Six months later...

According to the blog, it was the end of July 2017 when I assembled the quilt frame and loaded the first quilt top on to it.  And now, finally, six months later, I have today disassembled it.  I certainly didn't think it was going to be up that long, and kudos to my family for being so patient and supportive about it. The dining room suddenly seems so much bigger, we can now use the far entrance door instead of having to go in through the kitchen, and as a bonus the rooms where the displaced furniture was stashed seem bigger as well.

It took quite a while to take apart a workspace that had been in use for six months, and my sewing room now looks like a tornado whipped through it because of all the stuff that has to be squeezed back into the room. I need to do some major tidying and re-organisation down there.  The cat hasn't helped by pulling down a lot of loose fabric as she clambers up to her favoured top shelf.

  I actually had two tops left in my queue: the vintage top I bought in France and my reproduction Lone Star quilt.  But after studying the vintage top, I realised I want to disassemble it and do some work on it.  And the Lone Star really needs to be quilted 'properly' after all the work I've put into it.  I could have basted it on the frame, but it needs to be marked before being basted.  And with the long queue waiting for quilting downstairs, the marks would be on for months which didn't seem like a good idea.  I'll just have to baste the Lone Star the old fashioned way on the dining table when its turn comes.

I didn't do too badly, especially considering that for over a month the frame wasn't in use because of the electrician working and our holiday.  I quilted six bed quilts on the frame and two wallhangings, some of which were more than a decade old.  I basted two more bed quilts that are waiting their turn to be quilted.  Meanwhile I finished a partly quilted bed quilt on the sit down machine, quilted a table cloth, and am currently quilting the Snowman quilt.  The corner where I hang my unfinished tops is looking pretty empty now which feels good.

This is the last quilt I did on the frame before disassembly: the blue and white china quilt.  It would have benefited from custom quilting but that just wasn't going to happen considering I made this about 12-15 years ago and it's been hanging about ever since.  Now it will be useable (once I get the binding on). It turned out pretty well.

My knitted doll is coming along.  She has a dress and cardigan now, and I'm working on some shorts for her.  The cardi buttons are a bit too big, I might look for smaller ones. I'm still impressed with the superior result the cotton yarn is giving compared to using acrylic DK. And I'm enjoying making clothes, my inner little girl coming out I guess.

I've spent more time this week working on my travelling lace pillow which is almost finished.  I'm just waiting for the glue on the straps to dry before I do the final bit of stitching.  It's turned out pretty well, I'm pleased with it.  But the proof will be in actually making lace on it.  I've never used a roller pillow before so I don't know what it will be like.  I can probably move my current bucks point edging project onto the roller initially to see what it's like, but ultimately I will need to make a new pricking that is the size of the roller circumference. I had planned to make a tutorial on how I made the pillow but it's turned out to be so complicated that I've given up on being able to provide any kind of coherent instructions or measurements. I might do an extra post where I will try to describe what I've done in case it might help other lacemakers.

Today we went out to view snowdrops at Evenley Wood over near Brackley, after reading about their display in a magazine. It's a large tended woodland with lots of paths and they had marked out a snowdrop trail so that you could see the best patches.  They have many different varieties, who knew there were so many different kinds of snowdrops? There were even some early crocuses coming up, some first daffodils blooming, and some lovely carpets of tiny cyclamen. We were lucky with the weather this morning, quite cold at around 4 degrees C but sunny. We had bundled up and quite enjoyed our walk around, although DH had the forethought to put wellies on while I was slipping about in the mud in my old shoes.

We enjoyed a delicious lunch in the very cold open-sided shed cafe, with some heat thrown out by a woodburner but it was still necessary to keep wearing all outdoor clothing, my fingerless gloves came in handy for cutlery manipulation!  It's nice to see signs of spring on the horizon.