Free Motion Mavericks - Week 209 - Sandwich Time

Big event!  I got round to making a quilt sandwich today.  I took advantage of a spare half hour and sandwiched one of the cradle quilt tops that I made recently.  Will I manage to quilt it before Christmas?  Perhaps not.  Life has been busy recently, with a friend visiting from Germany, who has been with us for ten days and is leaving today, and my brother and sister lined up to stay with us this weekend.  As you can imagine, the emphasis at the moment is on chatting and cooking.

Here goes for week 207:-

Many thanks again to Andrée for linking up last time with her paper pieced loon quilt.  If you haven't seen her blog post yet, nip over now and see more.

If you have no free motion quilting to show, feel free to link up and show any project you like.  Here are the usual rules, but feel free to ignore them.  To keep the original emphasis, however, preference will be given to free motion quilting when featuring projects from the previous week.

If you love free motion quilting, whether you are a beginner just taking the plunge, or you have reached the stage where you can do ostrich feathers with your eyes shut and still achieve perfect symmetry, then please link up.

Remember, FMQ is FMQ, whether your machine was made last week, or it is older than your granny.

Here are the very easy and slightly elastic rules:-

1.  Link up with any recent post, ideally from the last week but within the last month, which features a free motion quilting project, whether it is a work in progress or a finish.

2.  Link back to this post in your own post.
  
3.  Visit as many of the other participants as possible and say hello in the comments box.

4.  The link up will remain open for four days, from midnight to midnight GMT for the long weekend, Friday to Monday.

So far quilters from the USA, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, France, Macau, Russia, Ireland and Brazil have taken part.  The first participant from each new country will get a special mention the following week.

A Picture for Sunday - November Sky

You might not be too keen on grey November skies, but every now and then there is a brief glimmer of colour.

Free Motion Mavericks - Week 208 - Time for an Audit

After putting off tidying the sewing room for weeks, I am finally getting round to it.  Rather more than just a quick tidy is needed, more like a full stocktake.  These are the backing material for cot quilts, some of which are offcuts from completed quilts and could well end up as tea cosies.  Most of these lengths haven't been cut into yet.  The timing of this sort out should set me up well for the New year.  If I am reasonably organised by then I should be able to launch into some projects in January.  I certainly won't need to go shopping.  Just seeing what I have will start a few ideas.  

Now that Christmas is only a month away and I would really rather hibernate than be busy, sewing might recede into the background while I concentrate on knitting, which has the huge advantage of being something you can combine with slobbing around on the settee in front of the telly.  And when I get bored of knitting I can make some mincemeat and look forward to home-made mince pies.

Here goes for week 207:-

Many thanks again to Andrée for linking up last time with her dolphins quilt.  If you haven't seen her blog post yet, nip over now and see more.

If you have no free motion quilting to show, feel free to link up and show any project you like.  Here are the usual rules, but feel free to ignore them.  To keep the original emphasis, however, preference will be given to free motion quilting when featuring projects from the previous week.

If you love free motion quilting, whether you are a beginner just taking the plunge, or you have reached the stage where you can do ostrich feathers with your eyes shut and still achieve perfect symmetry, then please link up.

Remember, FMQ is FMQ, whether your machine was made last week, or it is older than your granny.

Here are the very easy and slightly elastic rules:-

1.  Link up with any recent post, ideally from the last week but within the last month, which features a free motion quilting project, whether it is a work in progress or a finish.

2.  Link back to this post in your own post.
  
3.  Visit as many of the other participants as possible and say hello in the comments box.

4.  The link up will remain open for four days, from midnight to midnight GMT for the long weekend, Friday to Monday.

So far quilters from the USA, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, France, Macau, Russia, Ireland and Brazil have taken part.  The first participant from each new country will get a special mention the following week.

A Picture for Sunday - Aquamarine

My first encounter with aquamarine, a colour I have always thought a bit overrated, but seeing it in waves about to break on the shore of the Mediterranean had me transfixed.  The water was so clear and the sunshine so bright that the ripples looked like shoals of fish rushing through the shallows.  For an instant I was fooled, so I stood for ages watching, and snapping away to see if the camera could capture the joy of it all.  This picture is the winner, because not only did it catch the wave breaking and the sunlit ripples, but also, if you look closely, you can see how the water has broken up the light to give a prismatic effect.

Free Motion Mavericks - Week 207 - My First Mobile Phone

Even the most stubborn of Luddites have been known to cave in.  Here it is, my very first mobile phone.  I've held out all these years saying I didn't need one, too much technology, how did the world function before they were invented etc etc, and now I have had the pleasure of sending both my children into a state of shock by whatsapping them out of the blue.

The first thing I had to do when we bought it was turn a deaf ear to all my husband's well intentioned instructions about which button to press and start rummaging around for the bits and pieces to make it a cosy.  Out came the multi-purpose practice piece, which I have already used to make a cover for the coffee pot and a pouch for my camera.  All I needed was a strip of 10 x 4 inches to fit the phone.

There was a horizonal line in the quilting which seemed the best place to fold the strip for the bottom of the pouch.  It also coincided with a change of colour, so the back is all blue. 

Probably the trickiest bit of work was sewing the buttons on.  Then once I put the phone in and fastened the buttons I found that I was pressing the on-off button on the phone, so I quickly learnt to slide it in top first.  It fits very snugly in my bag, alongside purse, biro, spare hankies, passport, boarding pass...  On Monday evening last week I was all packed and ready to go.

The following day I flew to Spain to meet my brother, who had arrived there the previous day.  The idea was that with my brand new mobile telephone we should be able to find each other easily.  The only snag was that my phone kept telling me I was in the wrong country, when my brother rang me I couldn't hear him, and I couldn't get wifi.  I saw a girl using her phone and decided to ask her for help.  It turned out that she was Russian and everything on her phone was in Cyrillic.  She very kindly took my brother's number and tried ringing him on her phone, but for some reason he doesn't answer calls from ladies he doesn't know.  I should have asked her to text him instead.  A bit of fancy script would have woken him up.  Then he texted me saying he was by the exit nearest the bus stop.  This is an airport I have travelled to twice before, so this should have been straightforward.  I followed signs to bus stops on the ground floor, went outside, and they were the wrong buses and the wrong stops.  Then I looked at his message again.  "Am by door to bus stop second floor..."  For goodness' sake, how can bus stops be upstairs?  So only another five minutes flapping around like a cross old hen and I found him.

Moral of the story:-

1.  Make prior arrangements.  They work better than mobile phones.
2.  Don't expect Spanish buses to run on the ground.

Here goes for week 207:-

Many thanks to Andrée for linking up last time with her dolphins quilt.  If you haven't seen her blog post yet, nip over now and see more.

If you have no free motion quilting to show, feel free to link up and show any project you like.  Here are the usual rules, but feel free to ignore them.  To keep the original emphasis, however, preference will be given to free motion quilting when featuring projects from the previous week.

If you love free motion quilting, whether you are a beginner just taking the plunge, or you have reached the stage where you can do ostrich feathers with your eyes shut and still achieve perfect symmetry, then please link up.

Remember, FMQ is FMQ, whether your machine was made last week, or it is older than your granny.

Here are the very easy and slightly elastic rules:-

1.  Link up with any recent post, ideally from the last week but within the last month, which features a free motion quilting project, whether it is a work in progress or a finish.

2.  Link back to this post in your own post.
  
3.  Visit as many of the other participants as possible and say hello in the comments box.

4.  The link up will remain open for four days, from midnight to midnight GMT for the long weekend, Friday to Monday.

So far quilters from the USA, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, France, Macau, Russia, Ireland and Brazil have taken part.  The first participant from each new country will get a special mention the following week.

Free Motion Mavericks - Week 206 - Resting

Well this is embarrassing.  No linky last Thursday and nothing to show this week.  The fact that I was ill for a few days has a lot to do with it.  Plus the fact that my daughter is at home at the moment until Saturday.  And I shall be going away next week on a jaunt with my brother, so there will be no linky next week either.  All this adds up to quite a long bloggy break.  I shall have to make the most of it and come back in a couple of weeks' time reinvigorated and full of enthusiasm.  

So without further ado...

Here goes for week 206:-

Many thanks to Olena for linking up last time with her starfish quilt.  If you haven't seen her blog post yet, nip over now and see more.

If you have no free motion quilting to show, feel free to link up and show any project you like.  Here are the usual rules, but feel free to ignore them.  To keep the original emphasis, however, preference will be given to free motion quilting when featuring projects from the previous week.

If you love free motion quilting, whether you are a beginner just taking the plunge, or you have reached the stage where you can do ostrich feathers with your eyes shut and still achieve perfect symmetry, then please link up.

Remember, FMQ is FMQ, whether your machine was made last week, or it is older than your granny.

Here are the very easy and slightly elastic rules:-

1.  Link up with any recent post, ideally from the last week but within the last month, which features a free motion quilting project, whether it is a work in progress or a finish.

2.  Link back to this post in your own post.
  
3.  Visit as many of the other participants as possible and say hello in the comments box.

4.  The link up will remain open for four days, from midnight to midnight GMT for the long weekend, Friday to Monday.

So far quilters from the USA, England, Wales, Australia, Canada, Germany, Holland, New Zealand, France, Macau, Russia, Ireland and Brazil have taken part.  The first participant from each new country will get a special mention the following week.