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What would you do with 2 weeks to go until an exhibition? Tackle the jobs that need doing OR suddenly decide that you need to make 12+m of over-the-top bunting to hang across the front of the stand? I had a few blocks left from Rainbow Warliors that I sewed together, some leftover squares that I screen-printed, some sequins and pompoms that I attached to bells nylon thread and then I “had to” make about 20 large pompoms from wool! The resulting bunting echoes the theme of Rainbow Warliors and is fabulous but worryingly heavy. I have visions of ...

I seem to have had a very busy week! I completed the small Warli quilts, added some prairie points then blocked them all ready to be bound. At first I could not figure out how 4 quilts that all started off at 30” x 40” ended up at different sizes until I remembered that the quilting would make a difference, Doh! Hopefully the differences of up to 1” won’t be too obvious when they are hanging.

I had a hexie customer quilt with a too small back so I bought a large, flat sheet and dyed it bright yellow ...

I wish there was a happy medium of summer weather in the UK. England has been sweltering in a heatwave while Scotland has been coolish and grey. I don’t actually like to be hot so my ideal weather would be around 21C, sunny with no wind:) My garden roses look and smell fantastic and I have no idea how they do it. They get hacked back in winter, never get fed or debugged and their soil is poor. I can barely see out of my window because “Geoff Hamilton” is blocking the view. I ...

Having a week without serious commitments is great for cracking on with projects. I heat-pressed the glitter-walris to their squares and made a batch of silver and plain hour-glass blocks. I am quite sure that I have got far more bits and pieces than I need for my 4 small Rainbow Warlior companion quilts;)

I decided that the puff quilt was not going to be a leisurely project and I was determined to get it done. I regretted ignoring advice to under-stuff, as I shoved in clumps of stuffing the size of tennis balls. When it came to quilting in ...

It has been a truly epic week, starting out in Glasgow where Nella and I went to stay with Freya to see a band which cancelled at the last minute. At any rate, we went out for tea, followed by ice cream and stayed the night so Nella could get a train the next day to stay with her lovely cousin in Exeter. This was a huge adventure for her, having not been anywhere unaccompanied since she was about 14. She managed the long journey and had a great week experiencing life as a student, partying, playing bingo and making ...

It was actually a bit of a bonus to discover that my customers were not coming until next week which gave me a whole week to crack on with the Rainbow Warliors. I was fortunate that Nella was perfectly contented to get on with her knitting projects so every spare minute was spent deciding on designs then stitching them out. At the start of a new quilt it is always making the decisions that seem to take longer than the actual sewing. The majority is ruler-work and I was not sure whether to allow myself any freehand areas at all ...

My latest obsession is learning German… I have visited a few times to teach longarm quilting for my friend, Regina Klaus and I know lots of random vocabulary but absolutely no genders or grammar so I cannot have a conversation. I managed a find a tutor who would come to the house and teach Nella and me using the BBC “Talk German” course. We have been most attentive pupils, quite swotty in fact – doing lots of practice and revision in between lessons. In addition, I have become addicted to the Duolingo phone app and have been battling it out online ...

It is amazing what you can achieve in a week where you don’t have to be anywhere in a hurry. I dug out a pop-up design wall, pinned up the Warli blocks and labelled them once I had decided on a random arrangement. The tricky thing was to add side strips in order to get the blocks to fit together since each varied slightly in height and width. After considerable fiddling and fudging I had a quilt top measuring (more or less) 79” square. Yes, it IS another large quilt, especially since I have decided that it will probably ...

I felt like I spent my entire week rushing to fit in meals and appointments, getting unnecessarily stressed by trivia. Despite that, I fitted in 3 simple customer quilts and celebrated my birthday. Even though I was not in India as planned, my girls made it special with lovely cards and gifts. The next day we drove Freya down to St Andrews to begin her final semester of 4th year. It is incredible how quickly her time at Uni has gone. 

It was a relief that Saturday was a day that I did not have to be anywhere and since ...

We have had a week of unusually settled, dry, January weather so I put the Ercol rocking chair outside to try and strip off the rest of the dark wood stain. It was a much more complicated job than I had anticipated with so many fiddly struts and the only thing that really worked was sanding it all off. I used an electric Mouse sander and tried out a lookalike Dremel which was useless. Purists would have done the job by hand to avoid scratching the wood but that would have taken months. I applied a dry paste of Barkeepers ...