A piece of HISTORY with some French influx

I’m not sure still about the outside 

blocks for the corners, but the draft

 looks about like this.

Couple of months ago I won a Jelly Roll of Moda Paisley Park from Kansas Troubles Quilters. Honestly, I love, LOVE this fabric design! But... such a fabric needed a pattern with some historic air about it and I’m not good at following instructions and copying somebody’s design. So I was struggling with ideas. 

 Finally I did choose the Lonestar. It’s historic and at the same time gives plenty of  freedom for adjustments as sqeezing a full size quilt out of one Jelly Roll is basically impossible.  

After some twiddling with diamond shapes I realised that I need one more colour and the only one (hardly) suitable from my stash was some vintage French fabric (SOULEIADO, BY SOCIETE CHARLES DEMERY "TISSU") which was lurking in my stash for few decades. So Lonestarfom Kansas will have some nice French twist.

Now with this little French influx I had enough diamond shapes for my Lonestar. This is the first block done. I like it a lot so far. (CHARLES DEMERY fabric is 4th row from the right).  The rest of fabric is Paisley Park by Moda.

Busy week, II

The second of this week's big jobs done and dusted. All went well, everybody is happy.

Life goes back to normal and now I'll be able return to my sewing machine finally.

Yesterday I also got the best present ever - an order to make my first baby quilt! Whoo- hooo!

Busy week

This weeks to-do-list is simple: two jobs.

One job done today, one to do.























This week is all about math.

It was supposed to be like that:
1+1+2,
rather simple, nearly ideal lifetime arithmetic. 

 But the life bent and twisted the four rules of arithmetic into something like this 1+1+2 (+1) -1= 1+3 -1-1-1= 1
which I disagreed strongly. 


I tried to change it to 1+1= 2(+3) but no way, life kicked back at me this one 

((1+1+2(+ 1) – 1)+((1+3(+1))+ (+1+1))(+2)) +1. 

Today was one little part of this formula, one simple 1+1, which I was walking towards for last 3 years step by step. Adoption. Today it finally happened. 
The rest of this math is left for the weekend.


As a result sewing machine is doomed to sulk alone in the corner and - strange enough - it doesn't bother me at all.

Evil

I can’t say that I had been very lucky this Halloween. The idea to do something about Halloween hit me too late – just the day before. So off I went to look for a pumpkin. Well, of course there were none left at the local veg markets so I was doomed by a tiny one from Tesco stock. Not a very good start, but totally my own fault. 

The second problem appeared when I looked at these tiny pumpkins... The shape. They all were typical pumpkin shape instead of offering some space for carving a scull which as you all know, needs more vertical space than horizontal. 

Well, then I carved. I have a bunch of carving-ish tools but none really worked for the rather soft pumpkin so I was stuck with an old serrated knife from the kitchen box which worked the best. 

I spent Thursday evening and half of Friday carving. At the end it looked about right. Not perfect but I was rather happy about the outcome. We lit the candle inside and happily put our scary pumpkin outside on the porch.   

And then, a tad bit over an hour later.... It was gone. Ta-ra!




We live in a quiet blind alley in rather nice area of the city after all – neatly trimmed lawns, nicely polished cars, polite small talks with neigbours...
Why on earth somebody would creap up on our porch to steal A PUMPKIN? What’s wrong with you, people?  Some kind of OFF THE WALL FRIDAY?



 I would be able to fill probably several pages with ranting, but seriously... When you close your eyes and imagine England, it’s all about moss on the old stone walls and green meadows, ivy and holy, castles and terrace houses, polite small talk about weather and umbrellas. The reality is rather different, sadly...
 

Well, anyway, it lasted about an hour and half, and I hope it was enough to scare all the evil spirits away.