Christmas in July!

It didn't matter that the sun was shining, we were celebrating all things festive and making Christmas Tree Skirts.  (Which, you know, are skirts for your Christmas tree rather than skirts for you with Christmas trees on them.  You'd be surprised how many people don't know that...)

We had the Christmas CDs playing, until the afternoon when it was time to listen to the Wimbledon Ladies' final on Radio 5 live.

 We had our lunch in the garden, using the Christmas china and pretending we were Australian...

 ...we concentrated really hard despite the heat and the Christmas music, so we got all our pieces in the right places!

In the bat of an eyelid, there were three completed circular quilt tops.  Gill sped away and finished first,

 all Bev's deer ended up facing the right way,

and Barbara's awkward fabric (why did I say I'd cut all the pieces for everyone?) ended up looking just lovely.

You might have noticed that every tree skirt has a pale, plain-ish fabric as one of the three: this is so that an embroidery design can be added at the end of every third blade.  Here's the gift on mine, which I'd done ahead of time.  Gill, Bev and Barbara all went home with their embroideries marked out ready to stitch - that's why you start your tree skirt in July - you need lots of time to have it finished by Christmas!

Summer sewing

I always need a summer sewing project - something to take out and about on day trips for that half hour after lunch where you just want to sit in the shade while hubby snoozes...

This year I've decided on English paper piecing.  I've chosen my design, selected my fabric and threads and found a cute little box to keep everything together.

 

I've cut out all my paper shapes, using a fantastic free graph paper programme.

I've even made a sneaky start on the real thing, after my test block turned out ok.  I'm a tacker - lots of tacking is good I think, you end up with much shaper creases on the edges of your shapes.

I've picked bright sunny fabrics to match the season - can't wait to start properly!

Wendy's Sampler Quilt

I've recently quilted this bed size sampler quilt for Wendy.  It's all in lovely calm shades and is a very restful sort of quilt to look at.  While her husband had a cup of coffee and read his book, Wendy and I spent a long time deciding properly what to quilt everywhere and ultimately plumped for feathers in the two outer borders, a feather-swirl in the sashing and a variety of feather patterns in the blocks.

Lots of block photos coming up!

 

I was really pleased with how it turned out.  I still love the moment when the quilting's all finished, the ends of all the (hundreds in this quilt!) of thread ends are knotted and sewn in, the edges are neatly trimmed and I can spread the quilt out and have a proper look at it.  Wendy's quilt certainly deserved a second look!