Hi Everyone,

I’m sorry that I seem to have been away so long. It was my plan to have the whole of May to garden but May turned out to be wet windy and cold. I think I managed about three days in all and made very little progress. Then, as it turned to June, the days suddenly became hot and buggy and the garden exploded into huge patches of nettles. I feel rather disheartened as I made nothing like the progress I usually do. I will try again towards the end of the year when the swallows have gone, the weeds begin to die down a bit and the weather is more pleasant to work in.

I have planted around my duck area to make it look pretty and feel more secure but they do tend to trample over everything, so I don’t plant anything precious there.

The cows have become very interested in my ducks lately and spend hours staring at them over the wall. The ducks pretend they haven’t seen them.

The pots in my courtyard are looking good but it takes all morning to water them. I usually keep things in pots until they are fairly large before they are planted or the deer eat them.

What has been really successful is all the cuttings I took of Hydrangeas last year. All of them have survived and are just beginning to flower. I will keep some and give some away to friends.

In the hours that the garden was inhospitable I did quite a bit of spring cleaning and sold some stuff on EBay that I had been wanting to get rid of for a while. And I came across a new and interesting product available for English Paper Piecing that I hope to try out and review, as soon as I can. It’s called Eppiflex, plastic laser cut templates in various shapes that can be used repeatedly without wearing out. They are transparent for precise placing and fussy cutting, bendable yet with edges firm enough for precise folding, whip and ladder stitch friendly, easily removable and heat resistant so you can press over them. They sound amazing. The down side is they are much more expensive than paper pieces (about £12 for a pack of 50) but if you used, for example, 2 inch squares in most of your projects they would probably be worth the investment. Anyway I will give them a try at some point and let you know what I think of them. If you have tried them, please let us know what your verdict is. (Check them out at Sewhot.co.uk or look for the video on Youtube)

I did get a little English Paper Piecing done here and there; not what I had planned to do originally (as usual) but I began a few simple mini quilts that I was in the mood for at the time. Of course they are not finished. I sometimes think it would be better to show you one thing that was finished, rather than a number of things part done, but I always seem to have several things on the go at the same time.

I plan to add more to each of them They are all a bit dull at the moment. The first one is a 8 inch block I am going to call ‘Wishing Star’. I have not decided what I want to do with it but I like the gold against the black.

The second one is a traditional American block called ‘Garden of Eden’, which I thought would be fun to complete with a garden of Eden theme in fabric, hence the leaves and apples. I plan to embroider something in the horizontal yellow bar, a leafy scroll, a couple of small figures, or perhaps a serpent. What do you think?

It’s just sitting on its backing fabric of apples at the moment and is roughly tacked around the edges. Those stitches will disappear later and some hand quilting will make it look more interesting. It also an 8 inch block.

The third mini quilt I began was again a traditional block called ‘Castle Wall’. I thought as we have several castles dotted about Scotland I might add some tartan and enclose a unicorn (our national animal) within the castle walls (I did a previous post called ‘Scotland’s Unicorn’ in January 2019 if you are interested in scrolling back.)

There are navy blue stars beyond the castle walls though you can’t see them very well here. I lived in a castle in Scotland for a year, once. Here is a photo of their courtyard. It’s quite something, isn’t it?

There is more to say about the Castle Wall block so I will come back to it in another post, perhaps when this little unicorn quilt is finished.

Lastly I began a larger quilt of roughly 15 inches square, made from almost a whole Moda charm pack called ‘Once Upon A Chicken’. The strange thing is, though, charm packs don’t seem to have much tonal variety; not this one anyway. You can see how flat this one looks; there is not the depth that you can achieve with light medium and dark fabrics within the same quilt. Perhaps they are designed to be added to, so I could of course replace some of the pieces here with other darker or plainer fabrics but I think I am just going to leave it as it is. I am hoping that some dark brown quilting stitches and binding, and perhaps embroidering the chicken in the centre, will give the whole thing a bit more life. If not, I’ll know what I need to do next time.

It looks strange like this, all the paper pieces fabric wrapped but none of them sewn together.

Since my last post I have added a Contact page to this site (find the link at the top of my Home page) so that you can get in touch with me if you have any general questions about my work orA its availability. I have also added a Paypal button on my Shop page, which is for UK purchases only for the moment. I shall be listing many more products on my Shop page in the coming months. Purchases from abroad are probably better made on my Folksy site. This is all still a work in progress but will get sorted out in due course.

So, till next time….