It's my birthday!

I've done no sewing today. Martin bought me a mass storage drive as a present and I've spent all my time transferring my files off CD's onto it. I find CD's while good and useful a pain when you want to retrieve something. Especially as I am not the most organised of people when it comes to saving things. But this portable drive will be re-writable and I can move things around on it to my heart's content. And looking at these CD's I found loads of files that I'd forgotten I'd got. One whole folder with pictures of quilts from a quilt show in Exeter and another with pictures of old crazy quilts. I love those old crazies. The random piecing is so exciting and the colours are amazing. I have to admit that I don't like what I call the bull's eye style of crazy quilting. To me it is more like an off kilter log cabin. Those Victorian's would just pick up patches and stick them on without a lot of planning and they turned out so well. I try very hard not to get an obvious centre in my blocks. One of my little foibles.

I have been playing with a lucet. It makes the most amazing cord. I've been using a soft rayon thread and yet the cord is quite tight and very strong. It will be good for drawstrings in dorothy bags and for couching into coils. I did think that if I dyed some rusty orange rayon I could use the chain on my Rust and Seaweed piece. Would make good textural spots among the weed. This is so simple to do (using the Lucet) and doesn't take a lot of effort or time. I sit and do it while chatting or having coffee. I might even start carrying it around with me. The booklet that came with the lucet had some amazing things that one could achieve but at the moment I am sticking to the simple under and over technique. Nothing fancy! http://www.stringpage.com/lucet/lucet.html This site gives some interesting facts about lucets.