Oh! Phew! Unpicking lots of seams takes lots of time 😉 In my previous blog post I shared my very silly decision not to label each of the 36 blocks before putting together my latest version of Dashing Stars. Having made one poor decision I followed it up with an even more misguided one: I choose to leave the blocks I’d misplaced in the first couple of rows and just rearranged others in lower rows thinking it would work out OK! Well! It didn’t! The inevitable marathon of unpicking followed (not so much a marathon as a endurance race with stages as it took several sessions over several days to undo all those pesky stitches!).
Anyway the blocks finally went back up on the design wall. I used my original photograph to guide me as I pinned a label to each and every block AND then, and only then, did I stitch them all together!
I have a piece of extra wide backing along with a piece of 100% cotton wadding cut to size ready to embark on basting and quilting.
Thankfully making blocks for the #scrappytripalong2019 continues to put me back in my happy-sewing frame of mind. I am so enjoying making a couple of these blocks just as and when the inclination takes me. There are six more tube sets to cut and stitch before all 24 blocks are complete and I can put the quilt top together. Here are the latest blocks and the waiting strip sets.
And finally, as it’s World Book Day it seems very appropriate to share some photos of Bateman’s, the home of Rudyard Kipling and his family from 1902 to 1939. We visited the house on Monday with my M-I-L and had a very pleasant time. The house is old as you can see by the date, 1634, carved into the stonework above the front door.
Despite the stone doorways and wood paneled rooms the house did feel homely. The rooms were relatively small (definitely not on a grand stately home scale) with large fireplaces giving the whole place the feel of a family home designed for comfortable living rather than for making a ‘wealth and power’ statement to visitors. Kipling described the house as ‘a good and peaceable place’.
March has arrived with a series of storms and squally showers so we didn’t get much of a chance to walk around the gardens. I was fascinated by the lichen growing on the elderly apple trees. The Hellebores provided a delicate spot of colour.
Linking with Lorna for Let’s Bee Social and Kelly at My Quilt Infatuation for Needle and Thread Thursday (Kelly has been making some mini-quilts from scraps and machine quilting them).
Allison
Your churn dash quilt is so cute!
Thank you! It is a design by Viv Poon of Purple Stitches 🙂