A little different - Part one:meat

I've been meaning to blog about my shopping habits for a little while now. Not the most exciting of topics I guess, so this will fall under the 'and other stories' part of my blog!

This year, I decided I would make it a New Year's resolution to try to avoid going to the supermarket for my food shopping.

It took me a few weeks to actually put this into action, and then another week or so to pluck up the courage to go into the local (award winning) butchers and buy something and then another week or so to arrange for a vegetable box to be delivered from a local farm shop. I even bought some fish from the market last week.

 

The problem is, I live in a town where the main shop on the high street is a massive Tesco and it's a lovely building.

 

 

And the other problem is having a son there are certain store cupboard type things that I still need to get, like ketchup and baked beans and the cats still need catfood.

So at the moment I am still visiting the supermarket but haven't bought any meat or veg in it for a number of weeks now.
Every little helps as they say?

A few weeks in and it's going reasonably well and in light of the recent meat scandal, it was a wise decision; not that I used to buy many ready meals anyway. However this week, I nearly wavered and didn't feel like walking down the high street to my butchers. But I did and I'm glad I was strong.
I'm starting to feel that if I can educate my son that buying fresh local produce from independent shops is better, it will be something he takes into adulthood with him. It may be an uphill battle though as he asked the other week if we were poor because I wasn't shopping at the supermarket anymore. Interesting thought process going on there!
As a society something has gone wrong somewhere. We are buying processed mass prooduced food and losing the skill of cooking. It's time to draw the line and get back to basics. We have gone too far.
 It would seem I am not the only person trying to live without a supermarket. I'm enjoying reading this blog written by a guy living in Cornwall who is trying to give up using a supermarket for more than just Lent. He admits as he's single it's maybe a bit easier for him to #shoplocal but I have real admiration for this family blogging about doing it too.

Part two will be about my veg experiences,,,,,,,,,,

What I am doing now - Feb

I had a free weekend last weekend..........and used it wisely; well it was Groundhog Day and I was kind of hoping that would mean I would be very productive if I spent the day sewing and had to relive the day over and over again!

 

I managed to make a few more scrappytripalong blocks in my red and white fabrics. I'm just making them as and when. Here are the first four

 

 

 

As I make more I am realising that whilst I thought it would be quite clever to restrict my fabric palette to red and white fabrics, it is also quite limiting and a little bit of me wishes I had continued with making a totally scrappy one like this.

 
I'll keep persevering with the red and whities for now though.

I've been doing a bit of quilting this week on my Kaleidoscope quilt. As this isn't a traditional quilt, each stage of the quilting needs a bit of thinking and every now and then I hit a bit of a brick wall, but then it's a fantastic feeling when I break through that wall. I'm quilting some parallel lines for some background quilting at the moment.

 

The other thing I have been working on the last week or so is a red and white challenge quilt that my mother has issued to my sister and me: to make a quilt 1m square using a bag of red and white fabrics she gave us at Christmas. My first reaction was "oh". I was already making a New York Beauty style red and white quilt, had started the red and white scrappytripalong and really didn't want to make another red and white quilt. Plus I don't have much time for making quilts for me so any time taken out making this challenge quilt was going to be time taken away from my own quilting. So I have compromised, kind of. I've made something quickly by machine but will probably hand quilt it.

It echoes a modern minimalist phase that I am going through at the moment.

 

 

I foundation pieced the fabric strips to ensure they were accurate and straight. Each one is 3/4" wide. They would have been all over the place if I had just pieced them by machine!
I'm thinking about quilting it with cross hatching, possibly in red and white threads. Might experiment with doing the cross hatching vertically in one colour and horizontally in the other.

Seeing as I was working with my red and white prints I made a start on the next block for my NYB quilt, really want to crack on with this now!

 
Linking up with Lily's Quilts Fresh Sewing Day post and Small Blog Meet

It may be cold outside.......

............but it's warm indoors, especially if you have a quilt you are working on!

I should have been doing some more quilting on my Kaleidoscope quilt this week as it is lovely and warm with a wool wadding, but I haven't even got it out! It's been a busy week with a trip to Worcestershire for some photography and of course the snow which has meant son's school has closed early twice this week.

We had snow in the east on Monday. It wasn't too bad, but it has been really cold all week. However the frost on the trees and bushes in the garden has been wonderful

(For some reason wherever I post the last image.....it never gets shown the right way round, even though I have rotated and saved it the right way up!)

Then there was more snow yesterday but worse in the west this time. We maybe got about an inch of snow. It was enough to bring all the birds in the garden, which is pretty cool seeing as we never get birds in our little garden. An especially new visitor was this cute wagtail, who was obviously cold as he kept on lifting one foot off the ground

So what sewing have I done this week? Mainly I've been putting together a sashing row and been joining row C onto my SBS quilt. I really need to find a virtual design wall so that I can insert the images of each block in it. Maybe that will be my task today?!

I have also been sidetracked a little with the scrappy tripalong that is doing the rounds in Blogland, thanks mainly due to Katy at I'm a Ginger Monkey. Katy has a serious addiction to this! The original tutorial is at Quiltville. I have been fairly restrained so far and only made two blocks, but I can hear it calling to me!

The trouble is, I'm also thinking how cool it would look if I cut a strip from each of my red and white prints.........

My plan this weekend is to add the borders to the new layer cake quilt I have been working on........assuming I can resist the lure of the scrappy tripalong.......

Humble

I've been trying to find the time to sit and write a 2012 review for the last few days, having read Lily's Quilts post on 1 January. But so far all I have done is feel very humble and almost inadequate compared to all the other bloggers who have linked their blogs to the post, either for Fresh Sewing Day or the Small Blog Meet.

I only have one FINISHED quilt to show for 2012!

This is it!

My layer cake quilt that I made for British Patchwork & Quilting.

Otherwise all I have made is quilt tops..........plenty of them! And all of them tops to display fabrics, so I'm not particularly attached to any of them.

 

And then I become addicted to pre-cuts using Hoffman Bali Pops, Snaps and Crackers. This one is a really quick one using a pack of 5" squares (Snaps) and a strip pack (Pops), both in Tiramisu. I think I will actually quilt this one!

I have made a couple of other quilt tops using pre-cuts, but they are kind of secret at the moment as I'm thinking about turning them into patterns..............once I have quilted them!!

And that's about it!

As I said........humble is the word x

Still Stitching.......and smiling!

Christmas has been and gone and so has 2012 (nearly). I think I might have said a year ago how hard I find Christmas now that I am on my own, but on the other hand it does make you realise it's all about the children. So you put your misgivings etc to one side and you get together with your families and the kids have a great time opening presents together and the general excitement of the day. Well that's what happened in my family anyway.

 

This past year I have tried to be more productive in my quilt-making and I think that's true to some extent. I definitely make more quilts to display my fabrics, although I never have the time to quilt them.........which reminds me I need to get back to my machine quilting!

 

There is one thing for certain............I have developed an addiction for pre-cuts! I love Bali Pops and now they are available in 5" and 10" squares too there are even more design possibilites. The hardest part is actually opening the packet and even now it takes me a while to do it, but I have played with all of them this year and am thinking I might turn my designs into patterns...........once I have quilted the quilts I've made of course!

 

So what does 2013 hold? I think I need to concentrate on using my time more productively (ie stay off Facebook etc) and work on my own quilts as well as display quilts.

Getting ahead of myself, I've already picked up the Sylvia's Bridal Sampler quilts again and have almost completed row C on both quilts, I have a couple of red and white quilts to make and then there is my Kaleidoscope quilt that I need to keep working on.

 

Wow that sounds a lot already!!

 

Best get on with it then............

Free Motion Project Quiltalong

So here it is! My first attempt at free motion quilting.

I am following the Free Motion Quilting Project Quiltalong, just to give me some tips and guidance. This was created by Leah Day who originally started her blog to design a different type of free motion filler quilting for every day of the year; the Free Motion Quilting Project.
You can visit her blog here. It’s such a useful tool!
I've watched the first couple of videos and am running a little before I can walk by combining the two at the same time.....

As I started, it was a bit jagged and my stitches very short as I had trouble moving the quilt sandwich around. Started to wish I had waited and bought some grippy gloves or something. I was having problems even doing the simple 'U' shapes......

It all looks rather amateurish doesn't it? But hey everyone has to start somewhere!

The next image is of me jumping ahead a bit adding a few extra wiggles before I was any good at doing the basic U's.

I reached the bottom of my ‘quilt’ at this point. So started again at the top practising some simple U’s which were a bit better this time.

This last picture shows me being a bit more adventurous again before I was ready, but I think I can already see some progress!

I was able to move the quilt around a lot better at this stage too. I’ve put my little 1” x 6” ruler in the images so you can see the scale of  the quilting.

I have taken a break as I finished stitching the fabric square I had sandwiched together and thought I would do a quick blog post before going to get some more calico.
I’ve kept my pieces quite small not only to keep them manageable but also because I am using up some wadding scraps. The wadding is Hobbs Polydown which is a 2oz wadding. I will also play around with some thinner wadding like Hobbs 80/20.

The main thing, as Leah says, is to practice as practice makes perfect!

Here we go again......

Wow! How can it be that over two months have gone by since I last wrote a blog post? I really am going to have to try harder! It's not like they have to be long mega essays after all is it?

I have actually done very little sewing recently. I do actually intend to do some hand sewing every evening but somehow I manage to fritter away what free time I have without even holding a needle. Even if I try not to touch that big time sucker, aka my computer, I seem to be catching up on twitter on my phone instead.
I do like twitter at the moment though!

I have been playing with the new Bali Pops, Crackers and Snaps that I had in stock. One quilt top I want to keep under wraps a little as I might turn it into a pattern, I made that from an old Pop pack.

The other quilt I have created is so basic and likely already to have been made before so I don't mind sharing that, although most of the images for it are on my phone, so I have pinched one from there for now.

 

It's made with one Tiramisu Pop and one Tiramisu Snap which is a 5" square pack. When I made the quilt I used the left over Pop strips in the borders and thought I had enough bits left to mitre the corners......... but I didn't so I had to unpick one mega long seam and insert a couple more border bits and redo the border.
I was right to do so though and it would have bugged me if I had done straight border corners!

 

Ages ago I promised a picture of my completed layer cake quilt that I was making for the magazine. It was featured in the Sept 2012 issue and was also on the front cover. So here it is!

 

 

And I'm really excited to see it's being used in the publicity for the new Uttoxeter quilt show, the British Quilt & Stitch Village!