Archie The Wonder Dog

Furtle (v): to have a rummage or delve into the contents of something Hello! This month has involved lots of (sock) knitting as it’s been far too hot to quilt ET and I haven’t felt like doing any dressmaking as my sewing room is still, um, a work in progress. (Just waiting for shelves to go up now and then I can move everything back in, arrange it and then, hopefully, make some serious progress on my  FAL list .) Here’s what I’ve done this month (aka as socks, socks and more socks): Yarn is Neon Flamingo by Made By Penguins Yarn is Rainbow Speckle 2020 by Made By Penguins Yarn is an unnamed speckle by Made By Penguins  (not the same speckle as the one above, this one has paler speckles) and Sasparilla by West Yorkshire Spinners   Yarn is Pinkalicious by, yes, you guessed it, Made By Penguins   (I bought some lucky dip skeins from her last year and this is one of them. I love it!) I also took some photos of the garden as it was looking particularly lovely. Then a load...

Furtle (v): to have a rummage or delve into the contents of something Hello! Spring has sprung!! At the start of the month, I looked at my photos of the garden from the start of lockdown last year (most of which contain Mini Archie hiding in various spots) and couldn't believe the difference in how much green there was in them.  I looked at the garden and didn't think it would be anywhere near by the time the 24th (one year anniversary of Mini Archie's first Lockdown Hide) came round, but it is almost there and it's lovely to look out of the window and see the fresh spring green. And with the cheery thought of plants springing into life, let's look at what I've made this month: I finished the pair of socks I was knitting last time: You may notice that neither sock looks exactly like the finished one I showed last month, and that's because I got halfway down the foot of the second sock and ran out of yarn! So I unpicked the toe of the first one and pulled ...

The final pair of socks on my Q3 FAL list is finished! These are knitted from 85%/15% merino/nylon yarn from Made By Penguins  called 'Solar'  and are incredibly soft - they'll be like wearing clouds on your feet, I imagine!  I bought it as part of a 'lucky dip' from  Made By Penguins  and t he offer is still available:  lucky Dip 100g merino/nylon ;   lucky Dip 20g merino/nylon  (A very good price for very good yarn, especially if you buy four 100g hanks! I'm still tempted to get another set...) This is item 17 from my  Q3 FAL list  and I'll be linking up with the  finishes party  when the time comes. One of the Wooliam gang mice on instagram ran a sunflower competition this summer and Mini Archie et al entered with enthusiasm but were let down by late sowing, late planting out, and fairly useless compost (finding peat-free compost round here is a challenge so I ended up using Lidl's and I'm not that im...

...but I don't know why it's been an odd week so I'm going to blame the clocks going back!  I also don't feel like I've got anything done, so let's see what I can pull out of the hat, eh? I reached a couple of milestones on the blue and white quilt's hand quilting.  Here's Mini Archie helping me celebrate the first one: Three quarters of the way there!!! And here's Archie wondering whether he'll get his tea before I reach the next milestone: I'm sure it's teatime.  Tell me it's teatime.   A while later, after Archie's tea, I hit the milestone! One hundred stars quilted!  (Just 27 to go!) I've even bought the binding fabric, as I had a discount code for Simply Solids and wanted to use it before it ran out.  It arrived yesterday and I think it's going to work well: I'm now aiming to get it finished for either Christmas, or Mam's birthday in early January.  I was doing two stars a day during ...

Hello! (I know, I'm here again!  I can't quite believe it...) This week has been a week of dithering and hand quilting yet more stars.  I've quilted just over two-thirds of the stars on the blue and white quilt, here are the latest two: I started cutting the hexies for my first Christmas cushion, and discovered I was eight hexies short of a cushion (a phrase I'm hoping passes into common usage!): so I set about trying to work out what to put in the gaps, which is where the dithering started.  First of all I removed the plain hexies: which I liked, but something's going to have to go in the gap so I searched through my stash and found some options: and the only thing that helped me decide was that I'd use the stripy fabric for the binding.  (Thanks, Clare !) I thought that laying the hexies over the options might help (that was less fun than you might think!, but it didn't: but it didn't stop me trying again: Still no dec...

The top item on my new FAL list and the project to which I am dedicating all of my 'sewing machine' time (that's any time I'm awake and in the house on an afternoon) and a lot of my 'something to do while I watch telly in the evening' time (I pin blocks/rows while I'm watching telly and then sew when I'm next able to use my sewing machine) is the blue and white nine patch/snowball quilt, started (oh, the shame) in February 2012.  Mam and I hatched the plan (the quilt is for her spare bed) over one of our 'I need a sit down, a pot of tea and a scone' breaks during a visit to Harrogate Quilt Show in September 2011 and most of the fabrics were bought then or spirited from my stash/scrap boxes soon afterwards.  To my shame, this quilt still isn't finished but I'm (finally) getting there! Since I last blogged about this project (almost a year ago!), I've managed to keep the project just about ticking over (have I mentioned that it...