I have been completely buried working on, what I hope will be, my first pattern designs and I hope to be able to show them to you soon. But in the meantime, I am taking a tea break to catch up on the blog and I thought it might be appropriate to tell you how I actually came to be doing any of this. It has been a long and accidental apprenticeship of sorts.
Read MoreHope your summer is full of balmy days and a chance to relax. I have to confess, not alot of sewing going on around here really these last few weeks, but perhaps a chance to catch up with my travel journal on the blog. I know that last post was a bit epic, so a little light sight seeing scrapbooking from the rest of our travels in the US coming up today.
Read MoreWe are back from the US and our trip to Massachusetts and after gathering my thoughts, I am finally ready to tell you quite a story..... all about Abigail's House and the quilt which preceded the visit.
Read MoreJust about got over the jet lag and so much to tell you about our travels in the Massachusetts & Rhode Island. But I need a 'mo' to sort through my photos and my memories of all that we saw and did, so in the meantime, I wanted to show you something that I actually took with me and worked on while we were in the US. You may remember that I was somewhat enamoured with Venice, when we visited in May and came home inspired to make a quilt to encompass all the elements that make up this amazing city - the wonderful colours, the architecture, the water, the history and the whole aroma of this romantic place. I raided my stash for fabrics that I thought met this brief and then set about thinking what exactly might such a quilt even look like.
Read MoreI feel like I have no words to describe how utterly bewitching Venice is and how it's beauty completely caught me off guard. I simply had no idea. I mean I did... but no....I didn't really. You see pictures of it and you see it in films, but nothing can prepare you for the breath taking panoramas that greet with every turn in every canal. It is a sparkling city - a place for dreaming and letting your mind melt into the scene you behold. I think Jan Morris' description says it all "It is very old, and very grand, and bent-backed. Its towers survey the lagoon in crotchety splendour, some leaning one, some another. Its skyline is elaborate with campaniles, domes, pinnacles and a big red grain elevator. There are glimpses of flags and fretted rooftops, marble pillars, cavernous canals. An incessant bustle of boats passes before the quays of the place; a great white liner slips towards its port; a multitude of tottering palaces, brooding and monstrous, presses towards its water front like so many invalid aristocrats jostling for fresh air. It is a gnarled but gorgeous city: and as the boat approaches through the last church-crowned islands......so the whole scene seems to shimmer - with pinkness, with age, with self-satisfaction, with sadness, with delight. The navigator stows away his charts and puts on a gay straw hat; for he has reached that paragon among landfalls, Venice." (exact from 'Venice' by Jan Morris 1963).
Read MoreBut at this moment, as I take a backwards glance and find myself joining the two ends of this circle, from Yorkshire to London to Moscow to Paris to Stockholm and back to Yorkshire, I feel blessed to be able to say.... it is truly, a perfect circle.
Read MoreMaking Embroidery Modern
