Here are more bobbins as well as different types of lace on display. Just gorgeous.

The amount of work and concentration involved in making pillow lace is mind-boggling to me, I just know that I could never manage it. I’d end up banging my head off a wall with frustration, but Evee is part of a lace-making group and to me that means that you must be close to the top of the tree as far as lace crafting is concerned, it’s much more difficult than crochet for example, and I’ve never managed anything more difficult than granny squares. Hooks are not my idea of fun.

I think I’m only happy doing things which don’t require too much attention, so I can knit or sew at the same time as watching TV or chatting. Well you’ve got to multi task!

So pretty and girly.

I don’t know about you, but I would love to have this as the view out of my window, rainbow and all.

I should have gone around taking notes. This one has a poem on it but I haven’t a clue what it says. The collage/quilt makes me think of “granny’s hielan’ hame” though. It looks like Loch Lomond with all the wee islands. Deceptively naive looking and it’s another location I would like to live in.

I just have a few more photos of the Creative Stitches exhibition at Glasgow to show – but I’ll leave them for another post!

The name of the exhibition was The Song of the Clyde, the Clyde is obviously the river which runs through Glasgow and was/is famous for shipbuilding. I suppose these were quilted by the Glasgow branch of the guild.

I think this one of cranes is my favourite.

But this one was fab too.

I was so busy chatting to the lady from the Quilter’s Guild that I didn’t get a chance to read what this one was all about. Gorgeous colours though!

The one below is much more muted but still lovely.

I presume the red shapes are the propellers of ships.

And this one is made from an old linen map which has been sliced up and interspersed with fabric which has been quilted.

There were so many beautiful quilts on show, this is just a few of them. Of course there were lots of DO NOT TOUCH notices about, which was understandable, but honestly I had to go about hanging on to my camera round my neck because they’re all so temptingly tactile looking.

It was quite difficult to get photos but I did just manage to snap some of the Downton Abbey costumes – as you can see.

I took lots of photos of quilts and embroideries as that’s mainly what I’m interested in and I thought I’d start off with this one, a tribute to Jane Austen. It’s about a metre square I think and although this was part of the Quilter’s Guild Exhibition it also has a lot of embroidery on it.

In fact I think it’s often quite difficult to figure out what is meant to be embroidery or quilting. The two crafts seem to cross over into each other’s territory a lot. I would call quite a lot of the exhibits collages, but whatever they’re called I’m just awestruck by the beauty of some of them. I’ll be posting some real crackers soon!

As I want to hang the bunting in the garden, looped from trees to the so called summer-house I thought I had better make it more robust than the stuff you can buy in shops or on-line. With the sort of weather that we can get, even in the summer, those flimsy shop bought things would be rags in no time.

As you can see I’ve strung it along a dresser in my dining-room, just so that you can see it a bit better. I didn’t have to buy any fabric because I have lots in my stash, I’m a bit of a fabric remnant junky and I can’t resist poking around anywhere there’s likely to be nice material, new or vintage. The patterned material is from Laura Ashley, I bought it years ago and as the design is only printed on one side I decided that I would make all the flags/pennants like wee pockets or ‘pokey hat’ shaped as we say in Scotland, so that the design is visible on both sides. It also makes them much stronger.

I used bias binding for the ‘string’ as it comes already folded over and it’s simple to place the flags on the fold and sew along the edge. Job done!

I can see that by the time I’ve finished the other lengths of bunting I’ll have a pile of small off-cuts of the fabrics and I can’t possibly chuck it all out. Maybe I can make a small crazy patchwork quilt with the leftovers. Waste not want not and all that. I think I would have made quite a good pioneer or crofter!

I wanted to get back to doing some traditional embroidery a wee while ago so I bought this 1950s cushion cover from Ebay, it had obviously been folded up and unused in somebody’s work basket for the last 60 years or so.

It didn’t take me as long to do as I thought it might, I speeded things up quite a bit by adding the buttons to the design where there should really have been satin stitched circles. Actually, you live and learn because I thought that was such a good idea at the time but then I realised that I should have left the button embellishments to last as they did make it difficult to iron when the stitching was all finished. Silly me!

I also stitched tiny beads into the middle of some of the daisy flowers, just to make the textures a bit different. The other daisies have the more traditional French knots as centres. I think the yellow flowers were probably supposed to be pink but I decided I wanted a zingy mainly yellow and green colour scheme, so the pink got the elbow!

The stitches I used are the usual satin stitch, stem stitch sort of things. Now I want to try something a bit more ambitious and modern. With that in mind I bought a lovely book called:
Three Dimensional Embroidery Stitches by Pat Trott from Amazon. It arrived just a couple of days ago so I’m now raring to get on with another project. The book also shows you how to use paint in your designs too, which is something I haven’t tried yet. I can’t wait to experiment.

The image is from Amazon, if you want to look inside you’ll have to take a look at it on Amazon.

I posted about previous stages of this project here.

There isn’t much that I can do in the garden at this time of the year so I usually take up my knitting needles in the winter. I used to be really good at it but I’m a bit rusty now and I’m trying to get back to where I was skill wise.

I’ve looked in the shops for nice big thick jumpers but I haven’t had much luck finding what I wanted. They’re often too short because when it’s cold I like my bahookie (bum) to be nicely covered. But this year the sleeves are a bit strange too. Why are they designing nice big pullovers with short sleeves or three-quarter length ones? I don’t know about you but I like to have warm arms. In the past the sleeves always used to be too long for me and they would flap past my hands. I think I have short arms, it was a problem when I tried to learn the violin too, well that’s my excuse! I thought I had found a nice looking woolly in TK Maxx but when I pulled it out to get a good look I discovered that it had only one sleeve! Where’s the point in that?

Anyway, I looked through my small stash of wool and decided to knit an old favourite of mine. As you can see by the dog-earedness of the pattern it has been well used over the years since I first knitted it in the 1970s when leg warmers were first in fashion. I never did knit those but I have done the hat.

I’ve used Wendy Dolce wool which is fluffy but isn’t itchy, I’ve used it before with this pattern and it works fine. So as you can see the back is nearly finished and it hasn’t taken long, the needles are quite thick which always helps. I’ll show you the finished article before Christmas – maybe!

I bought a job lot of 1950s embroidery projects from Ebay a while ago and this is the second one which I’ve tackled. The design is very traditional and old fashioned this time and none of the work had been started, it had obviously spent the last 60 years or so folded away in a drawer. When we move I’m hoping to get a house with a conservatory this time as I want a place for my cactus plants which will be safe for them. I’ve been keeping them in the greenhouse for years with no problems but the last two years I’ve had cactus fatalities when my aluminium greenhouse door froze up for weeks on end, so I couldn’t even rescue them. I digress – the cushions are for a conservatory which doesn’t exist as yet – except in my imagination.

As you can see from the first photo I should have done a lot (18 to be exact) of satin stitch circles but I thought the boredom of that might kill me. My solution was to rake through my mum’s old button tin and it came up trumps, as usual. Of course I’ve added buttons to the tin over the years but about half of them were mum’s. I found two sets of buttons of a similar rusty colour, I think they were originally on shirts which wore out. As luck would have it I had exactly nine of each set – perfect and they were very quickly sewn on. I think they look better than the satin stitching would have looked anyway. The flowers are going to be filled in yellow like buttercups and the others will be daisies. I’m hoping to get it finished soon because I have another Jacobean embroidery project which I’m chewing at the bit to start.

The bottom left hand button looks strange but in reality it looks like the others, it must have been the flash or angle or something!

As you can see I’ve finished embroidering the linen cushion cover which I started some weeks ago and I’m quite pleased with it. I like the really bright colours which are a feature of this sort of 1930s Jacobean design. It should brighten up a grey day and we certainly get plenty of them!

It was absolutely yonks since I had done any embroidering like this. I’ve been doing cross stitch and tapestry/needlepoint projects more recently but I must admit that I really enjoyed doing this kind of embroidery again and I now have a few more similar projects that I’m dying to get stuck into.

At first my stitching was quite dodgy really but I think that I improved as I progressed with it and I hope that the next thing I do will be better. I’m going to try using a finer needle with the hope that I’ll be able to manage more delicate stitching then.