December - last furtle of 2019!

Well well! What did December bring in the furtling sphere?? A productive day at Killearn with the #stirlingshirestitch folks brought together my booknerd quilt top. I wont get it done and dusted in 2019, events have overtaken that goal but it will be done very very soon in 2020!

Again events overtook my goal of getting this done with early morning sewing. My vintage home quilt, this was a BOM by Jo Avery for todays quilter magazine a year or so ago. But hey the top is still done just needs quilting, so again hopefully another early 2020 finish!

I had a great visit to the harrogate knitting and stitching show with Ruth and Sheena, just a lovely break, look at the tea room!

And i bought loads of lovely fabric at Purple Stitches, Viv is so sweet!

I finished my I love to sew needlecase, bright and pretty

But sadly my mother was not well. She is a lot better now but i had to spend a lot of time looking after her up North, so all my lovely stitching plans didnt come to fruition. But i did get cracking with my Tresna shawl! I am now almost finished, I learned to wrap and turn, i think i am doing it right!!! not really sure to be honest but hey its a learning curve. I am now playing wool chicken .... can you see how much i have left???? Not sure if its enough but i can always buy more.

I should really mention christmas too shouldnt i! I will hold my hands up and confess i really struggle with Christmas, I could quite happily hibernate the whole month of december. I stress at the thought of presents both giving and recieving. But i did get some lovely presents, thanks to my Amazon wish list! Two Kaffe Fassett books from mam. When i was looking after her i spent a lot of time looking through these and plotting and planning quilts!

I got another two from Scoobs!

 Plus this book, fabulous and it has already paid for itself, I had no idea my presser foot setting for the walking foot was too tight! no wonder my quilting has been really puckered recently, I think it must have been reset when getting serviced. I have been wondering why my quilting was so puckered, been blaming all sorts, but this book sorted it out!

And while we are on it, lets say goodbye to the sewing room! well not totally goodbye just to the colour scheme and layout. I have a few quilts in progress that i want to keep and have on display, we have also been talking about redecorating it for a while too, the blue walls are a bit cold, so we have a huge tub of buttermilk matt emulsion, a very lovely Scoobs who is willing to spend January the first painting! watch this space!

Its been a good 2019, with a fair few ups and downs, but on the whole its been good and that is mostly due to lovely chums and a wonderful scoobs xx

A finish! I love to sew sewing case

When i saw my chum Sheena make this lovely sewing case at the FOQ then i knew i had to do it too. So it was number 11 on my Q 4 list

I love a bit of embroidery my eyesight isnt good enough for the fine embroider i used to do but this is perfect!

this is as Christmassy as it gets!

I have never enjoyed Christmas, not from a very young age. Many reasons I think, in recent years anniversaries of bereavement in December have made it even more challenging. I'm not alone I know many struggle at this time of year.

This year I am trying to be more accepting of the season, me being in a Miserable budsmam bubble isn't going to change anything 😂 so with the help of a fab pappersaxsten pattern - spruced up, I made a Christmas tree. 

I hope you have a good holiday whatever your beliefs. 

I made a small thing!!!

I made a small thing! Lots of excitement cos I'm normally rubbish at small. This pixie sewing case, pattern by Rosie Taylor was really nice to make. Apart from a small hiccup with the kam snap it came together nicely. It was my secret santa for the Stirlingshire stitch Xmas party. It's about 4 inches square when folded. I'm pleased with it. 

Is it any wonder my nerves are frayed????

Now that title is a little bit tongue in cheek and dont worry I am not melting down again, quite the opposite!
I had a road trip! with wonderful chums Sheena and Ruth. I think it was Sheena who first mentioned going to Harrogate for the knitting and stitching show. Well im not one to miss out on a crafty road trip so off we went!
I decided to drive which i dont think i would do again but hey i tried it and did enjoy it but waaaaaay longer than i thought. But i checked into my travel lodge (love a travel lodge) and headed off for a luffly dinner with Sheena at Las Iguanas, sooper fab with a lovely posh mocktail cos i was on the wagon (totes unecessary as it turns out ....)
The next day i decided to head to Bettys for breakfast. Bettys is an institution in Harrogate and it is lovely with this great latte and i had smoked salmon and scrambled eggies on muffin, vury nice start to the day.

I todled off to the show and who did i bump into but the lovely Viv from purple stitches. Well she has all the best fabric and i couldnt resist this, pandas in scarves!!!

The convention center itself was wonderful really nice, we got access to the theater so we could sit and have coffee/lunch and look at this.

 I liked the show,  lots of different things, i dont think i could do more than 2 days but it was a very pleasant weekend,  well mostly! I was standing looking at a stall and all i could hear was - "OK EVERYBODY!!!! STOP!!!" I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around to see a middle aged lady in the middle of an aisle glowering at a poor woman,  the next thing she said was "KAREN has decided that we are all now going THIS WAY and not THAT way, havent you Karen??????"
A poor old lady who was in the group and who had a zimmer did a very slow 365 degree turn in it and said mournfully "is it any wonder my nerves are frayed??" poor soul they had lost the spirit of the occasion a bit!!
Ruth suggested a local restaurant for our saturday night dinner,  really nice they had blade a cut of meat that reminds me of my youth and my gran, it was fab.
On the sunday we all met up for lunch, we had all been admiring the cakes in Bettys window so i had gone and bought us some marzipan robins, they were so nice!

 I had to have a little homage to Agatha, Dame Agatha Christie of course! This is the Old Swan hotel where she vanished to for 11 days in 1926.

Lets finish with my sunday breakfast latter from Balthazars a very nice deli. 

 Harrogate you were lovely and lovely company, I  will be back!

A finish!

We haz a Q4 finish! no 6 on my list was a zip up tray - pattern by Aneela Hooey, well actually it ended up being 2 zip up trays as i ended up making one for myself too!

Fabric is mostly Lucy Engels with some Helen Steele in as well (the yellow dragonflies) I do love this pouch so much but ay yay yay sewing on the binding is not so easy for my poor wee arthritic fingers! and i never seem to get it flat, but i love the pouch and they are really really useful.

November's furtle!

im trying to do this from a travel lodge in Harrogate! This could all go very wrong 😂😂 so November what's been happening? Well this fir a start. My cogs and thistles quilt started at a Pappersaxsten, Jenny Haynes class, it needed to get done.

and it did! Little bit of fudging but we got there, my lovely chum Sheena is having a quilt drive for the charity she works for. This will go there.

Carry4on in the pappersaxsten vein is my version of her spruced up pattern

cute huh!

Wot else?? Oh yes a couple of zip up trays... I do love this pattern so much but ay yay yay sewing on the binding... But they are pretty

so I'm down in Harrogate for the knitting and stitching show, really enjoying it, shortly heading off for food with the lovely Ruth and Sheena!

I'll finish off with todays flat white at Betty's tearooms 

I just wiped out 2 years...

Well that was fun! I'm off sick with the lurgy, yet again. Horrible cough so I can't lay down or sleep so I thought I would bite the bullet and get rid of Flickr. Since they started charging last year for over a 1k pictures I knew the time had come to part ways. Problem was I had about 4 years of pictures on the blog linked out to flickr... The subscription is due in December so I started plugging away at it. After getting 2 and a half years done I decided what the heck and just deleted all of 2014 and 2015.. And it was fine absolutely fine. Sadly I seem to have lost some pictures in the transition, all of the pictures of the making of my silk quilt, a work trip to Athens, I was sad about those. But hey as life catastrophies goes these are minor! I'll never use a 3rd party app for the blog again this is the 3rd time I've had to redo things because of one. Hey ho lesson learned. 

Anniversary

Honestly blogger!!! this is from 2016 why you put  it here! i  was updating it!
I love my country, it's beautiful, that is all. It keeps me sane, gives me peace and serenity.   Anniversary in Pitlochry 6 years eh? Fabulous.

My Scoobs in front of the fire in our favourite hotel, he proposed here, we honeymooned here, I recovered from chemotherapy here. It was Buds favourite too.

Still rocking it 😊

 

Dugald Stewart a life in books

Honestly blogger!!! this is from 2016 why you put  it here! i  was updating it!
In s previous life I was a rare books librarian .... Rock n roll! I loved it every minute. I did my masters thesis on the Library of Dugald Stewart an 18th century Scottish philosophe and mathematician. Fascinating man.  Anyhoo to my eternal shame he lived for a large part of this life not far from me. I have never been there till last weekend! And it is beautiful, Kinneil estate near Bo'ness. The inventor James Watt also live there and he and Dugald knew each other.

 It's taken me a while but I will be back.