BLOG 339

BLOG 339

I had such a busy week last week. We met up with Pacific Island friends in the Lake District and had a couple of nights in a hotel in Ings. There were 4 couples in total and we are bound together by our history on the island of Tarawa. We all lived and worked there and socialised together and, quite remarkably, we all got married out there too. Two couple have celebrated their 45^th wedding anniversary and 2 couples are about to. In this day and age that it quite an accomplishment!

Another busy period then followed over the WE when the grandchildren were in residence. My daughter was 50 on the first day of spring and they had a lovely and lively weekend in London to celebrate. The weather here was continually cold and wet so all I can say is thank goodness for soft play centres and the Ice Cream farm in Cheshire!!

So here I am, a few days late, playing catch-up! I had a day at Suzette’s last week and that is about the only time where I feel I can sit and sew all day. There is no phone to answer, no washing up to do or washing to hang on the line. It is a day of pure indulgence and I can sew whatever I want. Because I am surrounded by machine embroiderers, I like to use thread, shears, dissolvable layers etc. Here’s the start of a sunflower project; it is a flower I adore.

              Sheers

The sheers were trapped between 2 dissolvable layers, but these were not as stiff as the ones I used for the bowl. I then started to scribble and paint with thread.

            Scribbling

            More detail

            In progress

           So far

And here’s a useful tip for you: Sometimes a bit of unpicking, or ‘reverse sewing’ as I like to call it, is necessary. I have to do it quite often and last week I managed to sew the wrong line onto the main body of the Rainbow Delectable Mountain quilt.

            Reverse sewing

To unpick, I usually go along the line of stitches clipping every 4^th stitch and then I can just pull the seams apart. That leaves many threads on the surface of the fabric. To harvest them I wrap a piece of masking tape, with sticky side outwards, around my fingers and stick it onto itself. Then I just have to wipe it along the edge of the fabric and it picks up the bits. This is very useful to know.

          Masking tape

          Threads

 

 

 

       And more