The Treehouse

One Flower Wednesday

I managed two flowers this week and have started to put the diamonds around another - I was impatient to see how the new purple fabric looked. I thought I would have had time to finish the diamonds last night but after a whole afternoon of cycling and boating we came home, had a lovely bbq and then I was just too worn out to sew - I needed my bed!

 

Photos are funny things - the new purple fabric doesn't look anything at like this in real life...it's a little bit brighter than the purple in the middle. I''m not having a good photographing day today at all!

Today is back to school day...I could quite happily have carried on with holidaying for a few weeks more! We did the usual photos before setting off in the car but the light was odd and the little camera not behaving very well at all in those conditions so I'll have to make them suffer pose again tomorrow morning!

 

This is Catherine's third year of high school now so she's well and truly got the hang of things but my little guy there - this is his first day of high school and he looks far too grown up in that shirt and tie in my opinion...where has my baby gone :o So exciting for him to be moving on though and he's ready for the challenge and all of the wonderful sporting opportunities of course, lol! Today is a short day (Wednesday is always a short day) and they finish at 2.30pm and will be home by bus for 3 o'clock. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it!

 

 

Frosty Flakes No. 4

I'm enjoying making these little snowflakes, they're so pretty and delicate.

 

I found the perfect purple fabric for the diamond path for my Flower Garden quilt yesterday - I've stitched 6 diamonds on this evening and 3 triangles so I'm 1/2 way round...it's quite a long way! I'm aiming to make a few more hexies this week to try and catch up a bit.

 

My Garden and Clamshells

Almost missed my posting, have been super busy running around trying to find extra players for tonight's cricket match today and then ferrying boys to the cricket match this evening. Now I'm back home and have managed to iron and photograph this week's creations. 2 flowers for my garden and sadly, in spite of my determination to put an outer ring on each week, the sporting schedule has been so full that I've just not managed it - perhaps I will aim for two next week.

 

On the clamshell front things turned a little peculiar - to say the least! I spent a good portion of time printing and cutting clamshells so I knew I wasn't going to get too many stitched together...and actually, I was a little worried about those curves. Part way through the cutting, I could stand it no longer and had to get started stitching and I was hooked straight away - these little shapes go together unbelievably easily. Unfortunately, I was stitching at not the best time one evening and got a little distracted and before I knew it - I'd stitched a clamshell in the wrong way round. Well, I sort of liked it so I thought I'd keep it like that and see what developed! So - instead of rows of different blue fabrics I ended up with this...

 

It looks a little odd for two reasons - the grass isn't flat and there is an unstitched between the bottom bright blue clamshell and the cream/blue flowers one. I'm not sure whether to right this off as a practice piece or continue as I'm wondering whether this sort of shape requires a little more planning in the placement of colours than rows. The jury is out on the matter now but I need to decide soon because I want to get some more stitching done (when the sporting has calmed down a little!)

Poor klosjes aren't making an appearance this week either - soon though, very soon!

 

 

One Flower Wednesday plus a few other bits

Last week I managed to complete my to-do list :D One item was to catch up on the My Little Heart SAL and I had done so by Friday.

 

April

May 

June

This week's to-do list included cutting out all of the fabric for Jenny's Christmas Story quilt - I was bursting to start making this quilt and then was hesitant because I wasn't sure about the fabrics that I'd chosen...I was determined to use only stash fabric and not buy anything new! On Monday I managed cut everything out and also I put together all of the stitchery blocks so that was an excellent start :D

 

Not a brilliant photo...the sun was a little too bright at the time but I'm not grumbling about bright sunshine at all, it's lovely.

I had a good hexagon week this week - I managed to make 3 and I like these ones a lot...I think I'll be combining more of the large patterns with the smaller patterned fabrics. I have 20 blooms in little glassine envelopes ready to stitch. Also this week, I wanted to make sure that my outer fabric choice worked so I decided to stitch the outer hexies onto one of this week's blooms - hadn't realised quite how long that was going to take! It was a good move though as now I'm certain that I like the fabric and I also know that it won't be a good idea to leave this part of the project until all of the flowers are stitched or they may be doomed to UFO-dom :o

 

This week's blooms resting in my lovely peony - it's a massive plant now but only started off as one stalk with one leaf! Poor blooms are so heavy that some of them bend right over to the floor. This is the first year that the rain hasn't destroyed them as soon as they opened so I may get John to give them a little photo shoot :)

I have quite a lot of sheets of clamshells printed out now and am ready to cut and stitch. I've also been washing the fabric that I bought for a Dresden plate quilt and for the Life is Beautiful quilt. Trying to prepare lots of things before the school holidays begin so that I've got plenty of hand stitching to take along when the weather is fine enough to go to the park and on picnics.

 

  

 

Busy Bees

I was going to start out with a photo of all the busy little bees currently working very hard in our garden however - they're so quick that everytime I took a photo they'd zoomed off by the time the camera had done it's thing! I'll have to kidnap John's camera in order to capture them I think, they're far too speedy for my little point and shoot!

I have a list this week of things to accomplish. It's quite long. I don't know that I'll get it all done as once again it's a very busy sporty week - and a very successful sporty week too. So far we've had a fabulous netball win (28-5) and a fabulous cricket win (317-250ish) and Catherine came fourth in javelin at an athletics meeting yesterday. Tonight we shall be sporting in a far more sedate manner - it's crown green bowling night. I've declared myself fit to bowl again following the nasty back incident after Easter which left me unable to walk at all for 2 1/2 weeks so I'm hoping I'll get to play tonight...if not, at least I'm off the injured bench and onto the reserve bench, that's progress!

One of my aims this week was to catch up with the My Little Heart SAL cross stitch and I've made some progress - the Easter bunny is stitched and I finished off all of the brown boxes, only May and June to stitch and I am all up to date with that. Here's the bunny with this week's flower for my garden...another green one, I like the green fabric! My blue arrived for the outer circle so next week I may print up some blue hexagons to see what these flowers look like with their blue petals on.

 

Another thing on my 'list' this week was to sew some more of the blocks for Catherine's quilt. I made 4 or 5 on Monday. They're rather large...16" and I'm thinking that I need a little sashing around the outside edge of them otherwise the pinwheels might disappear. I'm thinking of using white for the sashing.

 

(that bit of blur at the bottom...that's the camera strap! didn't see it until I had the picture open in Photoshop!)

 

Left to do on the list are...

Print, cut and sew some clamshells (I washed the blue fabric for these the other day...goodness me, the amount of die that came out it's a wonder there's any colour left in the fabric at all!)

Sew another section of Mary Wigham's wardrobe.

Sew a little more of my Blackbird SAL.

Looks like I'm going to be busy!

 

A Finish!

I enjoyed every little stitch of this...

 

Needle and Thread by Little House Needleworks

stitched with recommended threads on 32 count natural raw linen

and this week's solitary bloom...

 

I wanted to make more but just got carried away with the cross stitch this week!

Off to buy a new vacuum cleaner today, mine has decided to retire!

 

 

Today's Blooms

I made 3 this week! No klosjes at the weekend but I did do a huge amount of cutting out so there is hope for a good quantity this coming weekend :) I've been having a lovely cross stitch the last few days - I got really behind with my various projects recently when I had a trapped nerve in my back - the pain was just too furious and nauseating for me to concentrate on a chart and count and my first priority as soon as thought was restored to my brain was to get Karen's birthday present made. I made good progress on Mary Wigham's wardrobe, started an Anniversaries of the Heart and now I'm enjoying a lovely treat by stitching up the LHN Needle and Thread pincusion bed and scissor keep...so cute, I love it!

Beautiful sunshine here today so hopefully we won't freeze tonight at bowling. If we're blessed again tomorrow we're going to head off for a day out somewhere :)

 

 

I bought a new Inklingo this morning - Clamshells. I was rather smitten when I saw the design done in shades of one colour, looks fabulous!

Crazy iPad Day!

We got a bit over excited about the iPad and were eagerly awaiting its release here in the UK. Now, ordinarily we don't rush out and buy something as soon as its available, we're more the 'wait a while and see if there are any problems' and 'let's think about it some more' type of people. Ever since we started buying Apple products though we seem to have gone a bit crazy - we just can't seem to get enough Apple in this house! We seem to have been awaiting the arrival of the iPad for a long time so...we decided that one of us would go to the Apple store today and try to get one. Our nearest Apple store is at the Trafford Centre and early in the morning there is a LOT of traffic in between us and the Trafford Centre! John set off very bright and early this morning to join the queue - the Apple store was opening at 8am. When he got there he found that quite a lot of folks had slept over night outside the shop :o There were about 150 people in front of him in the queue and happily he was home before 10.30am with our very own little iPad - we love it!

 

I'm not confident that the sharing thing is going to work in the long term though, lol!

While I was waiting for our new gadget to arrive home, I set too with my scissors and cut out many hexagons from the fabric that I printed onto yesterday and when my hands were tired of that I printed out more shapes for klosjes so I have plenty of spools and flowers to stitch now.

 

I've more still to cut out but I'm going to start dividing the hexagons into flowers next, I've already sorted some of the klosje pieces and pinned them together. I bought some of the green fabrics for the klosjes from the Garden Song range yesterday and I feel that they may have a future as a bag of some sort as well...they're really rather lovely.

The boys have gone off to a cricket match this evening, so while Catherine is catching is catching up with Sue Thomas FBI I've been having a play at making a crazy patchwork block - I'm joining in with Crazy Patchwork Friday I bought a book some time ago by Judith Baker Montano and had this on my list of things to play with. I wasn't paying too much attention to the instructions really so things didn't quite go according to plan.

 

I quite like the way it had turned out so far - it's needing some embellishments yet. The stitching around the outside edge is just a tacking stitch to stop everything flapping around when I come to do the embroidery and embellishing.

I'm going to be spending some quality time with Mary Wigham's wardrobe this weekend...that's the plan anyway!

 

 

 

Klosjes and Grandmother's Garden

We had a super sunny weekend here with plenty of outdoor activities. I did manage to get quite a bit of work done on the Bluebird block and am now on the stitchery part. Also managed to complete 5 more klosjes bringing my total to 7 now. 

 

This morning I spent a lovely morning chatting with Jen while listening to Tim Rice on the radio - we had stitching at the ready but there was no needle action at all :o After a spot of lunch, I've put together this week's flower for my garden :) I like them more with the smaller prints but as I'm using a jellyroll I'm committed to making use of the large prints as well. I have bought some large print with the bird on for a border...I think it will be quite some time before I'm cutting into that though!!!

 

 

  Scans today - it's pouring down outside!

One Flower Wednesday with Harvest Home

I've cut into the jellyroll :o This jellyroll made a very lovely ornament on my shelf however, after some 2 years of sitting there I thought it was finally time for it to look pretty somewhere else...i.e. on our bed! I ran up my Inklingo 1" hexagon pdf yesterday and got some printing done. This morning I've sat and worked out what other fabric I need to get in addition to the jellyroll. I've settled on the blue shade after a lot fiddling about and am just now waiting to hear if there is sufficient available - I hope so because I'm not big on decision making, particularly where fabric buying is concerned and it takes me a very long time to make a final choice! 

Here is today's flower - I actually made it last night. I took my printed hexagons along to Matthew's cricket match with the intention of sitting and cutting them out. Well, I not only cut them out, I sewed together my flower. Hoping to get more printing done today and make a start on the next flower tonight - I'm looking forward to some relaxing stitching after the stress of having to plan and decision make this morning! :grin: