Saturday, September 21, 2013

Small Quilts

One of the blogs that I follow is Quilts in the Barn, in a recent post Linda has photographs of her wall of small quilts. This inspired me to look at some of the small quilts that I have made (and forgotten about) and think about displaying them somewhere. This may be difficult as there is not much free wall space in this house!



This is a doll quilt from The Civil war sewing circle by Kathleen Tracy.



These are from the Little quilts books and patterns.


This is a very old one! These Bow tie bears are still appealing.

Small Quilts

Monday, September 16, 2013

A little bit of sewing

As yesterday involved gardening and cooking and no sewing, I tried to make up for it today.

Today, even though it is my day off, I had to go in to work and give a talk. So because I could not really setttle to anything, and there was not really enough time to get involved in gardening or housework, I decided to cut out some blocks ready to machine piece for yet another quilt that I am making. I also did some hexagon piecing in the train to and from work.



These are two blocks for the quilt, designed by Barbara Brackman and Deb Rowden for display in the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield Illinois. The quilt is displayed in the exhibit that depicts Abe's early life on the frontier in a log cabin. The quilt is made up of 28 star blocks and 28 sixteen patch blocks.


I am trying to get into the habit of updating my blog on a more regular basis, hope I can stick to it!

Sunday, September 15, 2013

A Day at Home


Today being Sunday and not having to go to work I spent some time in the garden. We had a burst of very warm weather (including bush fires) last week and the cicadas decided that it was time to hatch. These are the holes from which the cicadas emerged.






and then they climbed a nearby tree and left their shells behind.


The weather then changed and the temperature dropped and they are not surviving poor things.


A colleague at work had brought in a lot of lemons from her neighbours very fruitful tree, so I had to make strawberry jam (strawberries are very cheap at the moment).


And then I made a lemon cake (the second one in two days, I took the first one to work yesterday). My sons always ask when I am baking a cake "is that for work?", I feel an obligation to make them a cake now and then.


This is a great recipe and really easy as you just have to melt the butter and add it to the eggs and sugar that have been beaten together. The recipe is from a beautiful book -A Year in my garden by Jenny Ferguson, who lives in Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands.





Sunday night we always have pizza it is a family tradition. Son M makes the dough and then we all prepare our toppings to our liking, luckily we have two ovens so that we can cook four pizzas at once.
This is my pizza, just out of the oven, goat cheese and parma ham.


This is Mr P's - prawn, chili, smoked salmon and feta.


I have to go now and eat my delicious pizza!

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Long time coming

It has been some time since my last post!! My mother has been in and out of hospital, and work and life have prevented me from updating my blog. Luckily life, etc have not stopped me patchworking and quilting, and I have some photos of what I am currently working on.


This  is a doll quilt that I hand pieced some time ago from a Renee Plains pattern, now quilted, bound and finished!

  I have finally started to make a medallion/frame quilt, this is my own design and definitely a work in progress!


These half inch hexagons are to be appliqued in the corners, I have completed two and two to go.


 I have even had time to do some knitting. I had one skein of baby alpaca wool after knitting my mother a pair of gloves, so I began to knit Mum a scarf to match the gloves, but soon realised that I would not have enough wool, so I purchased on line from Ecoyarns what I thought was the same colour, but as you can see it has become  a striped scarf.


I have a couple of other completed projects and will save them for my next post (I aim to be a more regular blogger).