The Wool Palace

Lying on the floor

Quilting has many good aspects, but it can't compete with knitting as a portable craft.  It doesn't really lend itself to sitting in front of the TV - the whir of the sewing machine is a bit off putting.

Imagine my pleasure in discovering the delights of English Paper Piecing.  I was seduced by beauties like this and in next to no time I was cutting up paper pieces, basting and sewing up my own little treasure.

There's something delightfully anachronistic about sitting in front on the TV, iPad beside me, handstitching away.  I feel as if I should be wearing a bonnet and sighing over which suitable man will come to take tea with me.

I put aside my bonnet fantasies and sighing long enough to sign up for an EPP Bee.  Serendipitously, I read this post which sent me off with a little shopping list of supplies to get myself ready.

I'm pleased to see that Clover design eminently desirable accessories for sewing as well as knitting.  My sewing box promises to be as full of Clover bits and bobs as my knitting bag.

 

Destashing

I forgot to mention this before.

I am slowly clearing out some of my knitting supplies.  This week it is mainly laceweight yarns, plus some packs of Rowan yarns.

Keep an eye on my ebay listings if you are interested.

Weekender

It's been a weekend of catching up with housework and gardening.  I did manage to fit in an argument with Sam about GCSE revision, but there's been little time for sewing.

Seeing as I was in the garden, I thought I'd do a photoshoot of a couple of things I completed a while back.

I've been sewing since I was a teenager and I took some quilting classes back when the children were little, but this was the first 'proper' quilt I did, about 18 months ago.  I used the Mix Tape pattern from Oh Fransson.  It's done in prints from the 'Just Wing It' collection by Momo - I was just getting to grips with online fabric shopping at this point.  I learnt a lot while doing this quilt.  Like the importance of measuring and cutting accurately, and sewing an accurate seam.  It was the first quilt I'd ever machine quilted - that was a steep learning curve.  There are many, many mistakes in this quilt, but it was made with love and it's used every day, so I'm happy.

Close up of the binding and backing, just to give you an even better idea of the number of mistakes.

I did a few other projects after the quilt, but don't have any photos to show of them today.  Obviously I couldn't do a quilt for one child and not for the other, because that would make me a terrible mother.  Sam and I discussed what he would like and he chose Drunk Love From Denyse Schmidt.  I quickly decided that I couldn't be bothered faffing around with templates, so I read some tutorials here and here and jumped in.

This was a lot of fun to do, plus it's very forgiving as you're just able to trim each block to the perfect size as you finish.  I haven't actually finished this yet.  The top has been done for quite a few months and I ordered some fabric for the backing, but when it arrived I didn't like it as much as I'd expected, so I've had it folded up on a shelf, hoping that I'd start to like the backing fabric better.  Taking it down to photograph today, I've come to peace with the fact that I need to buy some other backing fabric, so that's what I'm going to do.  I'm trying to forget about the money I spent on the 4 metres of fabric that I'm not going to use.

It's done in Kona Solids with some Alexander Henry Pirate Grid mixed in.  While making this one I learnt that calculating the correct amount of fabric before you order is a good idea.  I ordered about half what I needed, ran out and then had to search through every Kona supplier in the UK to find one of the shades of grey I needed.

The coming week promises to be busy again but I'm hoping to squeeze in a bit of sewing time at some point.  I've signed up to a couple of swaps and bees on Flickr, so I'm looking forward to some fun stuff over the next few months.

Baby steps

So, I've been looking around, seeing what the blogging world is like these days.  Things are different!  Bloglines appears to be dead, I've been using Google Reader for the past 18 months or so, I suppose most people do.  Flickr seems HUGE, or maybe I was just slow to pick up on it before.

I had a long break, even from reading blogs, and lots of people who were blogging when I was around seem to have stopped, although there's still plenty of familiar faces on Ravelry.

These days I'm doing a lot more sewing than knitting, so most of the blogs I'm reading are sewing ones.  I've been lurking around, gathering inspiration for a year or so and now I'll try and be a bit more active I think.

I finished off the top for a baby quilt I'm doing for my sister.  She's living in Melbourne and I've never been to her house, so I feel a bit in the dark as to whether she'll like it or not.  I know she's my sister, but the last house of hers I went to was her student flat in Cambridge, which probably isn't representative of her taste now.  We had a bit of a pinning session on Pinterest and I came up with this colour scheme.

Now it's all sewn together I'm thinking it's kind of bright, but bright is good for a baby right?  I think the quilting will calm it down a bit as well.  The baby's not due for a few months yet, so there's always time to do something else...

 

Time flies

Well, those four years went by fast.

I have a hankering to start blogging again.  However, my skills are rusty, so I need to find my feet. 

Expect to see some tinkering around for the next few weeks.