Archie The Wonder Dog

snow Archie: 2000 - 2017 This morning, I took Archie for his final walk (actually two of them), he had his final breakfast, he made his last visit to Mam and Dad's house, and then he took his final ride in the car on his fluffy blanket. Do I get a treat for sitting so nicely? Archie has been in fragile health for many years - he had a really bad back as the result of an attack by a much bigger dog a few years ago, and the injury constantly threatened the feeling in all four legs.  He also had a failing liver and a heart murmur, and the latter was slowly but surely getting worse and meant he was losing power in his back legs.  Throughout all this, he was he usual chirpy and stoic self and always looked well considering how many health problems he had.  He loved his food (particularly biscuits and tuna) and he loved his walks, right up until the end. I love it here, lots of sniffs to sniff, lots of people to admire me.  Now, how about a biscuit? Yesterda...

In October 2015, I made a trug to keep bits and pieces in (it's really handy if you're taking a project to someone's house/a workshop as you can fit lots in it!) and in the following months, I made a rotary cutter pouch, a needle book, a scissor holder and a Lola pouch from the leftovers (I started with a yard of the black and white print and a metre of the turquoise solid).  That left this little lot: I decided that I'd make a mat for my sewing machine to sit on when it's on the table, as it's a bit awkward to push away from/pull towards me when I'm working.  And it would be a handy place to stick the odd pin or place a reel of thread on and not have it roll off the edge of the table.  As you can see, there's not an awful lot left, particularly not in large pieces, so I decided to add some bright pink solid (to reflect the pink trim on the inside of the trug and the pink quilting and pandas on the pouch) and the remnants of orange sketch I had le...

In May last year, I took part in a blog hop for Oakshott and made a table runner from their gorgeous Lipari range, which was being relaunched.  Before I launched into making the blocks for the runner, I needed to piece a test block to check the templates worked.  Here it is mid assembly: I couldn't leave it on its own, so let it choose some potential friends: I decided to stick with the fabrics from Monico Solorio-Snow 's Sew Yummy collection for Cloud 9 fabrics , so out went that multi dot and in came some tomato pin cushions.  I made an exception for the bead lines second down as that would make an ideal binding. I pieced these blocks in fits and starts in between other projects as I found that having made sixteen whole blocks and four half blocks, my enthusiasm was somewhat lacking.  To think that when I made the test block I thought I might up the size a bit and make a big quilt!  I think not! At some point I had three blocks: Then I ha...

Me again! (I know, no posts for months and then loads in one week.  I'm going to try to be better next quarter!  Crowd (off):  mutters We've heard that before...) Way back in October, I started work on a tutorial for the 2016 FAL and chose to demonstrate how to accurately insert narrow (1/4") strips into a piece of fabric and, of course, I needed a project to demonstrate it on. I decided to make a table runner from pale grey Oakshott, with strips of darker grey inserted (and with blocks of turquoise inserted into those).  I didn't manage to get the runner quilted, so at the start of this quarter, it looked like this: And here's a closer look at those inserted strips: I spent a while puzzling how to quilt it until I took it to show a friend and we puzzled together and eventually decided that echoing the strips down the length of the runner would look quite nice. I measured the width of the inserted section (11 x 0.25" = 2.75") so I knew ho...