24th June 2009

Wow. what an exciting start to the day. Postman called at 7.15 am with a USA parcel from my Spring Mini quilt swap. Not only is the quilt wonderful and the machine quilting brilliant, there was also chocolate and FQ's enclosed. Thank you so much Maya.. I love it.

On the left are the 9 completed Baltimore blocks [ from Fatcat patterns]. It has been a struggle to get the machine applique done, but at last they are ready for the next step.. not sure what that is going to be yet!

Holiday in Scotland

Just back from two weeks holiday in Scotland where I tried to find time to make a USA paper pieced star each day. I actually managed to make 11 stars [see photo] of the 30 I eventually want to make. They are from Carol Doak's book 50 Fabulous Paper-Pieced Stars.

Most of my time was taken up watching dolphins from the lounge window, I had never seen them in the wild around the coast of Great Britain and three days I managed to watch them. Plus grey seals were lolling about on the beach near our hired cottage. An added treat was seeing an Osprey flying over the Spey River estuary.

A visit to two patchwork shops meant my stash busting is not doing too well this month!

Back home I have 1078 emails in my in box! so a lot have been deleted or I will never catch up!

Four projects worked on in May / June

Playing catch up with my blog.

I am working on my Baltimore blocks, machine quilting them, 5 completed and 4 partially done.. really want to get them ready to join together.

The chicken pincushion was my swap and went with a length of liberty fabric to Polly auntpollysporch.blogspot.com.

The snails trail quilt was finally backed, quilted and the binding sewn on.. another UFO bites the dust!

Final photo is of the June lottery block sent to Carol Doak's yahoo group..
Talking of Carol Doak, I have started to plan making a 30 star paper pieced quilt from her book. At the moment I have the patterns printed and some of the fabric cut out.. watch this space.