At Easter I went to Tekapo in the middle of the South Island of New Zealand.  The mountains and lakes are amazing there and the weather was beautiful.  The place we stayed at had great views and a big deck off the lounge.   I took some quilting along because our Capital Quilters exhibtion is fast approaching and I'm not ready!! I still have two quilts in progress and this is one of them.  It's the Trip Around the World that I started in January.  You can read more about it here.   It's quite a bit colder in the South Island than the North Island and ..read more

I'm busy finishing three new quilts for our Capital Quilters exhibition in May. Plus I want to enter at least one of the challenges.  So I'm quilting every day but I can't show you any of that just yet.  However, in the evenings when I collapse into my chair I pick up my cross stitch and I've made good progress on Shades of Indigo by Nicole of Northern Expressions Needlework.  There's just one more border to go now. Of course mine isn't stitched with indigo threads.  I've chosen my favourite greens and blues.  The problem is that when you deviate from the pattern ..read more

You probably thought you'd never see this day, but my Pandemic Sampler is fully finished and ready for framing!! I had most of it finished in April 2022 (almost two years ago), but I still had all the back stitching to do, plus my initials - which were the real sticking point.  The back stitch took about a week of stitching just in the evenings.  The pattern is 20 pages of A4 paper so there was a fair bit to work through.  My initials were an issue because "W"s are wide and I had to figure out how to fit them in.  In the end I came up with a dainty, subtle solution th ..read more

I've got exciting news to share.  Capital Quilters are having an exhibition in May 2024 in Lower Hutt.  It's going to be on Saturday 11 May and Sunday 12 May which is also Mothers' Day.  Wouldn't be lovely to take your mum to a quilt show on Mothers' Day? You can look at the quilts together and then stop in at the on-site cafe for a bite to eat.  Of course we're going to have merchants too so you'll have to allow time for shopping too.   The Lower Hutt Events Centre is the lovely modern facility where we've held our exhibition twice before, and where the Symposi ..read more

Hello!!  I'm back and I've got a finished top to show you.   I'm calling it Stone Flower because the fabric in the centre is the Stone Flower wide back by Kaffe Fassett Collective. Here's how it evolved over a short period of time back in April 2023. Another wide back by Kaffe Fassett Collective mixed in with Cactus Flower in blue I took elements of the Blue Square Dance pattern from Kaffe's Quilts in the Cotswolds book and used them to expand on my fussy cut Stone Flower centre piece.  But I stopped when I got to the final border because I ..read more

I'm just back from a lovely family holiday in Nelson.  It's such a pretty place with beautiful beaches and bays. We stayed in an Airbnb overlooking Tasman Bay and I loved watching the ebb and flow of the tide and the sea changing colour throughout the day.  I did take some hand sewing with me, but it's hard to get going when you're away from home and the seating doesn't match your ideal setup at home.  Also - I kept getting distracted by the action on the water.  We saw standup paddle boarders, kayakers, people learning to sail little P class yachts, kite surfers, wind ..read more

Happy New Year everyone.  No sooner had I dropped my mum and dad at the airport on 27 December than I started getting inspired on Instagram.  Often I will start a Christmas themed cross stitch between Christmas and New Year, but this year I started a Christmas quilt and I had the whole top pieced in just seven days.   I was inspired by this photo on Instagram: But I used the brighter colours from this Christmas gift bag: The photo I liked was by Edyta Sitar so I used her Laundry Basket Quilts PDF pattern for a Trip Around the World quilt.  I watched he ..read more

Well, it's almost the end of 2023 and it's time to look back at what I've achieved this year.   My biggest achievement this year was my 5 week trip to Europe.  I loved every moment of it, but it did mean that I didn't make as many quilts as usual.   That's OK because my goals for 2023 were to: finish what I'd already started use what I already had I think I did quite well on both of those goals. Here's what I made in 2023. 1.  Good Fortune - Bonnie Hunter Mystery quilt from 2018 2.  Kaffe Fassett Hand Quilted Sampler 3.  Dear John - Jen Kingw ..read more

I can hardly believe this, but I started this blog 10 years ago today.  Here's a link back to my very first post.   I started my blog because my friends and relatives had told me that they really looked forward to receiving my Christmas letter and seeing photos of the things that I had made during the year.  And also because I wanted to keep a personal record of what I had made.   Some pears I finished last week I've made 689 blog posts since 16 December 2013 - that's at least one a week, every week for 10 years!! Five years ago today I started the Peaco ..read more

Do you like the Christmas Stocking I made? A few months ago a family member asked if I would make a Christmas stocking for her baby.  It's baby's first Christmas so of course she needed a stocking.   I spotted this very cute fabric by Mia Charro for Free Spirit Fabrics so I bought it and proceeded to quilt it with my walking foot.  Then I cut out the stocking shapes and bound it using my Patterns byAnnie instructions. I do like the red striped binding - it finishes it off perfectly.   After two long weeks the parcel has finally arrived in Australia ..read more