Slow and steady wins the race...

... or that's what I keep telling myself about my pathetically slow rate of completion on my projects!

I've been working on a number of little-ish projects recently.

First is a little basket for my Gran to cheer up her walker, which she also uses as a tea tray:

Nothing too difficult, but hopefully she'll like it! 

I've also made a little present for a colleague's little boy. I can't for the life of me remember what these things are called, I saw a tutorial for one a while ago and I thought "that's such an unusual name, I won't forget that." Well....... It all worked in the end, but there was a lot of headscratching required in order to get all the layers in the right order. And sewing circles is difficult!

As you can see, I've been playing with the filters on Flickr. After this post, Jenelle from Echinops and Aster very kindly helped me out. It's still not brilliant but at least I can use Flickr now!

The big project of the moment is H's quilt. A's reached her home yesterday, and I think it went down well, so time to crack on with her little cousin's.

I sent a very cheeky progress shot to his lovely Mummy, just showing a big pile of scraps which I'd trimmed off, but you guys can see what it really looks like at the minute:

This is 22 of the 40 blocks in this style, the other 18 are just missing one side strip of sashing as I ran out of solids, or so I thought. As it turns out, I had restocked but I forgot all about this until I bought more!! As soon as I've finished these, I need to start the 40 blocks with solid centres and white sashing.

But that's not going to happen tonight, I've got better plans!

/geek!

Anyone...

... want to buy me a ticket to the FQ Retreat whilst I'm at my brother in law's wedding?

(eeek, must finish their present!)

To embroider or not to embroider?

I've been doing lots of hand stitching recently, working on some EPP projects for a couple of friends. So far, they look like this:

 

 A Rose Star Block and

 

 a hexagon 'flower', both in random pinks and other girly colours.

These are going to be appliqued to some cream cotton to turn them into cushions for their respective little girls' Christmas presents.

I've also made a pair of cushions for my brother in law and future sister in law's wedding in a few weeks, using the Double Wedding Ring print from Quilt Blocks - appropriate I think!

 

The front

 

 

 Side view - one has a pink back, the other has a blue back - geeky coordination or what?!

Now, the dilemma is, should I add some hand quilting or embroidery to them? I'm tempted to add their names and the date, or maybe some quilting inside the rings? Or is that just too OTT? Hmmmmm...............

A win and a bookmark

I was so pleased last week to receive a lovely package of Catherine at Knotted Cotton

 It was so tempting to rip open the package, but I thought I should take a picture first

 Inside was the book that I won, and Catherine kindly included some floss too.

I decided to make a quick bookmark for one of my best friends, using one of the patterns in the book, and finally using some proper stitches instead of made up ones!

Please excuse the photo, I forgot my phone so had to borrow Dads :D

A Flickr Question

So, I was gutted to miss out on the sign ups for Mouthy Stitches 2, but I'm not sure that I would have been accepted as I don't tend to use Flickr very often.

Below is what I can usually see when I use Flickr.......

Lots of white boxes with no pictures!

I tend to get very frustrated waiting for images to load, to the point where I give up because I can't see anything! It's the same on my laptop and on my mobile.


Am I doing something wrong? Any advice would be appreciated!