Getting started!

Well I've made a start on the main one of my UFO's which is a Crazy Cutz quilt. It needs quilting but otherwise is finished. I did this as a class project as it was so quick and easy to do. What I call a 6 hour quilt top. Six hours to do the top and nearly eighteen months to finish the quilt. Not bad going! The original one I did was tied and made into a quillow but this one is larger and fill fit nicely on our double bed when its finished. While searching for the photo for this I came across a crazy patchwork block I made nearly three years ago. It was for a US/Euro RR and was duly sent over the pond to the US. The Euro side of this RR all finished the work and it was returned but none of us over here have had our blocks back. I feel really sad about this as I made this block at the time our nine month old grandson died and the colours were to commemorate this event. The organiser of this RR in the US really fell down on her job and I blame her for the fact that we haven't seen our blocks in all this time. In fact because of this I have been loathe to get involved in any other RR's. I used to love being part of one and it was exciting seeing all the different blocks and working on them. For many years I ran a European RR group and in all that time we never lost a block even though there were more than fifteen of us at the end. Actually saying that I think we lost one to the postal service but we all got together and replaced the block.

I spent most of the morning cleaning up drawings in PSP. I love this program; especially its ability to turn a bmp into a vector drawing. I'm so glad I've got a tablet and pen as I don't think I'd be able to do half the things that I do with a mouse. It took me a while to learn to use layers but now I can see how valuable they are.

Spent the rest of the time reading the book by Beth Ferrier....Hand Quilting by Machine. This is a really fun book and I can't wait to do some applique work using her method. I say her method but this has been around since the beginning of time or freezer paper and isn't new but she has some neat twists on an old theme which makes it much more user friendly. It always amazes me how many people claim to have invented a technique which has been going since the year dot. I'm not getting at Beth here as she actually says in the book that it isn't new but there are several other books that claim to be originators and arn't. And before freezer paper we were using ordinary paper stuck on with glue! Mind you we didn't get freezer paper over here for a long time as we didn't use it on stuff for the freezer. Plastic bags were the thing. And we had some neat techniques ironing plastic bags to fabric! Necessity is the mother of invention.