Wednesday, 31 March 2010

Happy Easter?


Its the beginning of the Easter holidays but what is this to wake up to. A few days after British summer time began we have SNOW. no rolling eggs this year, no daffodils in bloom, no lambs, no bunnies, and definitely no sunshine. A cold Easter is not what i wanted, the garden is in desperate need of some TLC , the grass really needs cut and i am way behind in sowing seeds.
It is just too cold but the plus point is all the extra time indoors to craft.

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Hopscotch


Hi, today i made this excellent hopscotch for my kids. I used a basic tutorial which can be found at http://sewhappytocraft.blogspot.com/2010/03/hopscotch-tutorial.html
i had been looking for a pattern for a few weeks and came across many but this was this quickest and easiest way to do it. I don't know how i didn't think of it myself.
The kids love it.
The only thing i did differently from the tutorial was that i treated it like i was making a quilt and added wadding, backing and binding and just stitched in the stitched lines. I used the machine to quilt as it was narrow but i still found it hard to get everything under and rolled out the way for stitching. hand quilting may take longer but it is so much easier. if anyone has any tips on machine quilting i would love to know, i just don't know how to do it without getting in a mess.I have bought many a book and looked at a lot of web pages on quilting but there is not a lot of instructions on the actual process of doing the "quilting", no info on where to start or what patterns to use or how to do them. You always get lots of detail on piecing the patchwork top together but then all it says after that is layer batting and backing and then quilt.
is it so big a secret that you can only be born with the knowledge?