A little spotty and dotty

Just a quick peek before it goes to a new home.

This quilt that I started quite a few years ago is finally finished.

I will show you a proper photo in a couple of weeks time, when it is unfolded and given to a special person, but until then......sshh....not a word .
That special person could see and then the surprise would be spoilt !


Patchwork is starting to take on a bit of a resurgance in my life lately, not that it ever really disappeared, and I do love hand piecing.


This is part of a star that forms a large hexagon.
I have made the stars before using the English Paper Piecing method, but this time I thought I would hand piece using Sarah's example


from Material Obsession 2.

I love her bright quilt with the spots and stripes she has used and it has been fun collecting all the spots and and dots I can lay my hands on !

Happiness is ....

I have been appreciating the simple things in life lately...............health, family, friends and loved ones, music...and more music, flowers, mountains, gardens, trees, news of good things happening, the sea, books, art...and of course I could go on and on. I am sure you can all think of a few things yourselves.

An old friend and I were driving home from the funeral of a mutual friend.

Our friend was our age and she had a beautiful family and home, a wonderful busy, joy filled life that she lived to the full, and she was killed in an instant on a quiet stretch of road in the country on a sunny friday afternoon in a horrific car accident.

We were reminded once again how utterly precious life is, and our relationships too.

I had a quiet day to reflect and I finished my jumper.

Nearly There

Two or three more hours and this could be finished, but with all the wonderful spring activity

happening outside in the garden, I am waiting for a quiet evening to knit the last little bit.

The tulips and other spring flowers are here for such a short time that I find myself outside with the intention of just wandering around admiring the blooms, but instead

I have a trowel in my hand and am running from one spot to the other with buckets of mulch, packets of seed, and a huge weeding bag.

Yesterday I had visitors coming over for supper, and I was in the garden thinking I will just do this little bit and then go inside, but changed my mind, and was down amongst the veges planting runner bean seeds when the sun went down,

and it didn't matter at all !

Patchwork and Picnics

Spring has now officially arrived, and I am thinking about picnics and spending time lounging about outside. I have been invited to share another stall very soon and decided to make some patchwork picnic blankets.

This was the first one . I backed it with a cotton fabric and then realised that it wasn't thick enough for a picnic blanket, so decided it would be much nicer as a summer tablecloth.

I sewed a soft fleecy backing on the next one.

Then rolled it up into a little bundle and added some elastic and a button, and now it has become something that is easy to throw onto the back seat of a car, or in the basket of a push bike...

voila...picnic time !

I think I might use one to lie under this tree, and gaze at the sky studded with a mass of blossom that reminds me of confetti .

Soulful notes

Long hours of rehearsing every night now until Saturday night when we are having another concert.

This one is our Young Musicians Concerto Concert and each night we are accompanying some very talented young players. My favourite is a young man .......Harry who is playing the Vieuxtemps Violin Concerto No.5, he looks about 12 yrs old, but is perhaps 13 or 14, I shall have to ask him tonight. He loves this concerto with a passion and plays it beautifully even though he is driving our conductor mad with his unexpected change of tempo throughout. I think what I like about him the most is his absolute ownership of the music and his confidence.

Henri Vieuxtemps is a Belgian composer, his parents were a weaver and an amateur violinist and his music gets to your very soul.

We once visited Belgium very briefly, and I had to hunt very carefully through lots of old photos to find this one taken in Antwerp ( I think.......umm I am now wondering if it is in Holland ? We were in both countries on the same day !)

Our orchestral leader told us the sad tale of Vieuxtemp's demise. After his stroke in 1879, he went to visit his daughter and son-in -law in Algeria and was walking down the street when he was knocked down by a brick-wielding drunkard in 1881, and died.

Anyway I thought you might like to hear a very old recording of the concerto. A young Leila Josefowicz playing in 1990.

Water Colour Flowers and Fibre

My friend Jo came to visit me the other day bringing with her a little plastic bag of a few dark purple pansy flowers that she had put into her freezer...turning them into ice flowers.

She showed me how to put the petals into a little muslin bag and then dipping the bag into a jar of warm water and squeezing the iced flowers gently until their purple colour is released into the water.

This process produced a beautiful result...bright inky purple dye.

I quickly unwound a couple of balls of wool...one was a white ball of kidsilk haze that I had left over from a baby shawl. I poured the water from the jar into two plastic containers adding a few drops of white vinegar to one and then adding a tiny amount of strained woodash to the other, and the water in each container changed colour immediately.

I immersed the wool into the containers and left them overnight to soak up the dye...and this is what I had the next day.

The green kidsilk haze was from the container with the tiny amount of woodash and the lavender was from the container with the vinegar.

Jo and I had both learnt to do this from the Eco Colour Workshop that we attended a few months ago, with India Flint. Jo has been regularly honing her skills and experimenting with colour and different plants and producing some wonderful results especially with lengths of silks.

I have not been so productive, but am well and truly hooked now, especially with all this Spring growth in the garden.

There was a storm yesterday and rain poured down continuously. It was the perfect day for creating lots of steamy, smelly dyepots. Jo arrived with a stove top, large dyepots and stirring spoons and I went outside and collected a mix of diffferent plants from the garden. I chose wallflowers, buddlia, red silverbeet and oxalis flowers (of which I had plenty...how pleased I was that I hadn't weeded them all away last week.)

So we cooked up a marvellous brew and these are what I have to show today.

I have a pillowcase stuffed full of three and four ply baby wool, all in typical baby wool colours...you know don't you...aqua, lemon, pink and blue and white and I am going to redye all of them using these plant dyes.

Cheerio for now, I am off to stock up on purple pansy seeds !

A lovely diversion

I always look forward to receiving Interweave Knits in my letterbox, and on Saturday morning when it arrived I knew what I had to do.

Sort through my stash and see if I could find a substitute yarn to make this;

I LOVE it, and didn't have to battle too long with my sensible self, who said in a very little voice "but what about all the other knitting that you haven't finished"."Ha , yes, what about that then ?"

No, my naughty, spur of the moment self decided to cast on as soon as possible.


I am using a 4ply soft Alpaca yarn instead of the yarn specified in the pattern, Road to China light,
which is a blend of alpaca, cashmere, camel and silk and far and away out of my price range.

The Inca wool comes from the trip I made to Norway last year, when I stood in a shop in Oslo as it was about to close, and randomly chose a few balls of my favorite colours. I shall use that as the fair isle pattern on the yoke, and for the main colour I had some 4 ply alpaca from a local shop here.

So, this sweater has been my very lovely diversion this week, but I shall share some pics of the Spring surprises also.

Hyacinths, and our beautiful plum tree.

I also enjoyed listening to Kathryn Williams and Neill MacColl, and this Come With Me is my favourite. Their CD Two is beautiful...take a listen and have yourself a lovely diversion today !