Today's shopping

So, I need some orange-y red tone on tone, and some bright clear yellow T-o-T. As I was in town, I tried the only shop in the city centre which sells quilting fabric...nothing, nada, zilch. Lots of garish prints (dogs? cats?? owls????). Some with self coloured patterns, but either too obvious for what I wanted or in the wrong colour. Why wouldn't a major department store which has a unique selling point stock marbled fabrics? Or Fossil Ferns? Or Makower's Spraytime? Or anything I can actually use?

There is another shop which does sell marbles, but it's a bus ride out of the city centre, and on a day when i have grocery shopping to do, I don't have time to trek for miles in search of 2 FQs! Back to the stash, which I've looked through once, just to see if there's anything vaguely close to what I want in there.

On a good note, I bought a pair of swimming goggles from TK Maxx. Speedo, fixed nose piece, white and lilac

UFO #1 of the year completed!!

I finally finished my niece Helen's 18th birthday quilt. I was trying to think how long I've been working on it, and realised it's not taken as long as I'd thought. I designed it way back in summer 07 (using EQ5), then got bought EQ6 for Christmas so re-interpreted it in there. Bought some pieces of pink fabric (Helen's request) between design and re-design, then in January at the AGM of my quilt group I bought loads of cream FQs for the background. Got the 18 blocks cut, and the logs for the outer border, then in February bought the bright bubblegum pink for the sashing, inner border and binding. It pieced up quite quickly, and I started the quilting.

As it has to be ready for May, I machine quilted it, using a pale pink thread and a shop bought design which just fit the blocks. Following a pattern on BQL, I used fancy thread in the bobbin, flipped the quilt upside-down and drew a meandering curve with swirls and swags right along that outer border.

Finally got the binding hand stitched down on Monday night.

First post

I'm looking for somewhere to ramble on about my quilts, running and general family life...looks like this will do. I've been quilting around 10 years, running for 2 and married for nearly 15.

Currently a member of Plym Piecemakers, and we're having an exhibition in Princetown in August. With a bit of luck, I'll have something to send to be shown. Right now I'm working on some small items for our sale table. We're hoping to raise the cost of a coach to the NEC Festival of Quilts next year.

So far, I've made 3 crazy pieced pin wheels, 16 coasters, 4 mini Christmas stockings and 3 needle cases. Some of these need to be hand finished which I'll do in the next week or so.

Picture to follow if I can work out how to post them!