They will make beautiful applique roses and rose buds.

This next lot of fabrics showed what I did the day after with yellow at one end and blue at the other, as I wanted greens, and again the next lot of fabrics put in a couple of hours after the originals. The reds are one of the red dye I had at home and the next is an over dye of one of my first orange fabrics with red to see what it would be. roses and poppies for this lot I think with some of the greens to support them.

I am at last getting back to quilting. I am machine quilting a machine pieced quilt.
New territory for me and it's getting easier to freehand machine quilt. Practise and practise practise. Ufortunatley Spud decided to help me quilt. see the photo below.

sewing cat & Dyeing

Spud making sure that if I don't spend time with him he will ensure I have to !

Having a Bess supervse the ironing can be a little bit of a problem, especially when Making bias binding but fortunatly the paw only came out once and a little tap was all it took for her to decide that watching was more fun.

PTOC

I have completed my first Lucy Boston Patchwork of the crosses block using Inklingo
to print the shape on the back. I love the look of this one now to do the other 15.

Inklingo triangles

This is the Raffle Quilt for our local guild show for 2007.
I made the top using Inklingo and machine pieced it.
One of our talented members who runs a machine quilting business did the fantastic quilting on it for us.
Very fast to put together as I only printed the triangles on one fabric.
Thanks Linda Franz.

New beginnings

This is the start of a new adventure and here are some of the travellers with me:
furry feline and clawed. Well loved and spoilt all of them. Missy in the wardrobe (she got there on her own!) Spud (with mouse) and Bess who cannot resist any fabric laid on her floor!

The ones below are the elderly citizens:
Claude is the tabby and Jazz is the tonkinese



The quilting and sewing will come a little later, when I have the camera charged.
I enjoy quilting, knitting , and crochet.