Recent work

Christmas greetings to everyone. I hope you all have/have had a good day.  I had hoped to get this post done yesterday but Christmas tends to bring unexpected tasks.  This year I have received a wonderful number of e-mails from friends all over the place and have been quite busy replying/sending mine out.  However, Christmas Day has dawned very gloomy here so I have time to write this post.  In fact it is so gloomy that here is a photo of Penzance taken on Christmas Day last year.  Please note the rainbow!  We will not be going out today!

Although 2015 has not been a good year for my textile work, I have not been entirely lazy.  My main project over the summer was a lap quilt as a sixtieth birthday present for my sister-in-law.  As I no longer quilt large pieces it went off to be long arm quilted.  I have not been able to post it on here until now as her birthday was only last week and I know she reads my blog.

If this looks vaguely familiar it is because the top is made from left over blocks from my own bed quilt.  As my bed is so big I had to buy two packs of jelly rolls and two packs of squares but only used a few of the second packet.  I had enough left over (with the addition of a few from my stash) to make a lap quilt.  The border is the fabric that backs my quilt but the backing is not the same.

Recently I decided that I should make a determined effort to use up some of my stash and that the time has come to make quilts for charity.  I have a lot of 'children's fabric' from many years of making cot quilts.  I do not normally buy quilting magazines but on a recent trip to Sainsburys I found a new quilting magazine,  Today's Quilter which had a pattern for a quilt with dogs on it.  The author said she was inspired by the London  quilting shop 'The Patchwork Dog and The Calico Cat' which existed over thirty years ago.  That really took me back as I remember the shop well.

So I have started to make a quilt that uses up some of my children's fabrics.

It is very much a 'work in progress' as Christmas intervened and you can see that I am still making the dogs.

My problem is that I resolved not to buy fabric for this project but find I have almost no larger pieces.  As the blocks have sashing between  them I am going to have think carefully as to whether I can manage without buying anything more.  We all know that not having enough fabric for a project is a perennial quilter's nightmare and is one way in which people build up stashes.  My aim is to reduce my stash!

I am not a neat worker so doing more 'traditional' work like this is a slight challenge. I tell myself it will do me good and that I will get back to art quilting in 2016.  So Happy New Year everyone and happy stitching to those of you who are quilters.