Stitchy goodness

Of course, I can't go to a quilt or stitching show without purchasing some cross-stitch patterns - and Sandown was no exception. I found three real bargains - only a few pounds each - 

and some others which, while not expensive, were more along the usual lines.

A simple star alphabet sampler

A summery stitchery (I tend to buy autumnal stuff all the time, so am trying to branch out a bit).

And a little house (I probably won't stitch the Home Sweet Home motto  - just the house).

Then there's a little Spring sampler with a house

and a winter piece, which I just thought was really sweet, especially with the fence going along the snow covered hill.

Another sheep themed stitchery (ok, I know, I'm into sheep stitcheries lately, but this one is very different than the virtues). 

And finally, another sampler with a house on it. Can't have too many of those, right?

Yes, I do have far more patterns than I need, but it's nice to have something to suit every mood, and I am working my way through things - I do finish quite a few cross-stitch pieces, so I don't feel too bad about buying them.  These days, I don't buy very many kits as I have quite a large collection of floss colours, both DMC (where I have tons, but still never seem to have all the numbers I need for a new piece) and some of the newer hand-dyes and over-dyes, like Weeks Dye Works, Gentle Art, and so on. 

One thing I did do recently - and I'm not sure if this makes me really organised, really sad, or some combination of the two - was create a spreadsheet for all the patterns I have, listing the colours they need. I also have a page of that sheet listing all the colours I own - this way I can easily determine which colours I need to buy to work on a project. Also keeps me from buying too many duplicates - I do check my box before buying, but if a thread is tucked away with a project somewhere I might not realise I own it - this should help solve that problem...

Cross-stitch update

So, this week I finished off the 7th installment of the bird piece - I reckon there's one more installment on the top of the branch - so I'm guessing the next one will be the top right hand corner of the piece - then after that, four on the bottom.  I could be wrong; I guess we'll find out before long.  There are a number of little buttons to add as well, but I'm doing them all at the end, as it makes frame placement while I'm stitching easier not to have them on the piece.

Once this was finished, I started one of my little sheep...

This is "Peace".  Technically, it's not the first of them, but I didn't really feel like stitching a snowflake just now, so I didn't start with hope. You can see the six which have been released so far, on the Little House website. I have four of these patterns in hand, and will receive the others on a monthly basis - I'm hoping to catch up with the installments before too long - they are quite small and quick to sew.   I actually took this sheep with me to start while I was queuing to get into a rock concert on Saturday (The Killers at Wembley) but I didn't get a lot done because it was quite windy and therefore hard to work. Maybe half a sheep or so.  But the rest is just two evenings' work, so you can see how quickly it goes.  Next week, back to the Irises, and then I'll finish off the sheep and perhaps start something new (or another sheep - we'll see...)

Fabric in...

I can't go to a quilt show without buying some fabric, and this was no exception. However, I did stick mainly to tonal fabrics, trying to buy where my stash is particularly sparse, like purples and yellows and some white-on-white.

I also stuck to the cheaper sale selections of fabric - I didn't pay more than £1.50 for any of these FQs and as little as £1 for some of them. These are the same FQs, but displayed attractively with the aid of my lovely helper...

These are the only non-tonal ones in the bunch - the two in front are for a specific project (a bag, by request) and the others are prints I liked which made up the numbers in sale offers (e.g. £1.00 each or 6 for £5; £1.50 each or 4 for £5 and so on...).  The only other thing I bought was some cross-stitch patterns, which I will show another day - though I was tempted by a little clip-on light and magnifying glass combo - I don't quite need it yet, but I can see in a few years' time, it may well come in handy!

Cotton Robin

Well, I received my little quilt from the Cotton Robin round robin I've been taking part in, but I wasn't able to show it right away, as Julie hadn't done the Grand Reveal yet. Now that she has, I can show the piece I received. It took me a while to work out which was is up.  I think this is what I like best, with the flowers going down the left-hand side.  What do you think?  I like the last one, too, but then the green lines look like an "A" and that grabs my eye too much...

If you want to see all the other pieces, check out the Big Reveal...

I'll try to hunt up the photos of the work I did on the pieces and blog them at some point - I think that's always fun to see...

A few quilts from Sandown

Alex and I popped over the National Quilt Championships at Sandown today - it's only about 15 minutes from us (the girls were busy elsewhere, though).  It's not a large show, but it was enjoyable (partly because it's not a large show - it could be bigger and still enjoyable, but some of the really big ones just hurt my brain after a while). There were several exhibits of quilts by a single artist, in addition to the ones in the general judging categories and the challenges. I haven't taken many photos, partly because I never seem to actually USE any of the photos of quilts I take, even for inspiration, and partly because I don't like to blog lots of photos of other people's quilts, especially when I'm not sure I can keep track of who made which one.   But here are a few where I do know who the artist is, so I feel ok showing them.  This first piece is by Annette Morgan, whose work I really like. Funny thing - I saw this from across the room and was immediately drawn to it - when I saw the name on the label, I thought well, at least my taste is consistent!  The quilt you can see a sliver of to the right of the photo is hers as well - the one to the left, I think not, though it's in similar colours. 

These are both detail shots from the quilt above - I just really like the squares and rectangles in different sizes, and the way they are quilted - in addition ot the colours. This quilt is both geometric and quite random at the same time, which I like.   Her work is wonderful - if you aren't familiar with her, do go check her out. 

Ferret, a longarm quilter who does amazing work, had an exhibition of some of her quilts (quite a few, though not one of my favourites - her cows!) there - I've picked out just one to show, although I like many of them. This one (Phoenix Rising) is a good example of one of the things I like about her work - from a distance, this is a lovely quilt of a Phoenix with lots of interesting colour gradation, etc. But it's up close where the quilt really begins to amaze, I think - have a look at the quilting detail in the photo below...

all around the Phoenix, there are red flames quilted, and further out, black quilted onto black.  And the quilting on the bird itself is amazing. The photos on her own website show the quilting even better - do go have a look!

This is a detail of a quilt by Lesley Brankin, who I've known for many years (since before Alex was born) - we were members of a birthday block swap together a long time ago.  The members of this group stayed in touch for quite a long time and some of us are still good friends to this day. I haven't seen Lesley in a while, but I really enjoyed seeing her piece at Sandown - it's really lovely. 

And this is a quilt which I just liked - I took about 5 more pictures of quilts I just liked, but this is the only one where I remembered to also take a photo of the blurb, so I'd know who the artist was.  The quilt is called Dance, and is by Rebecca Handyside. As far as I can tell, she doesn't blog or have a website, but she's made a nice quilt - I enjoyed looking at it!

A few things to give away

Here are some more cross-stitch patterns I'm ready to send on to new homes.  This first one is for two small pieces - Eek & Creepy are part of the same pattern. I did try to give this one away before but the person who wanted it was set to no-reply,  or I deleted her message or something, and I never managed to connect back up. If it was you, please try again - first priority to that person, otherwise, will happily send to whoever wants it.

A little garden sampler - photo not great, but you can see it stitched up, here. 

This little Spring Sampler won't come with the cabbage button, as I have used it, but you can do a stitched cabbage - it's a different colour green underneath, so it looks just fine anyway. You can see it in this post - if you aren't using the button, you stitch a spiral on top of the cabbage ...

This pattern has two different samplers in it - the one I stitched (on the left) and another, which I won't stitch. 

This is actually a kit which was passed along to me from another person who also was given it as a gift. I kept it for a while, thinking I might get to it, but I have now decided I won't, so let me know if you want it. Although it's a kit, it's small and not heavy, so I don't mind posting it abroad.

This is a different lighthouse - just a pattern from a magazine; it's one page. It's quite sweet, but again, I'm not going to stitch it.

This one is a photocopy of a booklet I got from a friend of mine. I've finally decided that I'm not going to stitch anything from it, but it's got some cute stuff. 

And finally, another kit - it's for a bookmark, so again, it's small. But we have tons of bookmarks and I doubt I'll ever get to it. 

If you are interested in any of these, leave a comment and let me know which one(s) and I'll draw winners (if necessary) in a week or two. 

Goodies!

This weekend brought a lovely visit from my friend Karol-Ann, who lives in Yorkshire, but came down to London to go to the tennis. Handily, I live very close to the tennis (15 minute drive for most of the year, a lot longer during the actual fortnight) so she came for dinner and to crash for the night before heading back. Her mum, who is visiting from South Africa, came along as well; I also invited my friend Lana, who knows Karol-Ann because they both have Nolting longarm machines (KA acquired hers recently and Lana helped her get it all set up) and who lives nearby and also has her mother visiting from abroad, so we all had a lovely evening of eating and chatting and eating and telling stories and eating...  There was no sewing done, but there were fabricy gifts - a great hexagon bag, which I will probably use as a project bag as it's quite soft (yeah, I know, fabric bags are always soft, but here I mean, not very rigid in structure) so will probably work better in that context than as a handbag.

And she also brought me some nice tonal fabrics in my sort of colours...

There were some little pencil cases and coin purses or other purpose zip-type bags for the kids, but they seem to have wandered off around the house elsewhere, and I can't be bothered to track them down for photos!

A bit of background info...

These are all backgrounds that I'm sending off to be worked on by two other people - hard to tell in this photo but the background behind the leafy paper is very shiny, so it adds an interesting touch to the card already. 

All three background are essentially the same, but the cutout is in a different place.

These are simpler - just a metallic fabric background with some ribbon stitched on.

These are three different rectangles of paper, to create two narrow borders around some text - it's from an old French novel. 

And finally, these have a kind of spritzed background (this is a good example of using all your crafty bits - the paper the background comes from was the piece of paper I put down on my table when I was spraying something and didn't want the paint to get on the table - it looked interesting, so I saved it!).  Each card then has a skeleton leaf stitched onto it with a small zigzag. 

You can see the skeleton leaf better here.

Some more ATCs worked on

I forgot to take a "before" shot of this one, so can't really do before/after, but the before was essentially the background - I added teh metallic strip and the metal charm.  These cards have only been worked on by two people now, and will be sent to a third player to complete.

These charming aliens came to me as heads on a background - forgot to photograph them before I worked on the first one - I've morphed them into Zetti style creatures, which I think works well, even though I don't consider Zetti to be my forte.

[Here's the before of two of them...]

And these three (again, forgot the "before" shot as I was thinking more of making the cards and less of blogging them) came to me as text background with the film strip ladies on them. I added the lettering and the charms.

Cross-stitch update

Good progress this week - I finished all the Iris and stems except a few incidental stitches which I need to go back and pick up.  I even did all the backstitching.  I filled in more of the border (definitely a good idea to do this as I go along as it's quite time consuming), did the Chinese character, and began the dish. I'm definitely liking this one - a more traditional type of pattern than a lot of the samplers I've done recently, but not that tricky - not too many colours at once. This week, back to the Flock piece (the pink fabric) to finish that bird, and then, my first sheep!

A few goodies

My local department store is not big, nor does it have a large haberdashery department, but it does have a small stock of crafty things (mostly aimed at the card-making market, along with a selection of wool, which doesn't appeal, as I don't knit).   Still, when you need a little craft fix, it's a nice place to pop into. I needed some glue with a fine tip, so I picked some up, along with a few sheets of paper, a packet of graduated vellum sheets and some little flower stickers. Nothing too unusual, but some nice bits and pieces, nonetheless...

This summer's when I expect to truly "stash up" - I'll be in the US for a month or so, and fully intend to do some damage in Michael's!

Bags

Amidst my more interesting sewing of the weekend, I made these three bags - two shopping bags with shorter handles and one over-the-shoulder bag with a longer straps. These are part of a group of projects I agreed to work on for the Friends group at our local library (for whom I made a baby quilt for raffle). They had had some fabric donated to them, and put out a call for people with sewing machines to assemble some bits and pieces - they precut the fabric, so all I had to do was stitch.  Not very interesting, but at least it was fairly quick.