Because Lily helped with the chequerboard quilt that I made for the doll quilt swap on the Quilting Board forum, I asked my partner Linda (not the same Linda that I have swapped with before) to send the quilt straight to Lily.
We visited Lily and her family yesterday, a really enjoyable day trip to South Wales. While the grown ups all sat around drinking tea in the front room the dolly was watching us, snuggled under her quilt.
Didn't Linda do a fantastic job! She managed to choose colours that go perfectly in Lily's house, and the quilt has nice soft wadding so it wraps easily around the doll.
Also, what makes the quilt extra special is that Linda took the opportunity to start her granddaughters off using the sewing machine, choosing a basic strip design so they could have nice easy runs of stitching.
Thank you Linda and granddaughters - Lily loves her quilt!
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Last week, a few days after the thaw, I heard fluttering in our bedroom. This beautiful butterfly was flapping against the window. He had been hiding somewhere in the room to hibernate and the house was now too warm for him.
He settled for a minute on the back of my daughter's hand. He wasn't at all interested in the smudge of water and honey she had for him on her hand. He just rested there and quivered his wings for a while, then I caught him and released him outside.
He was last seen flying up into a blue (!!!) sky from our back door.
The big computer is home again, the quilt for Karen is in the post, and hiding in my sewing den was this lovely little tapestry which I found in a charity shop years ago. It is framed behind glass, so I had a bit of a job trying to cut down the reflections when taking the photo. It is absolutely tiny, only 4 inches by 3.
The detail and colour are wonderfully atmospheric. The ruts on the track draw you into the scene, and the bright pink cherry blossom lets you know it is definitely springtime. What always intrigues me is, where is it? It doesn't look like England. The houses are too white and low, and the roofs too high and steep.
There are no clues on the back, only the address of the framers. I swear this isn't a picture of Cheshire. Holland? Denmark?
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...using husband's laptop and the pub's WiFi connection.
There will be a brief interruption to this blog.
On Friday I tried to post my reply to Nola's quiz question that she posted as a comment on Thursday, and nothing happened. The internet had disappeared into a cyberhole.
Yesterday the men in a van came to check the connection in the hole in the road and had to give up before they started because there was a car parked over the cover. We are expecting them back tomorrow.
Tonight our main computer is being packed up in a box ready for a quick trip to computer hospital for a check up.
So no blogging for a few days, but plenty of time for sewing, drawing patterns and generally tidying up the sewing den. By the end of the week I should be posting off a very important doll quilt to Karen in Canada.
Anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted...
Nola, it's for hanging your mothballs in the wardrobe.
Love,
Muv
Here are the bobbins from four different machines. From left to right, Vesta Transverse Shuttle/Little Vesta, Serata treadle (ie, Stoewer Vibrating Shuttle), Singer Vibrating Shuttle, Frister and Rossmann Transverse Shuttle.
Sometimes bobbins are interchangeable between machines, but not always.
If the disc at the end of the bobbin is too large for the shuttle, the bobbin will not rotate properly inside it. The disc on the Vesta bobbin is smaller than on all the other bobbins shown.
If the bobbin winder has a little pin where the bobbin fits in at the right hand side, then there has to be a small hole in the disc. My Singers can take bobbins without holes because there is no pin.
The protrusion at the centre of each disc might be sharp and pointed like the Singer, rounded like the Vesta and Serata, or not there at all, like the Frister and Rossmann. The F&R is flat at one end with five holes, but has a solid disc with a central protrusion at the other end.
The first questions you need to ask if you are thinking of acquiring a long bobbin machine are firstly, has it got the shuttle, and secondly, has it got bobbins. Singer bobbins are easy to come by, whereas other bobbins can prove to be pretty scarce.
It was in a box of bits from a car boot sale.
It is two and a quarter inches long, with plain stripes on one side,
and crossed lines and dots on the other.
Is it just a decorated darning needle, or did it have a particular use? I would be delighted to find out.
I spent a happy half hour browsing the knitting patterns in a charity shop this morning. I love the elegant summery atmosphere evoked in this one, and the fact that these models manage to look at ease in hand knitted items.
The knitting pattern itself took me back to my childhood, when wool came from Yorkshire in one ounce balls, and I expected to use face powder when I grew up.
My bro in law took one look at this pattern and took less than a millisecond to notice the Alfa Romeo in the background. It's the leaf print skirt that really interests me.
