Quilt progress

I have been working on this quilt for a while...... alright ages really.... I had some machine quilting issues with it and gave up in disgust. Yesterday with rain outside and feeling the need to finish some projects I rummaged around on my sewing table and thought that I should try and move this on to the next stage before my daughter grows up and moves out of home. Funnily enough I didn't realise quite how crazy busy the top looked before I took this photo, my daughter loves bright colours and lots of pattern, and I wanted to create a flower garden with lots of butterflies and faries for her.

The back is a LOT quieter with just a simple stripe down the middle (more to do with making the material wide enough without lots of mucking about than for any other reason). I've quilted down the centre of each strip, and got the idea for this style of quilt from the blog Wise Craft mid last year, although I looked at her finished single wedding ring quilt earlier today while blog surfing and I think that I will have to put it on my list of 'things to make and do'. Maybe I should finish some projects first.



I have also done a top and back for my son's quilt, but have not yet sandwiched and quilted. I still need to rummage through the fabric stash to sort out bindings for edges, although I think that I will wait till the two quilts are at the same stage because goodness knows there will be complaints if one is ready before the other!

My son's quilt top is nowhere near as bright, with lots of blues and greens in it (his favourites), but I have done the back with a similar blue (material hanging around from a project that I changed my mind about), and a dolphin print stripe.

(I just realised how dark the photos look..... another wet and dreary day today..... not happy! my tomatoes are not ripe yet.... I need summer to be about a month longer.... I don't know what I am going to do with green tomatoes :( )

Family holiday

I know I'm not the most prolific and reliable of blog-posters, but at least I have an excuse for the last gaping hole between posts.

The four of us went away for the week for a family holiday, a bit of an escape from the everyday grind (me), and work stress (hubby).

We spent lots of time at the hotel pool, making sure that the children got lots of use out of their floaties, and went on a drive to look at Marakoopa Cave at Mole Creek. There was lots of torch use by the littlies, and some mad counting of glow worms on the ceiling by my daughter...... her new favourite number is 57..... the number of glow worms counted while the guide had the lights turned off.

A quick visit with the inlaws over the weekend and then a long car trip with two small children home.... and then lots of unpacking, piles of dirty washing and settling back into home last night and I am feeling a bit unsettled at the moment. It's been a busy morning, and after a week of sleeping late returning to routine is a bit odd.

Unfortunately we had a bit of an accident with a broken olive oil bottle and some library books.... Luckily the rubber floor mat protected the car, but two cloth bags and a whole pile of other stuff was not so lucky..... so this morning I had to return the damaged books to the library and apologise profusely...... and to add insult to injury, the ones that were spoilt were the ones I hadn't read yet. So I am now waiting for a phone call to tell me how much in fines/replacement costs I'm going to have to pay.

The first thing we did last night after unpacking the car and saying 'isn't it nice to be home?' was to check out the garden and to see whether my tomatoes had ripened..... there has been a quite a bit of rain in the last few days, so some of them had gone a bit too far and disintegrated on the bushes (all the nice big fat ones that I had been eyeing off to make sauce with). So after some heavy culling we were left with a large bowlful of various types of tomatoes - beefsteak to cherry and pea, and a huge handful of large purple podded beans, luckily our neighbour had some broccoli going wild so we did a bit of a swap. I see roast chicken and lots of homegrown veggies in my future.

I keep hoping that my pumpkins will fatten up and ripen soon, and that the corn fills out nicely in the next week or two.... I can just see my children eating a large cob apiece (they LOVE corn) as often as I can find some that is ready.