Oh dear I’m not technical

Further to my last blog post, I made 9 Christmas puddings which will last for a few years in the freezer.
Then a photo of using up stash yarn. A baby cardigan for our local Refugee Group and just enough to make one last angel for Church tomorrow.

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It’s beginning to look like Christmas !

A great day today, a lovely start to Christmas. Firstly, our Church’s Christmas Fair in aid of two charities. I was helping with the Chocolate Tombola, great fun and we did well.
Then I won the Christmas Hamper, chock full of goodies which I’ll let our GD unpack when we have a family get together in the 8th. December.

Then I went to St Nicholas’s Church, one of our two Parish Churches for the Annual  Christmas Tree Show. Three categories: schools, children’s groups and adult groups.

Here’s my vote for the Adult Section, the Inner Wheel’s Save the Bee, a topical concern  in the UK. 

And the School’s one I voted for, the Infants school my children attended, I then taught at and then our GD attended.

Then I made our Christmas puddings using my Grandmother’s recipe which was HER grandmother’s!  My Nana was born in 1884 so it’s unique. Two washing up bowls of mixture.

Antidote to a dreary, wet and grey November day

We are having so many dark and dreary wet days which is not surprising as it’s November in the Northern Hemisphere. Some areas of the country have been flooded so I shouldn’t grumble.
Yesterday I boiled up the weekend’s chicken carcass for stock so this morning I turned it into red lentil and vegetable soup. The kitchen smelt wonderful, warm and inviting.

A large pan so we will get several servings of hearty soup.

Later on I did a little in my sewing room, pin basting the Chinese Coins quilt top that I recently finished. I think the colours are jewel like so perhaps Jewels will be its name.

Another Scrap quilt finish

I love making Crumb blocks, very often as a Leader and Ender type exercise, cutting them to 4” and 4.5” sizes. These are stashed and every now and then I use them to make a Baby Quilt.

Here’s my latest, definitely for a baby girl:
I alternated Crumb blocks with a variety of scraps.
Finished at 40” square, my favourite size for a baby quilt which can be used at first as a Playmat.

A close up of a few of my blocks, many of them include some favourite bits of fabric that have their own story.

The little girl is a scrap left from some old fabrics a Quilter friend in New Zealand was purging. Over the years it’s been used in several of my quilts.

I love the strawberry fabric I had for this backing. So pretty.

A host of little angels

Like last year my church is knitting little angels 👼🏻 to be dotted around the town just before Christmas with an attached label sending Christmas greetings from our church,

I knitted a lot last year and have knitted 35 this time. All looking very jolly.

What colour did I choose?

Yesterday I showed the 6 blue & green (with a bit of dusky pink) Coin columns I made inspired by some of the scraps I was gifted.
I asked if anyone could guess which colour I would use for the alternate columns.

Here they are:

All my own fabrics , quite a few from a jelly roll I have had for ages and ages which I knew I would never use for making a quilt.

I haven’t made a Coin Quilt for several years, the last one was a pretty pink baby quilt.
I was inspired to make another Coin Quilt by some fabulous ones I have seen on Fret not yourself blog.

This is the finished quilt top (flimsy):

Very bright and colourful!

Creating quilts from scraps

I was gifted a bag of scraps ( not huge) from a lovely quilting friend Sheila. My quilting group know I’m crazy about scraps - many of them probably think I’m weird as they wouldn’t get excited about such things!

Here’s the bag and contents:

I decided that I would make use of them straight away as I know that once scraps go into drawers and cupboards they stay there for years.

I sorted them into “like” groups and then contemplated them.    

                  

   

At the back are 8 blocks so I decided to use them in two sets of 4 as Medallion centres for two Improvised quilts. I sewed them side by side for a while and then decided to.   continue with the turquoise one and here it is as a flimsy:

     

 Medallion Improvisation  2 looks like this so far:

Then I turned my attention to the sets of blue and green (with a bit of deep pink) string sections. 

I think they were probably cut off sections but they suggested a Coin Quilt to me so I added lots of blue and green fabrics from my scraps and stash and made 6 Coin columns 

 

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I am going to add 5 columns in a different contrasting colour and alternate with these to create a Coin Quilt. This afternoon I sewed those 5 columns together. What colour do you think I have chosen?

Come back tomorrow to find out.