The New Decade has begun...

with very little being done by me.  Oh dear, I shall be hoping to get a lot better so there can be some progress made soon.
Had a  most fabulous visit to Wellington for the 5th birthday of Marceline Moore.  A schoolgirl now, oh my!  Where has this last five years gone I wonder, with so many major changes.  We managed to navigate the 29 steps up to Richard & Kea's house, twice I might add, lol, but it was maybe a bit much.  Should have used the brain and had a bigger rest gap between trips, but I was too keen to be out and about with the birthday girl.  All is good and on the way back now just a bit more slowly than thought,  and so no stitching is going on.  Darn.! Am working on a solution with a friend who is going to give me a bit of a hand with the bigger, heavier stuff.  Yay.
Not much in the way of photos either folks, sorry about that, but haven't actually been anywhere to take them.  I have done a little bit of cross stitch on a wee sampler I'm doing and enjoying too.  Haven't cross stitched for years.

Thought I would join in the RSC at so scrappy with the first colour being my favourite - green. Now there are only five days of the month to go... not a good start at all, but really keen to move out some of these scrap fabrics.

This is from springtime and now it's all dried up and looking a little sad for itself in the heat.  We have a week of temperatures of around 32 C at the moment.  Too hot for me and my garden, so on goes the air conditioning.









Hoping to make a start with my friend helping on getting the sashing triangles stitched onto the mystery hexagon quilt that I did last year.  Then I will put a small frame and final border onto it.  Looking forward to it getting finished at last as was hoping it would have happened last year, but sometimes things don't work out to plan do they?

The colours are certainly quite beautiful and very different for me to work with.  I have the recipient of this quilt all worked out and it is going to be a surprise.  Love that.


Well, I don't have a lot more to add today, but wanted to let you know what was happening in my world.  I may even get a beanie started this week as the urge is beginning to grow - a lovely friend gave me some gorgeous autumnal coloured wool, so that made the fingers itch a little bit.




Thanks for popping in and I shall try to have some more exciting news for you next time,.  Take care and keep on stitching,
God bless and big hugs,

Clare

I'm linking with Cynthia of Oh! Scrap here lots of lovely eye candy

Next quilt on the list please....

I'm trying to keep this roll going after the Sunflower quilt.  I managed to put two baby quilts together for Shala's newest grandchildren and enjoyed making something that was small and simple. The little pink quilt has an embroidered centre that I did while re-familiarising myself with the Janome MC500e Embroidery machine.  It was totally from my stash.  The boy's quilt is a little range of fabric I fell in love with in a quilt shop after Lucas was born.  Couldn't resist of course.

Now I have Kea's Star Wars quilt up on my design wall.  I'm using an incredibly simple pattern that was loaned to me called Bricks & Mortar by Red Mumma.  Its perfect for this collection of fabrics that I bought a few years ago.  Kea loves Star Wars if you haven't already guessed LOL.

Then I have a few photos of our spring garden.  Loving seeing all the bearded Irises and Granny Bonnets coming out.  Cant believe how tall my Granny Bonnets are - I'm assuming that's what everyone calls them - real name Aquilegia ?  I see from a quick peek on Mr Google that they are also known as Columbines.  Whatever you call them, I love them and some of mine are almost a metre (39 inches) tall this year.

That's all the talk this time and thanks for visiting me.

So there you have it.  A reasonably short blog for me I have to say.  I hope you manage to get in a lot more sewing in the weeks ahead with the Christmas rush already gaining steam.  It's the one thing I intensely dislike about Christmas - Jesus is the reason as they say.  But the commercialism of this season has become almost deafening (excuse my oxymoron).  The pressure that is put on families that are already struggling is huge when the main message is one of love.  I hope you manage to have a stress-free up to this celebration of all that is good and loving.

Well I did manage to chat on a bit more - it's a bit of a habit of mine lol.  I think I find it difficult to get off my soapbox which seems to be permanently fixed to my feet!!!  I wonder if it's because I'm so short, hehehe.


Oh dear, this time lovely people, I'm definitely signing off.
May you all be greatly blessed and hugged lots.

Clare
I'm linking to Oh!Scrap here  lovely eye candy and scrap busting quilts.

It's officially finished!! lots of photos

I said to myself - I'm not posting again until Danielle's quilt is finished because you would all be sick of getting updates showing so little progress.  Well, it is done and dusted and as I type it is winging its way up to Danielle in Te Awamutu.  Our youngest son and his family are going up to visit his siblings up that way, so he is loaded down with the quilt and five beanies for delivery!!!

I'm sure most of you think I have fallen off the planet as I didn't realise it had been quite so long since I last posted.  Hmmm, been busy stitching and hanging on to my health.  But enough of that, I have a few photos to share and I hope you enjoy them.

The Beanie production line, lol.
I did have five of them, but the yellow one ended up being given to a dear friend and I am knitting another one for that dear DIL.

Love that my family like to wear them and that it is something else I can make when I'm not up to quilting.

The finished quilt for Danielle.  I am so very pleased with how it has come out.  My dear friend Catherine made a fantastic job of quilting it for me with an edge to edge pattern that let the colours speak for themselves.
It is sideways in the photos as it was too long to hold up length-ways and the grounds was still wet from the big frost we had this morning.

 I found this fantastic extra wide backing fabric at Counting Stitches in Hastings.,  It was the absolute perfect match for this quilt.

This shows a little more of the dark and light in the quilt and the flowers in my late winter garden.  The bees have been making the most of the wall flowers that seem to flower for ever and smell beautiful.

This is my incredible UFO finish.  I started this embroidery cloth when my eldest daughter was 10.  She received it at the beginning of June and Janeen is now 47 years old!!!!  only too 37 years to complete.  The  most embarrassing thing is it only needed a few inches of the crochet edging to be finished for most of the last 10 years or so.  Hehehe

Oh well, a finish is a finish and that is one less thing in the UFO cupboard.  Yay

 My mystery blocks up until May.  Had been enjoying them but had some troubles with June/July blocks and not sure what is causing it.  These blocks come pre-cut and I think there may be some small discrepancies in cutting.  Not ruling out operator error though. Lol

A small baby quilt to be sent to the preemie babies unit.  I used some left over strips from another quilt I had made and added a top and bottom border to make it to size.  Totally from my stash - yippee.  Halfway through the quilting of it and hope to finish off over the weekend,

Finally, a parade of elephants from the Tuesday Girls.  These animals are so beautiful I am almost tempted to start one,  But  I have not finished enough UFO's yet and need a project like this like I need another whole in my head.  Hehehe.


One day, as most of us quilters say about those projects on our wish lists.




I hope you have enjoyed your catch up.  I am currently working mostly on a sunflower quilt for our eldest daughter.  Not sure how long that's going to take but here's hoping not as long as Danielle's seemed to take.



Our weather is supposed to be quite horrible over the weekend and it has already become quite cold.  Big snow falls down in the South Island and we do have snow up on our ranges.  This is why we have had two boomer frosts.  Rain however is forecast and we actually have not had very much rain at all and it would be most welcome.  It is also an excellent reason for being in your quilting room!!

Bye for now and take care.  May you feel blessed in you have and do.

Clare
I'm linking to Cynthia at Oh! Scrap
and Sarah at Confessions of a Scrap Addict.  Click here to visit Sarah.  It's worth the visit.

Progress for 6and6in2018 and all that...

has happened in the last six weeks has halted some progress, but I'm quite pleased at what I did manage to achieve.  After the medical hassles mentioned last I managed to get a bladder infection and then react afterwards to the antibiotics.  Ho hum, it goes like that sometimes.  Now it's onward and upwards I reckon.

So I have managed to make some progress on Danielle's quilt which only needs the 5.5 inch and 3.5 inch HST's made.  Unfortunately, because I have changed the initial direction for the fabrics in this quilt I felt there was not enough variety to cut the last of these out.  It meant a trip to the LQS (sad), but it also meant I needed to go to the furthermost away one to get a good selection of batiks.  Oh well, my sister was here to stay for the week, so we had a wonderful day out.

There are lots of photos in this post to make up for lost time.  I hope you enjoy them.

 It hasn't grown much, but I did put the pale blue border on, and now have some idea of what I am going to do next in regards to colour.

This one is not long back from my friend Lorraine who is learning to do custom quilting, and doing a fabulous job.  I shall show you a better photo once it is all bound.  Very happy with how this quilt has come out and it all started with some tiny ends from some WOF's left over from my shop.  LOL.

A sneak peek also at the mystery quilt I did through My Carolina Home's quilt along and it was called Square Dance.  I will have two finished quilts to show you in the next blog.  Wow.

Aren't they beautiful. it was so hard to choose.  Hopefully I will get back to cutting these out next week.

This is the reason I haven't finished my HST's.  Been working on these three little quilts for a few weeks now.  A friend of my DIL gave us a lovely electric lazy boy chair that was almost new.  As she was expecting twin boys, I decided to make baby quilts plus one for the older sibling Noah who is 3 years old.
This one is all finished.

 This one has the binding sewn down on the front and tomorrow I will get it stitched down to the back.  I got these two quilts out of a 5 inch wide roll up plus some extras from stash.  Managed to make two different looking quilts even though the style and colours are very much the same.

This is Noah's one and it is slightly bigger, as it should be for the twins big brother.  This was a little collection that I had in my stash for some time and I added a few strips from another roll up.  Had to do some interesting piecing to get enough picture blocks...lol.

And to finish off these are the beautiful flowers my daughter and her family in Perth, Australia sent me for my birthday last week.  They have lasted extremely well and were certainly very beautiful.





As per usual, I shall try not to be so long in coming back, but for a few weeks there, I had nothing to report to you.

I hope your weather is good wherever you are.  We have had heaps of rain these past few days, which is most unusual for us and quite welcome really.  It will give our farmers a good start to spring and summer.
The garden is just starting to burst into life with my beautiful deep yellow freesias almost outdoing themselves in the gloomy weather.  I shall have some pictures for the next post.  Take care of yourselves and have a fabulous day.

Hugs and blessings
Clare

p.s.  I'm linking to Oh Scrap here  and 18 in 2018 at What A Hoot here You will enjoy a visit to both these blogs,

Report for 6 and 6 in 2018 and 18 in 2018

So how has your month been?  I'm reasonable pleased with mine as I did achieve a few things.  We're also allowed to not perform quite as well in February because it's a bit sneaky in only having 28 days.  THREE whole days of stitching lost. Hmmm...
So here we go:

Happy, happy.  I have finished the second to last applique block of my quilt.  Already started on the LAST block.  Happy, happy, can you tell?

 The pies and tarts have doubled themselves, which is not great progress, but I have been concentrating on the applique.  This one is definitely going to be a slow project as it's very hard on my hands.  Still love it though, so although I had decided to abandon it, the girls have encouraged me to keep on going.  Glad they did.

The pile of nine patches has grown for my Mystery Quilt.  Such happy blocks to make and not too much brain work involved.  It's quite incredible that a simple bunch of squares like this can make so many wonderful patterns.

 I have finally made a block for Danielle's quilt.  Got a bit fed up with all the cutting and sorting, so decided to make a block.  I am pleased with how it looks, but it is a tricky wee block to make with all those triangles.  So important to get the size right too, so wondering whether to abandon the pattern and make something else up with the units I have. More pondering and  maybe I'll make a couple more blocks before I decide.

 My sister came up for the weekend and we had an awesome time stitching.  We have become very close since I got sick, and I love our time together.  We went out for coffee before Joy headed home.  The other good looking bloke is my dearly beloved Kerry.  Definitely a keeper as he has trained up quite well and looks after me extremely well in my illness.  I praise God daily for him.

All the kidlets and their tribes are doing well.  This year we have two grandies achieving their 5 years old milestones and will be gorgeous little school kids.


In between all this I managed to sew a swimming and book bag for my great granddaughter Tiana in Perth, Australia.  I did make it much harder than it should have been and you would laugh at the stupid things I did.  Was going to be simple - yeah right!



And to finished on a smiley note - don't you just love the way sunflowers make you smile.  These are growing out the back of our home and way above the fence (1.2 m) and much taller than yours truly with the camera.




I hope you have enjoyed my wee summary of February and hope yours has been good too.  Let's hope we get lots more sewn in March cause we have three more days in it, and Easter means no work and we get a very laid back start to April!  Oh dear it's going fast again isn't it.

I'm going to link to - Oh Scrap and this will take you there - here
To Pomegranate and Chintz'   6in2018-february
and Lynette at What a Hoot for 18 in 2018 here

Hugs and blessings and thank you so much for popping in.

Clare

A Lovely Rain and other oddities...

We have been blessed to have had three good doses of rain this month, which is quite unusual for Hawkes Bay.  We spend most of our spring/summer/autumn praying for rain, as we are traditionally a very dry area with hot summers - well, our definition of hot anyway!  At the moment our lawns are green and still need mowing, much to DH's disgust.  However, the garden does look so fresh after good rains, and we don' t have to stand out there and water.

This day lily is so gorgeous.  It is actually a more rusty red than this shows, and has given us a magnificent display for many days now.  The one my friend gave me flowered for the first time this year and I forgot to take a photo.  It is a lovely clear orange.

This lovely little chocolate coloured Cosmos is making a lovely wee splash of colour in amongst lots of purples and pinks.  Have had to do lots of deadheading this week to encourage more flowers,

 Our snapdragons were all from very small self seeded plants from DH's sister,  They have done very well, much to our surprise.  This one is a new seedling from ours and the originals all flowered again in their second year and have now been discarded.  I love the way they are biannual, so you get great value from them.

Our Swan plants have self seeded everywhere, so this year we have an excellent supply for the Monarch butterflies.  At the moment we are trying to fight off the wasps that eat the eggs and small caterpillars.  It's quite a war to keep the beautiful creatures at viable numbers.  Next thing we will be desperate for food.!

At the end of last year our Tuesday Chat girls decided we would make Pies and Tarts something we could all join in and do.  This is the beginning of my efforts - half a pie is stitched together, one tart is ready for stitching.  This will be a bit of a long term project I feel already, but it is nice to have one or two hand work things on hand to do.  It's supposed to help use up some of my scraps, but I only totally used up one small piece of fabric when I cut some more on Thursday!!  Drats

My good friend Lorraine has taken the plunge and bought herself an Innova long arm machine.  Lucky girl.  I have been to have a play and it's beautiful.  As she is in dire need of some practice pieces, I am making the most of this opportunity to move out some of those tops on my " Waiting for Quilting"  list I made two years ago and has been reduced by very few. This top goes back to early shop days.  Naturally, no fabric was kept for the border.  I was able to find this rather nice tile fabric that has all the colours in it at the LQS, and a small piece of dark teal that I will use as a frame in my stash.  Awesome, 5 tops will get finished.  Can you see me doing my happy dance?












So there you have it.  Some progress is being made - I think!! Talk to you again soon, and thanks for dropping in for a visit.  How is your quilting going?

Forgot to sign off - goodness me and say that I'm linking up with Cynthia  of Oh Scrap , her link is also on my side bar. Also with Lynette at  Confessions of a Fabric Addict .  Do go visit them, you will enjoy it. 
Bye for now,
Hugs and blessings
Clare

Scrap sorting...

Got a bee in my bonnet about sorting out the two baskets of scraps that were hiding under the tea trolley in the classroom.  Spent about 4 days using my Accu Quilt to cut them up into various squares.  Love this tool.  Makes life so easy for me.

I did start to balk at the 1.5 inch squares as I dont have a die for them.  Might be a Mothers Day request.  Think I'll sew them into strips and then cut a block out.  Sounds so much easier.

Made this beanie for son Richard, who has put in an order for at least a buffer of 10 before I decide to leave this world!!  Nice I thought, to be appreciated.

Love, love love the sunflowers in our back garden.  Seeds came from our daughter Shala.

Made this wee quilt as a donation quilt from a couple of charm packs I had collected.  Managed to find a gorgeous orange FQ in my stash for the border.  Nice blue to bind with.

Off on holiday on Wednesday and staying in Wellington with Richard, Kea and Marcy.  Made this wee zippered bag for Miss Marcy to carry some of her treasures around in.

And to finish, once again we are playing host parents to a zillion caterpillars and subsequent chrysalii and butterflies.  It is so exciting to get them right through.  The population is in decline and not sure why.
Will catch up again when back from our first holiday since 2012.  Wow it's going to be so interesting.

Hugs and thanks for reading.
Clare

I'm linking to Oh Scraps and the link is on  my sidebar.  Do check out what other wonderful scrap quilts are being made.

Almost there...

I have been making a huge effort to get all the blocks finished with Bradley's string quilt...there are only 4 more to go. Just as well as my bin is getting very empty, especially with the longer strips for the middle.
It is just too hot to be outside at the moment, so apart from watering (every 2nd day, hand held hose only) I stay inside.  Means I can stitch for more hours than usual. Tomorrow I have to quilt a small top for my friend, so wont get them finished until Thursday.

Tyson was checking things out though.  You can see how dry our grass is.  No need to mow, except for the edges of the garden where we water.
The snapdragons (antirrhinums ) have really come on and are flowering beautifully.  They were tiny little self-seeded plants from my sister in laws.  All different colours too.






Thanks for popping in again.  See you again soon.

Hugs and blessings
Clare

Linking to Cynthia Brunz @  Oh Scrap   Take a look, you will love her quilts.