Christmas rush

Aaarrgh...no time for blogging, no time for sewing. Far too much yet to do. Made a couple of blocks yesterday when I should have been doing other things Christmas-related, but couldn't help myself..fabric is just too lovely.

Little sis decided on stars for the block, and this is what we came up with.

I like the scrappier block best, but can't decide whether to go really scrappy and vary the colour placement between the blocks or not.

almost midwinter...

Not many days left now until the solstice. Here today the sky is blue, the sun is shining and it is freezing. The last sunny day was quite some time ago, and now that we do have sunshine again the angle of the light seems really low. (Honestly, we moved 2 degrees further north and I make such a big deal about it!) The chooks have just found their way into the back garden today. This part of the garden has a 6foot high fence around it and I suppose was once ornamental, but since Harvey was new to us and wandered when we first came here, we designated it our 'dog garden'...and as I was gazing through the window admiring the hens this afternoon and wondering when we will get our first eggs, and whether it might be worth putting a light in the henhouse in order to get some sooner, I noticed some of these:

We didn't live here last winter and I don't know what they are. They're too big for snowdrops, but it seems early for daffodils. I'm going to have to keep an eye on them.

And I had a bit of a scout around and found these. They're a different kind.

It's reassuring to know the garden is preparing for spring!

Meanwhile, in the house, there are some preparations for Christmas Feasting. Chiefly in the form of my special 'laughing' mince pies.
These are usually a big hit and - look, one had disappeared while I searched for the camera (wasn't me, honest!). I use my own recipe for mincemeat which includes loads of cherries and pineapple and papaya and coconut (well basically anything remotely suitable that I can find in the baking cupboard) and with spices they taste really christmassy.

Not much sewing going on. I had just about decided on the pattern for the brown quilt, and then Little Sis announced she is coming up early this week, so I will see what she thinks about the options. And I'm hoping to persuade her to sit infront of the sewing machine.

Between hand quilting the green and red quilt, grouting the tiles on the hall floor and decorating for Christmas, there hasn't been much time for new projects in this house. I found some buggy barn scraps to practice paper peicing with. This is The Eyes of March block from Quilters' Cache.


My Chocolat fabric for Little Sis's quilt arrived. I think there's more here than I will need.

Decorating for Christmas was a lot of fun. Since we have been living in limbo for the last two Christmases, and most of our stuff was in storage during that time, I have not seen most of our decorations for a long time. It was so good to take them out of their boxes again, and to go round the new house finding suitable spots for them to spend the holidays. Our lights seem to have been multiplying, too.

We booked a holiday for next month. A while ago DH and I made the decision that January is *the* time of the year for us to holiday. It's all a bit miserable in this country at this time of year - even more so now we are living so far north. Last January we went to Cyprus, and next month we will Cruise The Med. Cruising is a new thing for us, and I will need to plan my projects so I have some hand sewing to take with me.

Someone asked about haggis that I mentioned in a previous post. Haggis, eaten with neeps and tatties, is a traditional scottish delicacy. Tatties are potatoes, and neeps are turnips. In our house we usually have bashed neeps, that means they are mashed and we have them with lashings of butter and black pepper - yum! Haggis, in the olden days, was sheep offal mixed with oats and heavily spiced, enclosed in a sheep's stomach. To cook it you had to boil the whole thing a pan of water for several hours. These days I believe there are restrictions on the cuts of meat that can be included, and it usually comes wrapped in plastic which you can peel off and then microwave the haggis in less than 10 minutes. You can also get vegetarian haggis, full of lentils and beans and very tasty. These days I usually prefer the vegetarian one - here's a photo of one from a famous Edinburgh haggis maker.

When I went up to shut in the hens, I could only find the three chicks (whew, my babies survived one day in the big world!) and the ducks. Esmeralda and her brood were NOWHERE. I looked all over the garden, in the wild bit out the back, in the trees, out on the road...I thought they had flown. And by then it was almost completely dark.

And then I remembered there is no door on the garage we just use for junk. They were in there, roosting on the rafters!!!

That's enough drama for one day!

Well this morning I let the chooks out. Not into their enclosure, but out into the garden. This was always the plan, but I worried over how safe they would be, especially the youngest ones which we bought off ebay as eggs and hatched ourselves, and who have no mother(other than me!). These chicks are three months old now, and Esmeralda's brood are about a month older than that (2 or 3 of them are crowing now), and the ducks about 6 weeks older than them, so I reckoned it is time now that they all faced the world - and the 4 cats. Well three cats really 'cos Toby just sleeps. I have to keep going out to check on them. They're in the orchard just now, looking happy. They can fly. I shouldn't be worried.

Thank you to everyone who had suggestions about my quilting. I think this is going to be a quilting sampler! It's very interesting, as a beginner who hasn't given a quilt more then a passing glance before, to see the effect of placing the quilting different places. In addition to my last post I have now done a block with quilting 1/4inch on one side of each seam, and one with quilting through the middle of each 'log'. This latter is my favourite so far -thank you Libby, I would never have thought of this myself. I know I should, but I don't use a frame or hoop. It takes about half an evening for me to do one block and my fingers are now more numb than sore. But I love stitching the layers together, and I cannot say I think it is a waste of time.

Been spending a lot of time at the Quilter's Cache aswell, thinking about the next quilt. I ordered some more brown fabric. Brown and cream and ?beige - from Moda's Chocolat - and I'm looking for a suitable pattern. I have it narrowed down to one of about twenty five at the moment!

Yesterday DH had a day off work and we went over to the west coast, christmas shopping. We went to Lochinver, and had pies from the famous pieshop for lunch (I had haggis, neeps and tatties and DH had steak & ale, and then apple & blackcurrant. They were very good. And I'm not generally a fan of pies). I love art pottery, and this is what we bought:
I can show the plate 'cos the person getting it doesn't read my blog.


The others are for the house.
I just love the cockerel's tail.
And these have got to be the happiest sheep I've seen (for those who don't know, the hillsides of the scottish highlands are grazed by black faced sheep and the twisting roads are generally unfenced, making for interesting driving especially for tourists!)

My overwhelming memory of yesterday is of a long train journey through darkness.

This is what I brought with me to read. I spent most of the day in Glasgow. I got up at 5.30 - the middle of the night for me - and drove down, then got the train back in the late afternoon to Inverness where DH collected me. Then for a treat we went to Harry Ramsden's for Fish and Chips! It was nice to see little sis - she doesn't work Mondays at the moment. She is just back from a friend's wedding in India, and has been increasing her stash with some beautiful floaty dress fabric that she bought over there. It was generally an excuse to get her stash out and ooh and aah over it. And stroke it a little. There is tweed from Harris (a piece in pink and one in turquoise) and Thai silk (courtesy of the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok a couple of years ago) and now pashmina and some other stuff from India. And fancy buttons and offcuts of sheepskin and more. It's a real eclectic mix, with not so much in the way of cotton. This is an old photo of the silk she brought me back from Thailand. It's very lovely but I don't know what to do with it!

We had time before the train left to pop in to Mandors. We fought our way past the curtain fabric (and a lot of it was really gorgeous) to the craft corner. More oohing and ahhing and "look at this!" "look at this one!" and quite a lot of bolts got pulled. It was a bit frantic 'cos of the train departure, and felt a little like it was getting out of hand, but I think we got there. I don't think she has looked at craft fabrics before! We bought a couple of metres of brown from Moda's A Day in the Country which she really liked - she is very fond of brown at the moment. And a few other half metres of browns and reds. I think I will start to plan a quilt for her.

I decided what to do with the wools I showed earlier, and they are in the washer (for better/ for worse) as I write. Something simple with strips, I am thinking.

Quilting has been in progress on the red and green quilt over the weekend. Still a long way to go though! And sore fingers! I am trying out different styles.

Firstly, I need to say that my quilting stitch itself is a work in progress. And also that I am surprised by how much excess fabric there is, even though I smoothed and pinned the layers carefully. I wonder if I can get rid of this without using a frame.The outline quilting around the star itself I like, but the lines of stitching seemed to get a bit lost as I stitched successive 'echoes' of the star. I was hoping for something more - crisp, but my magic marking pen was SO magic that the line it left was visible for only about 5 minutes before disappearing. The quilting lines ended up being pretty much freehand. So I did the next block with an outline of the star and then something approximating to 'in the ditch'. What do people think?