A few days to myself!

I have a few days to myself this weekend as TK has gone on a residential trip with his school. I was glad to hear that they had arrived ok as there is a storm coming which only hits these shores every 50 years or so!
They have a wonderful time on these trips doing all kinds of exciting things as well as the fun of being away from home. Its an important step for them. Although its quite emotional seeing the kids leave on their coach, its also a wonderful moment as the rest of the school come out to wave them off on their adventure.
This year we had the fun of an absolute downpour just as the kids were getting on their coach. They of course managed not to get too wet, but pity the poor parents who got absolutely soaked! Still I suspect the kids will get a little wet and muddy over the next few days. I am sooo not looking forward to see his dirty washing when he comes back on Monday!

So while I have these days to myself I have decided to try and be productive. I do try and set myself goals when I am on my own but somehow, as I don't have my usual routine, I manage not to get much done.

Today has been good though!

A few months ago, I worked on a modern quilt design inspired by the tiles in my bathroom.

They are rather styish aren't they?

So I have created a design based on this. Today I re-drew the design on squared paper which is a novelty for me as I ususally draw things out in Quilt Pro. I'm going to put some fabrics together tomorrow and it should be very quick to put together. It will take me a while to quilt it although it is probably only going to be 24" by 30" !!

Talking of quilting, I'm thinking about teaching myself to do FMQ. There are quite a lot of tutorials on the web and like anything practice makes perfect. I just need to get myself a darning foot for my machine. Not sure if I will have any problems getting one though as my machine is probably 20 years old!

Next on my to do list was to work on a design for my red and white fabrics which I blogged about earlier in the year.
I had a eureka kind of moment the other day in the bath and decided I wanted to do a New York Beauty kind of quilt with the fabrics.
So I did a bit of drafting today, both on the pc and actually drawing and have come up with a basic design.
It seems to me that a lot of NYB quilts have lots of different versions of the block in them so I think I will be designing the blocks as I go.
I was so keen to get started as usual and have made the first block already

And yes I know it is all white fabrics!
I want to create a white centre and then gradually introduce the reds. I’m quite excited about it. The arcs are foundation pieced.

 

So all in all it has been a good day today! I was planning on capping it off by doing some quilting but this post has taken me longer to write than it should have done because Blogger is being stupid over the positioning of images and I have transferred over to MS Live Writer.

Let’s hope I be just as productive tomorrow!!