I’ve been very busy recently. My copywriting business has suddenly become busy again – always good for the bank balance – and I’ve been ploughing on with the Kaffe knitting as well as designing a new quilt and putting it together. What’s more the postie’s been busy too.

Yesterday he brought the last part of my Hancock’s order – three lovely Kaffe threads, gorgeous colours, and a lovely Kaffe shirt stripe. Those threads look too lovely to use.

Then the postie came today with a Snoopy Postal Bag (I’ve never seen one of those before!), and inside were thousands of tiny quilt pins and this fantastic doodah for closing them.

Thank you Sylvia! My dear friend traipsed half of NY state looking for these for me and I’m very grateful.

A New Quilt Design

Here’s a photo of my half completed new quilt design. I’m planning on machine quilting and then embellishing with Sulky Blendables large stitch hand quilting afterwards.

Mr Tiggy “helped” me lay it all out but in the end the room wasn’t big enough for both the quilt and Tiggy so one of them had to go! He wasn’t happy at being evicted from the sewing room as you can see.

Do you FMQ? I’ve tried it but haven’t practised enough. You may recall that a while back I took Deborah Louie’s Machine Quilting Classes but I haven’t really done much since then.I have done a few Stitch in the Ditchers and Straight Liners but no FMQ.

I recently found the Craftsy Website and they had a special on and so I purchased their Free Motion Quilting and More Video classes. While the teacher seems a little distracted and could do with putting her thought in order before she films, I have found it reasonably helpful. I’m half way through and I really like the video platform. You can take notes on the page during the video and when you do it stops the video and bookmarks the place so you can revisit it. Very clever!

How about some FREE FMQ?

The Quilt Show has offered everyone free access to their FMQ videos for Super Bowl Sunday so here’s the link. These lessons also include instructions for spray basting on a wall. Enjoy!

Here’s where I got up to with my knitting before the wrist problem. It’s the tunic from Kaffe Fassett’s Glorious Knitting Book using Noro Kureyon yarn. My wrist feels much better after many days of no handwork so I might just test it out today and see how I go.

I’ve hurt my wrist from mouse-overuse! So I can’t knit or hand sew at the moment. The good news is it’s getting better and hopefully I’ll be back with more interesting things to show you soon.

Last weekend we ventured into Newtown and found a lovely new coffee shop at 413 King Street, called A Coffee & A Yarn. Great coffee, friendly service and some lovely knitting yarns. I especially liked the mulberry silk. And if you haven’t brought your own knitting and you’re just itching to knit a row or two then needles and yarn are provided on every table.

I’ll have to take my own knitting next time. I’ve undone two attempts at a designing a multicoloured Noro Kureyon jumper and now I’m sticking to a tried and true Kaffe Fasset Tunic pattern. I’ll try to take a photo soon to show you.