Hugs & Squishies - and more

I know I've said this before, but it's something that bears repeating - the virtual world might have its problems, but it also is full of some truly wonderful people. I have had tons of sympathy emails, some from people who have never commented before as well as from those regular commenters. I have also had a good friend (Cathi - who I have known since before the internet existed - how's that for something to age a friendship, LOL) coordinate a squishie shower on her blog and another friend (Sophie, who I have never had the pleasure of meeting F2F) organise a comfort quilt on some of the forums I hang out on, which makes me get all emotional, so I have to stop talking about it now.



Anyway, today I received one of these comfort squishies - this is the photo at above left, from the lovely Jane, who has sent me this virtual hug - a cat pattern, some gold mesh (I actually have some of this, but only a little, as I have used it a lot in the past, so it was great to get some more), a piece of quilt themed fabric, and best of all to my postcard & inchie obsessed mind, a little bag of bits - some rickrack with flowers, some mirrors, oh and lots of other bits.



The other photo is also a lovely squishie, but is not a surprise - someone on one of my lists is selling off a lot of her stash at very good prices, and I picked up this "brown scrap bag" for a song (ok, not quite that cheap - it was £5). There's a ton of fabric in here, including some pieces which must be close to half a metre. Most of them are reproduction fabrics - I am really getting to like Civil War era repros - they are just lovely - don't know what it is about them, but there's something.









Well, the two parcels were delivered early - a ring at the doorbell at 8am; then the regular post brought me four lovely postcards, so it's been a good day for deliveries... Here we have a card from the 1910's theme swap from Annette, a pink and purple card from Kaye, Autumn Colours from Diane (who is always early with her cards and sends me into a panic!) and Stripes from Melinda, which I really like. I like all of them, don't get me wrong, but the stripes is particularly funky.







As always seems to happen, Murphy's Law struck me down this morning - I was innocently finishing my little journal/sketchbook thing with the lutradur and lace piece used as a cover, when all of the sudden, my machine stopped picking up the bobbin thread. [ok, ok, I confess, I did break a needle, and I wasn't being very nice to my machine, trying to sew through lots of layers of paper as well as the cover, which is the lutradur and lace piece fused to a piece of pelmet vilene, fused to a piece of fabric. But I was being as gentle as I could, I promise, gov] Anyway, luckily Lana has a spare machine and I was able to borrow this to work this morning - as DH was not only taking Sarah to tennis, but taking the other two as well, so they could play at the nice playground right by the tennis courts where she does lessons. Her lesson is an hour and it's about 15 minutes each way travel, so no way could I lose that hour and a half...



Anyway, I finished off the journal - which I think came out pretty well. Olivia immediately asked if she could make one, so perhaps that will be a project for later this autumn. I intend this one as a Christmas gift for an artist friend. I will make a second one for her husband, also an artist. In fact, I have a piece of L&L in progress as I type :) but I am still painting it.






So then I decided to do a couple of much more traditional things - I finished piecing the pink and orange Ohio Stars for the block lotto and put together these yellow and blue blocks into a top (the blocks were already made - it was only a matter of sewing together 24 6" blocks. This one I'm sending along to my friend Karol Ann for her local Linus group.)



And finally, here is a photo of the starting piece for my new CCRR (complex cloth round robin) with my surface embellishment group. With this group, anything goes, and we are doing rounds of 5 people this time, so I am really looking forward to seeing what these creative people come up with this time. I've had such good success with my CCRRs before, so I'm sure this one will be equally fun. It will go off in the post to Kathleen on Monday or Tuesday.