Back in the saddle

At last, after a washout of a week I am feeling back to normal. What started off as a bit of a cold, passed on to me by the Beloved JB, turned into one of those times my immune system surrenders and my body crumbles into a soggy heap awaiting rescue. Luckily this is not a common event and I have not felt quite so weak for at least 7 years I reckon, but any time I do get this way it makes me very annoyed and frustrated with myself, which is probably not the way to be, but there your go. I hate missing work and have felt guilty even though I have only been off for 3 days and this is through no misconception of thinking I am indispensable. It is purely through the feeling of letting people down. Tomorrow I plan however to bounce back into the office with a new found energy and I can't wait to hear the latest news from all the gang.

 

All this enforced sitting down meant I could catch up on my blog reading and on Friday, due to good light, I was at last able to take some pictures of my make for the Mouthy Stitches swap. This needs to be posted to its secret recipient tomorrow so I was stressing about getting some good pictures so this was an ideal opportunity. I am pretty pleased with the bag, especially as a first swap make, so let's just hope my partner likes it when it hits her doormat. If you would like to see some more pictures of the bag in progress click here for my flickr stream and let me know what you think. Oh and how do you like my new logo which I drew? I need to incoporate it into my blog header and things next but one step at a time....

 

Another morale boost was a visit to Carole and Brian at Beechwood Quilting yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours on the long am.. They have been very kind in letting me be their first customer to use a pantograph on my own rather than quilt it free hand and I feel very honoured. As ever I decided to do something tricky for a first attempt, as I wanted to quilt "Autumn Shadows", a lap quilt which I designed and made from Denyse Schmidt fabrics in greys and oranges. The design consists of long strips of varying widths in the feature fabrics set off against a plain very pale cream. The blocking reflects the long low shadows we see around here at this time of the year and the beautiful orange light  of my favourite time of the year.

 

To echo the block shapes I decided I wanted quilt in an L shape and of course that meant mastering a corner on the pantograph and repeating it over and over again on my small quilt. A challenge but worth it. Sadly the idea was great but the pattern is not as apparent on the quilt as I had hoped and would have stood out far better if I had either used a contrast thread or a plain backing. I am not usually brave enough to use contrast thread for quilting in case I make a muck up of it and the backing, whilst a great compliment to the front, was a last minute choice due to my illness and my inability to shop during the week.To be honest even my original idea of the orange fabric may not have made the quilting stand out I think.

 

Anyway I am pretty pleased with the overall look of the quilt and will put together the pattern in case any one is interested in having a go. More pictures can be seen here.

That's me for now I think. I am off to get some supper sorted and then an early night ( after Downton of course) ready for back to work , normality and human company tomorrow... bye for now and see you soon.