Happy Holiday Sewing

It's lovely to be able to spend the day with a friend who also loves sewing!   Usually I have to travel to Jackie in Ireland for this, but Valerie lives just a few miles away, and as we both work at school, we are both on holiday this week! Yippee!

You met Valerie before Christmas when she wanted to make a protective jacket for her sword fighting training, but yesterday she decided it was time to make herself a quilt.

I took her to Helen's: Helen is a lovely lady who has a patchwork shop and workroom in a logcabin in the garden at her home, and is full of ideas and suggestions. We found some lovely jewel coloured dragonflies, and paired them with some green and dark pink solid.

Although Valerie is new to patchworking she knows how to drive a sewing machine, so we moved on a bit from her initial plan of just big squares, and trialed a one patch and four patch idea

it looked good, so we arranged the blocks on the horizontal design wall (ok, my bed)

And then arranged a border of pink / green squares. We liked the arrangement, but wondered if the pink and purple squares were maybe a bit bland?

We have, of course, the technology (with the embroidery machine) to decorate the solid blocks, so Valerie picked up pen and paper and just knocked up a couple of awesome dragonflies and a flower for me to change from a sketch on paper to an embroidery on fabric.

I'm now off to play with the embroidery design software

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