it is summer in my garden

or - I should say - in my imaginary garden! 

This fabric garden has been getting ready for the butterfly ball, flowers slowly growing .

It is a joy to play with these pretty fabrics in the middle of cold January.

Flowers added in the corners, 

                                                           and two more borders, a leaf one 

and the squares on the point border. I chose very plain fabric for the background here

because I love this Liberty fabric so much and the plain background shows it off so well.

               It is now ready for what I think is the main attraction of this quilt - the applique border. 

                                                      This will be the part I will enjoy most!

                                                     Four borders of pure joy of applique!

                                                     

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

"Up comes the Sun, and the very long shadows grow shorter; his light is like amber; 

the glow, where grey mists have melted away from the meadows, starts dewdrops all sparkling like jewels below;

creatures that fly, or that creep, hop, or run, now awake all at once at a loud trumpet-call to tell them this greatest of days has begun - the day of the Feast and the Butterfly Ball!"

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2023

Manor House has a border and it is ready to quilt

We have been having lots of rain recently, so more time spent indoors. I found some dark grey fabric in my stash, enough for all the flying geese which form the inner border of the quilt.

For the corner squares of the main border I am using bird motifs from 

one of the fabrics used in the quilt.

With so much rain everything is looking lush, and when the sun comes out (which is not very often now), the garden is buzzing with bees.

 

So, one last press,

and it is ready to be put together

to be quilted.

I was unsure which colour to use for the quilting; grey would had been the obvious choice,

 but in the end I decided on light gold, which I think will work quite well here. 

  

This is little too early, I know, but I have also decide on the fabric for the binding; 

this deep wine matches one of the colours used in the applique.

All ready to quilt, but as I am going to do it by hand, now is not the time, 

it is too warm to have a quilt on my lap. 

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2020

....and how to hang it?

Of course I am talking about a quilt. I like to display my large quilts on a wall in our dining room, this being the only free wall downstairs, large enough to take a large quilt. But how to do that?
I know there are many various systems on the market, the most simple being a rod and a couple of brackets, but in my case this would mean a gap between the wall and the quilt, which would be visible every time I pass it; not suitable for here. I have been using an old wooden curtain rod (painted the same colour as the wall), with a cord attached to each end of the rod and a nail in the wall - not very satisfactory, and rather unsightly.
The idea came to me when I came across Hang-it-Dang-it system, but this is not cheap for a large size. So I applied the same idea to my wooden curtain rod. This involves a large screw in the wall and a hole in the rod. Putting a screw in the wall in most English houses means drilling into a brick and a wall plug; as I am not happy using power tools outside the kitchen, I engaged the Man of the House, he likes to play with his tools. 

So, one screw in the wall and one hole in the rod (it is best not to drill the hole right through the rod, as this would probably mean damaging the fabric later).

The hole slips over the screw, and there it is!

The next step was to make an opening in the quilt hanging sleeve - this was a quick, rather untidy job (must do better!); in the future I will have to make the sleeve in two parts, with a gap in the middle.

The secret here is to have everything exactly in the middle, the hole in the rod, and the opening in the sleeve - and here we are - providing I now make an opening in hanging sleeves of all my quilts , it will work for all of them.

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2020

Wet and windy weather has been replaced by frosty nights and calmer, sunny days; days you want to be outside.

This morning's crispy walk took us by a smallholding on the edge of town;

I was pleased to see that the long feathered geese made it past Christmas 😀

Little acknowledgement from the pony;

  

but the alpacas in their woolly winter coats couldn't be bothered to come and say hello this morning. 

 First snowdrops in the churchyard,

 and yellow aconites opening up in the park.

Back at home I finished a half of the leaf border on the Grandmother's Garden quilt. 

I am using a straight forward needleturn applique, which is quick and I feel most comfortable with.

I am rather addicted to this quilt at the moment, and I can't wait for the next stage, which will be a border of small log cabin blocks.

Those of you who follow Barbara Brackman's blog might have seen her interesting post on 16th January "Pattern Blocks", in which she writes about " orphan quilt blocks", and which have become very collectable. 

Some of them dating as far back as the start of 20th century, these were not quilt blocks to be part of any quilt, but to keep as a reference, a part of a quilt pattern library or to share a particular pattern with others. 

Therefore they were not necessarily well stitched, as their permanence wasn't the most important thing, and often they had to be unpicked and re-stitched, to be able to copy them over and over again. 

Today of course we can find a pattern for any block in many places, be it books, magazines or online.

In those days sharing a block with your friends in this way would had been the easiest way to get a new pattern.

And sharing is something which we quilters do so well, don't we!

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2020

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

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

another block, and there is always room for one more tree

A couple of dry days, a welcome respite from a long wet week (although it felt much longer), but the rain is back again tonight, and the weekend doesn't hold a promise of anything better 😞

The sewing room is a good place to be when it is like this, getting on with current projects and plan new ones (oh yes, and there are many in my head, all I need is to have enough years to make them all!) 

Some prep work for the next block of Quilter's Patch, 

the  "Moon Flower" (lots of pieces again),

and block no 12 is done.

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

Occasionally we miss our old garden, mainly all those trees we planted there.

So, call us crazy if you want, but in the interest of our well-being, 

and as a very tiny contribution to the well-being of the planet, 

we decided that our (very) small garden can accommodate one more tree;
this will be no 9 we have planted since we moved here .

And this is the new arrival, a golden birch, to be planted this autumn.

I am looking forward to the next spring already!

©pleasureinstitching.blogspot.co.uk 2010-2019