and the garden blossoms.....

So, Christmas is all done and over with; I hope it was all you wanted to be.........

I have been spending some of the evenings "growing" my garden, the central panel of my new quilt.

After assembling hexie flowers, I made them into strips,

and now I am joining the strips with more white hexies. 

The plan was to make all white hexies first, but that was a bit tedious, so I am making enough white ones for one strip at the time, and join each strip the the previous one. 

 I am nearly half way there!

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

Merry Christmas

to all my followers and to all who just pop in now and then, wherever you are in the world!

I hope you will have a wonderful time with your family and friends, calm and peace.

Here the old seasonal favourites have come out of hiding,

My favourite Christmas tablecloth, which I made some years ago
("Northern Quilts" pattern),

with embroidered corners.

And some last minute baking.

Although my clivia is little confused; after spending the summer outside, 

it has now decided to flower for Christmas; a welcome addition to our decoration.

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

flowers in December?

It is cold and foggy winter day outside, 

a week before Christmas,

but there are flowers growing inside my house.

Making hexagon flowers became bit of an obsession since I started this quilt

(see previous post) - spending most evenings putting little hexies together;  

I now have all 91 flowers I need for the center panel.

May be this project is not going to be as long term as I thought 😊

 Next step - 522 half inch white hexagons to fill in spaces around the flowers!

May be this where I might get fed up? Possibly.........

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

FNwF - a new project

Big "thank you" to Cheryll for getting us together again for Friday Night with Friends, the last one of the year!

I was very pleased to have finished St Germain quilt (see 2 posts back), but in a way I miss working on it. So I thought it would be nice to have another long term (very long term) project again.

I think long term projects are like good old friends; you don't need to see them very often, but when you do, you really enjoy their company.

A couple of weeks ago, during a particularly grey and wet day, I spent a pleasant afternoon in my sewing room, browsing through old quilting magazines.

Some years back "Quiltmania" magazine used to publish "Special" issues 4 times of the year, and in one of them (Summer 2013) I came across this gorgeous quilt. It is called

 "Grandmother's Flower Garden 1930". 

It is so colourful, bright and fresh looking, just what is needed for grey English winter; 

a combination of hexagons, log cabin blocks and applique. Measuring 2m x 2m, this is probably the largest quilt I have ever embarked on.

So yes, definitively a very long term! 

After a quick rummage through my stash I found that I already have all the fabrics I need!

Even all the white fabric, originally bought for another project which never happened.

The center flowers are made out of 1/2 in hexagons, all 1,159 of them, so that's how I have been spending my evenings ever since, including last night.

At last we are having some dry weather, so we managed to get out and tidy the garden this morning (or at least make a start), but now I am ready to go back to my hexies.

Enjoy your weekend, whatever you are up to!

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

This week I finished "Hot Cocoa Cafe" - 7th from "Santa's Village" set.

I have started a new project - see you at tomorrow's FNwF!









©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

St Germain quilt - finished at last

Designed by Laurie Simpson for Minick and Simpson, and published in the 100th issue of the Quiltmania magazine more then 5 years ago; so yes, the realisation, that I had been working on this for 5 years, has now hit me. 

But all done now. It was an enjoyable, be it a very long journey. All needleturn applique, hand stitched, and finished by hand quilting (around each applique piece at least once). And because this is a quilt to be used, rather than a wall hanging, I used a warm wadding, a mixture of cotton and wool; it was lovely to quilt through.

Needless to say that I am very pleased with it. It will now live on my bed.

 It measures approx 

160 x 180 cm, so it wasn't easy to take a picture of it outside ( too long for my washing line),

but luckily the quilt is bright enough for a picture inside, 

even on a dull winter day.

                                                       ----------------------------------------

My recent break in blogging was forced on me by a technical problem - one day last month my computer simply "died". My local computer chap soon found that it was the power supply unit which decided it had enough, but because of the age of the computer, it wasn't easy to find a replacement. But eventually one was located in Germany (!), so here we are, back in action!

Having to cope with just a small pocket size tablet in the meantime wasn't any fun, so I have a great deal of catching up to do. 

The autumn has somehow passed us by; it was cold and very wet; there was a brief break in the weather last month, when we visited Stourhead again, but only now it has been possible to download my camera, so here are some pictures.

I have nothing else to show you at the moment.

For the last couple of weeks both DH and I have been nursing a horrid cold, when all I wanted to do was to stay curled up under one of my lovely warm blankets in the front of the TV. 

Hopefully on the mend now. Why is it that as you get older it takes so much longer to get over any illness? It anything, we should be more resilient by now! 😒

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019

this and that, and teddy bears too

At last, after a month of rain, we might have some dry days.

We cleared all the roses from the middle bed in the front garden.

They were never really happy there, so we are replacing them with a mixture of perennials.

Freshly dug soil, with some addition of new compost - and now all the cats around think this is their new public convenience! A sprinkling of bin powder on the soil usually helps, but this has been washed away by the rain every night since I planted it out........😠

Hopefully, now the dry weather has been promised, we will be able to start tidying the back garden next week.

We took an advantage of being stuck indoors for so long, and sorted out lots of our books. 

Both DH and I are big book hoarders, and every few years we just have to "take the bull by it horns" and do something about it. Some books went to a local charity shop. But we took most of them, four big bagfuls, to the Barrington Court's  "Book Barn". It's a very large second hand book shop, very well run by National Trust volunteers, with comfy chairs, where you can relax while choosing your next read.

The money raised helps towards the upkeep of the Barrington Court; one of the ladies working there told us that last year they raised nearly £30,000.

While there, we took the advantage of a reasonably dry day and had a walk around the gardens.

Despite the rain, or because of it, and because we haven't had a cold snap yet, there are still lots of flowers around.

The pumpkins are ready,

and at last some autumn colour too, 

in the form of a magnificent, very old birch tree.

 

On Thursday I popped down to the Bath and West Showground.

The Craft4Crafters show is a regular, twice a year affair.

No "big names" exhibiting; a bit more textile stuff than usual, which was nice to see; also a chance to stock up with few things.

I was very "self controlled" and made only very small purchases -

I am sure these nice batik fabrics will come useful.

The creative spirit has somehow left me in the last few weeks.

I am still hand quilting St Germain quilt (a long process), and it is nice to have it on my lap, now it is chilly in the evenings.

A small nod to Christmas - I am working on the next cross stitch picture in the Santa Village series of 12 pictures; this is a long ongoing project.

This one is no 7.

May be another 2 years?.....

The 6 done so far.

So, what is is this about teddy bears?

This morning a new issue of Landscape magazine popped through the letter box; always a pleasure to read and I look forward to go through the whole magazine. But one article got my attention immediately, 

the one about The Teddy Hospital in Lyme Regis in Dorset.

Alice's Bear Shop, Teddy Bear and Doll Hospital was opened by Rikey Austin some 20 years ago and they are more busy then ever. 

There are some lovely stories in this article; about how the Hospital has grown, and about "patients" from near and far; a man who could not part with his teddy, so he had flown in with him from Bulgaria, and stayed in Lyme Regis while his bear was being mended!

This is just one of the patients waiting,

Ted Wilson having a rest before his "operation".

Why was I so exited about reading all this? Because this is where my Mary-Jane came from; I bought her during one of our visits to Lyme Regis (not long after out move to Somerset), when Alice's Shop was mainly just that.

So, meet my "gang"; they all have names (of course). 

Some were rescued from charity shops, some bought new, a couple of them I made myself.

This is George, he is rather special - a present from my son.

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019