Archie The Wonder Dog

When I started this project in 2012, it was with the intention of it being a long-term project.  One for 'sitting on the settee and watching telly with no prep required' sewing, but now I've embroidered all the blocks (although I'm behind with blogging about them), I really miss it and am going to have to start thinking about and preparing another long-term hand stitching project to replace it.  I'm slowly catching up with blogging about the squares in this series of weekly posts - I do hope you're not sick to the back teeth of them! You can find the other posts in the series here:  blocks 1 - 4 ;  blocks 5 - 8 ;  blocks 9 - 12 ;  blocks 13 - 16 ;  blocks 17 - 20 ;  blocks 21- 24 ; blocks 25 - 28 . The squares currently measure 7" square, but will be trimmed to 6.5" square before they're pieced into the quilt top.  I did this so that any ragged edges/fraying could be removed, rather than being in the seam allowance.  As last week's post, a

One of the items on my Q1 2016 FAL list was another Iced Hat for Mam and at the start of the quarter, it looked like this: In December, I made two of these as Christmas presents (one for Mam (right), one for my sister-in-law (left)) and they were well received (but not well blogged, oops!), but Mam decided she'd like her next one to have a longer brim so that the lazy wind couldn't get up the gap between her ear lobes and the hat! I knew I'd have plenty of yarn as I had plenty left when knitting these two hats and, although I used different yarn this time, I had about the same yardage and only needed to add an extra twenty-two rounds of rib. I'm afraid there's a staggering lack of in-progress photos for this project as it knitted up within a week and not once did I have my camera near me when I was knitting!  Even losing my cable needle didn't slow me down as I had a spare.  (I lost the cable needle before I started using it - it wasn't in t

After last week's experiment with a mosaic of the four Summersville blocks, I'm combining that with my old approach as the mosaic couldn't be viewed any larger for examination of the embroidery in any detail. As I've said before,  I started this project in 2012 as a 'sitting on the settee and watching telly with no prep required' project and slowly but surely embroidered all 49 blocks (which will be pieced into a quilt), but fell behind (mild understatement!) in blogging about them so I'm catching up with a weekly post. You can find the other posts in the series here:  blocks 1 - 4 ;  blocks 5 - 8 ;  blocks 9 - 12 ;  blocks 13 - 16 ;  blocks 17 - 20 ; blocks 21- 24 . The squares currently measure 7" square, but will be trimmed to 6.5" square before they're pieced into the quilt top.  I did this so that any ragged edges/fraying could be removed, rather than being in the seam allowance.  Once again, all the blocks this week have been em

I think we're around halfway through the first quarter of this year's FAL , so I thought I'd write a bit of a progress report on my list, which you'll find here .  I'm just going to share the projects where I've either made progress or have finished and blogged about them, so if an item isn't here then it's either finished and awaiting its moment of glory or, more likely, hasn't been touched. The big blue and white quilt (which I'm making for Mam's spare bed), has been machine quilted.  Here's how it looked at the start of the quarter: And this is how it looks now: I added an awful lot more lines than I thought I would.  I originally planned to do the vertical and horizontal ditches between the blocks and then across each diagonal on the nine patches, but when I'd done that, it didn't look finished and the ditches of the snowballs weren't quilted.  I decided to add four more lines per block and get a four patc

I thought I'd try something different for this Summersville post and make a mosaic of this week's four blocks, rather than posting individual photos - thanks for the idea, Jude ! I started this project in 2012 as a 'sitting on the settee and watching telly with no prep required' project and slowly but surely embroidered all 49 blocks, but fell behind (mild understatement!) in blogging about them so I'm catching up with a weekly post. The squares will be pieced into a quilt, set between nine patches on point (not yet made) and with some sort of background (not yet chosen or even looked for).  I hope the top will be finished by, well, the end of the decade would be nice!  Then I can start thinking about how to quilt it *grin* You can find the other posts in the series here: blocks 1 - 4 ; blocks 5 - 8 ; blocks 9 - 12 ; blocks 13 - 16 ; blocks 17 - 20 . All the embroidery in blocks 21 and 22 were done with split stitch, and blocks 23 and 24 were done with back

Before I start, I want to say thank you for all your lovely comments on my last post - I really appreciate them. I'm sorry I haven't replied to most of them yet, I've just been too tired to do much other than sleep or sit on the settee and watch easy telly, but I will reply at some point this week. When I was writing my current FAL list , I realised I'd never got round to making a small pouch for all my sewing machine bits and bobs - machine oil, screwdrivers, extra feet, etc.  I decided to use the fabric which was leftover from making my trug and some other things which have yet to be blogged about (they're making their début later in this post!).  I didn't have much of this fabric left but I knew I'd be able to get a small Lola pouch  out of them with little difficulty. When it came to it, I decided to make the large version as it meant I could fit in my walking foot box and it would be much handier to have everything in one place.  I didn'