Trip to Felbrigg

The grandchildren came to stay for a few days and we went to visit Felbrigg, a National Trust property nearby. It's a Jacobean house with a Georgian interior and a beautiful walled garden with chickens running free.
The outside:

 And two pictures of the hand painted birds on the wallpaper in the Chinese bedroom.
I also like the library, and the kitchen with the wonderful array of polished copper saucepans.

The children went for a romp in the woods, there are lots of walks to choose from, and I sat by the pool in the walled garden and watched a female blackbird bathe and goldfinches come down to drink. The borders were a riot of colour, and parts of the garden are let to local people for allottments. the smell of ripe blackcurrants was heavenly!

 I managed to finish stitching down the binding on my fourth Journal quilt so the next four are now ready to load up onto the Yahoo site at the beginning of August.

Purses

I've been entertaining myself between tasks by making small purses for my Sales Tableat the exhibition in my church at the end of August.

Scraps of linen and zippers I've been given.. with bits of lace and some tiny Hexagons.

And a little Liberty purse begun by my friend Daphne and finished by me.

I had forgotten how lovely these are, and how easy to make so  expect there will be more.

Quilt finished!

My Yellow Great Granny squares is finished, complete with Label, hanging sleeve and with the binding completed. When I tried to finish it last week the binding fabric was two inches too short and I'd left the rest of the fabric at home. Frustrating, but it's done now.

Beautifully quilted by Mandy Parks with a modern version of Baptists' Fan. Clever to put a curvy design on top of straight-line piecing.

Teaching Day at Oak Leaf Quilters

I had a good time teaching at Oak Leaf Quilters in Reepham today.
They seemed to enjoy themselves too and there was good food and copious amounts of tea and cake.
We spent the morning looking at modern versions of Log Cabin:

Barbara's little log cabin crosses

Christine's version

and in the afternoon we played with sixty-degree triangles which could be
hexagons-by-machine ... or not! Have a look at these new versions:

Barbara's

Elizabeth's

Maggie's

Sue's

Interesting aren't they!

New Work

I've been remiss about posting for a bit but I have been getting on with stitching, and also have spent a lot of time in the garden!

Here, finished at last is my green and grey "Chartreuse Wonder".
Mandy Parks has as usual done a fantastic job on the quilting, the curvy pattern is called Helm and suits the straight line piecing very well.

 I've made this design three times now, although I've managed to loose the pink and turquoise top... it must be somewhere at the bottom of a box or bag!

I've even made a bag with the same patchwork pattern.

This is the Applecore quilt that Mandy has quilted with a straight-line pattern called Knitterly, again very suitable on top of all those curves. This is rotary cut with a Marti Michell template and machine pieced, but it isn't very big as I got bored and had something else that I was working on that also needed finishing. I bound the edge with bias binding cut from the yellow that is in the quilt and I really like it against the pinks and blues.

I decided when I came to do the sleeve that actually it looked better this way up.
these two are heading for the Modern Quilt specialist group stand at Festival Of Quilts in Birmingham in August, and then to my exhibition in the Church at Catfield at the end of that month.

Rattlesnake Class

Yesterday I taught Rattlesnake at Winterton Quilters. They were a great class, very quiet as there was a lot of concentration!

As ever there were students, starting with Ann, who had an innovative approach to the design and I learnt something new!

Here are Vicky's stunning black and green blocks auditioning a split background colour - something I hadn't thought of!!

and here are some more from the class:

Ann's is centre top. so effective when the "teeth" blend into the background, and there were lots more that I didn't get to photograph.

This is Nina's, a stunning colour combination, but lousy photo as it was certainly not distorted like that!


And below, the class star, Lynne, who completed all her blocks and took out all the paper, and stitched them together well before the end of the class!


Isn't that fabulous!

New Great Granny

My four-and-a-half inch square great granny top is now done.
It was languishinging on my wall while I got on with smaller stuff, but had to be finished so I can have my design wall back!
I like it better now it is done. I had to make it larger and decided to do so by expanding the centre line in both directions then when I came back to it I had run out of fabric, but fortunately the shop still had a little left and I got enough to make binding too.

I still think maybe I could have done more with the middle..

And here are the 2 1/2" square blocks that I made first. This top is also done with white sashing and low volume cornerstones.