One block at a time

Is anyone watching the Great British Sewing Bee?  I keep hearing an ad for British Gas on the radio when I'm working on my dollshouse and I'm sure the voiceover artist is the comedian presenter from GSB.  While it is a rare treat to see crafts and sewing on British television, I'm not keen on the emphasis on speed over quality, and I just fast forward through the transformation challenges as it's often just fancy dress made out of bin bags etc.  But it is amazing how much they can achieve in just a few hours.  It would generally take me longer to cut out the fabric than it does for them to sew an entire dress. I feel envious. And their dresses fit their models.

Meanwhile my sewing proceeds at a snail's pace and I have cut out but not yet sewn another 6.5 inch block for the 30s Sampler Quilt.  Much as I find sewing repetitive block quilts quite tedious, there is a lot to be said for production cutting and sewing of a limited number of blocks all from the same set of fabrics.  It is much slower to work on a scrappy quilt where every block is different,  has different fabrics which have to be selected, pressed, cut into different shapes than the previous block, and assembled in a different way than the previous blocks.  Although it does mean that you get to fondle much more fabric and play with many more colours.

Very unseasonably, I have finished the next room in my Christmas House Cross-Stitch, the parlour with a fireplace and stockings. I've just got the attic to stitch now so hopefully this should be ready to display in plenty of time for next Christmas. I need to decide how I am going to decorate the house-shaped wooden frame.  The kit picture shows it painted solid red but I was wondering about going more down the dollshouse route and differentiating the walls from the roof. I have some brick-effect wallpaper I could use.

Now that I've finished the Bucks Point hexagon, I retrieved the Floral Bucks Edging from the attic, the one that I started on the Knuston course back in September.  I spent some time looking at it and worked a bit of ground, but it's hard to remember what I was doing with the main part.  I did write some notes at the time and have reviewed them, but I think it's going to take a while to get back into it. I now have a copy of the Alex Stillwell Floral Bucks book which my teacher recommended, I should probably look through that again.  Annoyingly, at some point the pillow must have taken a fall because several bobbins have snapped their threads so I have to work those back in.  Luckily it's only a sample.  I've heard dreadful stories of pets knocking over pillows containing works in progress with hundreds of bobbins ending up in an unworkable tangle.