Handsewing averted

finished the quilt!  And thanks to a few hints and tips from Dancingstar I managed to do it without a single stitch of the dreaded handsewing (for which I am truly thankful, because it was a really long way around that binding even on a machine – if I’d had to do it by hand,…

Lookit what I did!

mazingly, I actually made a decision.  And not only that, I sewed the blocks together, so now I’m committed to that decision (well, I suppose if I was really determined to change my mind I could always break out the quick-unpick, but yeah, nah). Not all the squares line up properly, and it doesn’t quite…

So many choices!

I had a few friends around for a pot-luck dinner on Friday night.  Not everyone I’d invited could make it – some were out of town, or had other plans, or cancelled because of illness (or in one case just forgot – I got a very apologetic email the next morning), but the few of…

The clever bit

o, I left you with all those loops of squares, and promised you a really clever bit. Well, the really clever bit is that you unpick one seam from each loop, to turn them back into strips, but you unpick a different seam on each one. Which means that each strip starts with a different…

Merry Christmas!

k, ignore everything you’ve ever read or seen about how spending Christmas alone is a terrible thing.  It’s not – in fact, it’s been a very pleasant experience.  Of course, it probably helps that I’ve never really thought of Christmas as that big a deal anyway.  Yes, I have a lot of fun decorating the…

Holidays!

Thanks to the generous allocation of University Holidays around this time of year, plus of course quite a few Public Holidays, and the judicious use of a couple of days’ leave, I’ve got a whole two weeks off work. And much needed it is too, after a very busy few months (that break in October…

Making slow progress

The good news is, I finished the machine sewing part of the minecraft face mats. Work in progress – mats at various stages of completion. Machine sewing finally done! Of course, that means the bad news is I’m up to the hand-sewing part.  Which is the slow and difficult bit (well, it is if you’re…

The chickens have landed

hich means I can finally reveal the secret project I mentioned ages ago. In fact, it was two secret projects.  Or possibly just two iterations of the same secret project.  When browsing the internets looking for patterns to feed my new paper-piecing obsession, I came across a lovely chicken pattern that was just crying out…