Design wall

With all my travels I forgot to show you the design wall that was the final part of my dining room-to-studio- project. It was another collaboration with Dad - I specified, he re-designed, he built, he drove it down on his trailer on a special trip after we discovered it was too big for either of our cars (and we don't drive Fiat Puntos!) and I paid for it!

This is the back view of it in his garage. I will photo it in situ soon.

It is foam board in a pine frame, made in two panels each 6 feet by 2.5 feet. The panels bolt togther to give a larger work space but unbolt for easier carrying out to the garage where it will live in storage when not in use. ( In theory - so far it hasn't left the house!) It is covered with needlepunch wadding stapled to the frame.

It has a tiny little red spot on it which I assumed was a bug that met its end in a kamikazi dive into the board. Turned out Dad got a bit close to the staple gun.....

Blog alteration

Quick note - I have altered this bog so that you don't need a google account to comment. I returned home to find a new reader had found the blog, was reading it all the way through and had bothered to send me email comments on it all because she couldn't do it on the blog, not having a google account for her own. (Julie, you are wonderful!) I hadn't realised that I had excluded anyone that way. So, if you have previously been excluded from commenting (a) I am sorry and (b) come on in, all (non - spammers) are welcome!

Back from Tunisia

Ok, call me stupid but I have just returned from Tunisia and, when I booked, I actually believed the average weather charts which said it would be around 34 degrees. It was in fact around 44 - 45 degrees which for me is way too hot to do anything than lie in the shade or dip in the pool. In fact by mid afternoon it was too hot even for that. Fortunately it turned out that in the air-conditioned lounge there was a quilting demonstration each day........
.... so you have no design wall - why not trail threads over someone else's sofa back?! There was one woman from Stafford who kept sidling past having a good look and who is now on her way to her local craft shop because she now knows what to do with the FQ's she kept looking at ('such lovely colours'). The waiters are still trying to figure out what I was doing with a towel and a travel iron on their glass coffee table. And of course, once I got on a roll, I couldn't stop.. here I am at Monsatir airport...


... and again at baggage reclaim in Manchester on a Christmas quilt by now because the flying geese top (sans borders which still need to be bought) got finished on the plane!Because we had booked leg room seats, I had to put my box up in the overhead compartment for landing, but kept some squares and my needle and thread down. For those who constantly ask me how I manage to get so much done I can tell you that one can handsew five and a half seven inch fourpatches in the time between the seat belt signs going on and the plane arriving on stand!

This is a picture of a picture on the landing of our hotel ....( really I told you we did nothing sensible you could take pictures off! Ok we went to the Marina a few times to eat but it was too dark then for piccies!)... because even Dennis said it would make a good quilt. ( I think he is getting the quilting equivalent of Stockholm syndrome).

One final tale - we were in the swimming pool and we over heard some rather small but loud south ('sarth') Londonders trying to work out what 4 feet nine was in meters, presumably in relation to the pool depth markings. Dennis and I just looked at each other becuase (a) he is Mr Calculator Head and is known for blurting out impossible calculations at will without even realising he has done it and (b) because I am a mental arthimatic dunce.

"No, come on," he said, "Even you can do that now. That's a quilting calcualtion. Go on, try."

Now bear in mind that in order to do anything in my head I have to do Carol Vordeman like contortions and break it down into easy stages (Countdown - its a TV programme you don't mind missing if you are not British and don't get that reference!)

So I go, "OK. there's thirty nine inches in a meter. Twelve inches are a foot, so three feet is a meter plus cutting space. So six feet is two meters and that's loads more than four feet nine so the answer is two meters, that's plenty."

I think Dennis finally understands how every time I make a quilt my stash actually grows a bit!

Kaffe Fassett class

When I got the programme for the Festival of Quilts it seemed a natural choice to do a colour workshop with Kaffe Fasset given that I love to work with a whole range of colours.... as long as they are copper, gold, ochre, beige, sand, rust....! Ok. Brown. There is nothing wrong with brown. But I confess to looking at Kaffe's fabrics and hating them but loving his quilts. So, wanting to understand how to get from one to t'other, and be brave enought to have a go, I signed up.

It was a day class based on his Frothy Quilt which was in one of his older books and reappears in his new book Quilts in the Sun. We were told to collect 25 fabrics in 1/4 0r 1/2 meter pieces in two complementary colourways in differing intensities and that we could cut into the required half square triangles before hand to save some time.

So, I was a bit bemused as to how it could take a day to teach us how to assemble tringales. Esecially as we were not even sewing them, just pinning then to a portable design wall ( flannel sheet) to take home. But all became clear.

Firstly it does actually take a long time to pin all those bits to a sheet! However, the class is not about patchwork technique ( although Rowan pattern writer Pauline Smith was on hand for those who needed help with technicalities). It was about colour.

Once we had got some fabric up - as in the picture above- in any order but following the light and dark pattern placement, Kaffe started to prowl and give advice. I found him contemplative, gentle and respectiful in his advice but definate at the same time. When my first pieces were up I stepped back to look at it and he joined me and asked what I saw and what I liked. His advice was that I needed to deepen the colours from my pinks and cobalts - the prints were different but the tones all a bit samey. He suggested taking the blues to purples and the pinks more to the orange of which I already had a flash and had said I liked. When he suggested more vibrant pink I laughed and said that compared to brown I thought my pink was exceedingly bright and he said 'Oh no, I'm talking Barbara Cartland's dresses pink." You can see two sample pieces from Pauline's scrap stash pinned up to the photo above as we experimented a bit with his ideas.

At that stage I got to go shopping with Kaffe down at the Cotton Patch stall in the festival hall proper and I began to add in the five new fabrics I picked. ( I did really pick them - he approved them!) I think you can see from this photo the difference it makes.

After lunch we worked some more and then Kaffe went around the class giving a 'crit' about each quilt - his response to the colours ... here he is saying that mine is ' rich and passionate'!....He was very positive about each quilt and I began to wonder if he could genuinely like every quilt and find only good in it. But then he came to one which was in oranges and greens. He said that this was an example of one that didn't work and that he had been arguing with the maker about it all day but she liked it as it was which was fine. However, he said that he would add in more colours and tones as, although hers was orange and green, it was flat and reading as if it might as well have been black and white. He held just one triangle of pink up against it and the whole class ( except the maker) ooohed and ahhed!

The class cost £65 which I think was expensive but I certainly don't berudge it. I did not get a whole ream of notes as I once did in a Dawn Cameron Dick class - the lessons learned were much more subtle and mostly by doing and being nudged rather than being lectured to. The main lesson I learned was to take my colours a little further round and deeper into the colour wheel than I am used to. It was also interesting to see how the same pattern came out in other people's fabrics - you can see some works in progress above and below..

My lesson was in adding colour - for other people it was taking it out and being willing to cut a little, stick it up on the board fast ( Kaffe's exact words were ' just run it up the bloody flag pole' )so you can see how it works and if necessary scrap it and go to something else.

I have been assembling the blocks today but am now so tired I have starte dto rotate the bocks as I sew which is my warning sign to stop. When eth borders are on I'll show you finished product. But, however it tuirns out I have proof that it has been touched by the master...

Festival of quilts part 1

I am back home after a fantastic four days in a steel hangar in Birmingham. It is too late to blog in detail - tomorrow if you come back I will tell you all about what it was like to do a class with Kaffe Fassett. For now let me just show you what a few books, a CD, several notions and 62.5 folded meters of fabric looks like. (In my defence just before I went to Festival I got my very first commssion. The lady who bought my Leaf Peeper quilt wants the same quilt pattern but in different colours so the very muted tones at the back are for her not my stash!) ......Granted there is a lot of fabrics for my stash, some of which will probably justify their own pictures in due course. But I mean, there is a full three weeks until the next quilt show and I am away for one of those in Tunisia.....wouldn't it be dreadful if I ran out in the meantine ? :)

Festival of quilts

Just to let you know that blog silence is due to the fact that I am at Festival of Quilts for 4 days. I can only blog becuase my friend Lesley and I were discontent with our solid days of quilty stuff and so sprung for the wifi fee so that we could watch The Quilt show online in your room this evening! I have been shopping from Britain (some would say shopping with the GDP of Britain) and photos will follow on my return home.

Paris - part 2

You know your husband loves you when you go to Paris and....


1. He doesn't mind going to the Musee D'Orsay all by hisself becuase you are more interested in seeing the potential quilting designs - I mean, African, Aboriginal and Oceanic art, at the Quay Branly. No photos are allowed in there but this is a picture of the reflection of the museum's panels in the windows of a nearby apartment block.

2. When he finds he can't get into the Musee D'Orsay because there is a two hour queue and it is now two hours before closing he goes instead to Brentano's American bookshop on Avenue L'Opera near the hotel. When he spies a handwritten sign saying that they have a new patchwork room he not only follows the sign but tells you about it on your later return to the hotel. Then, he comes with you to sit while you browse for an hour or so. (They have a very good collection of English specialist books together with some Japanese and a handful of French and German. Also knitting and crochet.)

3. He agrees to translate from French the five back copies of Quiltmania magazine you find on sale there. (I shall be subscribing as I was impressed with the quality of the magazine - it is also available in English, much to his relief.)

4. When, at eleven thirty on the last night you are reading the ads in the said magazine and squeal 'I've found another one' he asks what and doesn't visibly flinch when you say "Quilt shop of course!". He allows you to rearrange your last day's plans, comes with you, leaves you to browse and goes for an espresso at the bar around the corner and arrives back at the precise time you have chosen fabric and need translation. When you say 'Fabric is expensive here' whilst clutching two fat quarters, he tells you to buy a whole meter of each because you will only regret it when you go home without it.

(La Boutique du patchwork is just a few metro stops away from the tourist center of Paris (Rue Saint-Maur, not far from the cemeterty in which Jim Morrison is buried) and is a very good shop with a wide selection of all kinds of fabric including African which of course delighted me. However, fabric is much more expensive in France than here. Turns out they also sell on line.)

5. He is prepared to accept that 'Lets go to Monmartre today' really means lets get off the Metro at Barbes Rochechouart and wander around the African area in the tipping rain and only once says, "Aren't all these wax fabrics the same ones we looked at in Brixton?". (They were plus many more, but more expensive.)

Lest you think that he had a miserable time let me just say that the little boy inside him was very excited to ride the Noddy train through Montmatre ('toot,toot'). That's him leaning out waving!

Paris - part 1

You know you have OQD (Obsessive Quilting Disorder) when you go to Paris and:

1. The first photo you take is of the ceiling in Manchester Airport terminal 2 because it looks like it could inspire an interesting foundation pieced design.

2. You go and look at the quilt shop near Notre Dame on a day when you know it is not open just to make sure it really is there and your addiction will be fulfilled if you just wait until Tuesday.

3. Even when it is still open you hang about the area for another hour and a half ( well how hard is that when the place is full of patisseries?) because the shop opposite that specialises in Native American books and magazines doesn't open until 2pm but has molas in the window. (And inside as it turns out but I decided I'd rather make one than buy one.)

4. You look at the famous window in Notre Dame cathedral and think: Well that's just a very fancy Dresden plate.

5. You sit in the one cafe at the foot of Sacre Cour that has direct views up to the building and take photos not of the iconic church but of the (closed) arts centre off to the right becuase these banners remind you of the molas you now want to make.

6. You scour all the kiosks by every metro station for a French patchwork magazine (partly because your husband made a jesting, throwaway comment along the lines of, 'I bet they don't have quilting magazines in French' and you wanted to prove him wrong and partly because you haven't seen an English one for four days and you really, really want to see some quilty pictures). Only, when you finally find one you have to put it back because it is a translation of a German magazine you already have.

7. Your husband takes you out for a beautiful Sunday lunch at a swish Montparnasse restaurant and you take photos of the floor.

Tune in tomorrow for Part 2!

Fabric mystery solved

Regular readers will remenre the Jinny Beyer fabric saga - the fabric I bought that said English Garden on the selvedge but was actually the Pataognia collection. I have just got this email from the people at the Jinny Beyer shop who have been making enquiries on my behalf:

Dear Helen:
We've found an answer to why the selvage name of the fabric does not reflect all later named collections of the fabric. The selvage on fabrics usually reflects the first name given it by the fabric-making company and is on the printing roll. The expense to re-tool the printing roll for additional colorways, even if in a collection later named by the company is cost prohibitive.We're glad your quilt turned out lovely and was appreciated by the recipients.
Jane

Be warned!!

There will now be another blog break as we head to Paris tomorrow for five days. I have the patchwork shop by Notre Dame on the agenda!

Penrith trip

In my blogging absence I have been up in Penrith for three days quilting and a day at Potfest a festival at Hutton in the field. ( as in pot makers not pot smokers!) I will post on the quilting tomorrow when I have more time, but for today, you MUST visit this site to see AMAZING quilty ceramics! My Mum bought the piece that you click on to get into the site. I made the mistake of taking photos of this piece back to Dennis who was languishing on a sick bed, working on the basis that its going on his wall too. When I went back for it with his agreement, it had gone. Grrr. Next time I just buy. However, I am getting a replica specially made. It was a lovely sunny day for once this wet summer and the show was held in opensided marquees in this beautiful setting:

Brixton fabrics

Here's the Brixton fabric. The pictures show a folded section about 15 inches in length except for the red and green one. That was an off-cut of only three yards - although I paid the same as for 6 yards of the others because it is my favourite! It was hanging on a skirt hanger outside a very sad little fabric shop tucked into a back alley and very close to a butchers selling bits of animal I didn't really recognise. It was hanging there singing 'Buy me, buy me, I am the only pretty thing in this alleyway.' The picture of it shows a span of about one and a half yards. It was draped badly over my sofa so I'm sorry about the distortion. I only have one yard of the maroon ( which I pulled out of a plastic sack of tat in the same sorry little shop.) I am thinking that all this stuff is so cheap it will just be fun to chop it all up and play with how many different ways you can cut the mock Kente cloth to get different looking pieces. Obviously much of it lends itself to fussy cutting ready made rectangle blocks but narrow and wide verticle /horizonal strips will all look very different. What would you do with it?

African fabrics

I can't upload photos to this computer at work in London but I can tell you that I bought 27 yards of fabric yesterday in Brixton. It hadn't occurred to me whn I googled for African textile shops that what I would get was dutch wax print sold only in 6 yard pieces i.e dress size. But at £12 - £15 for those six yards it still had to be done. (For those who can do maths and work out that 27 does not divide by 6 - I did find some off cuts on the market as well!). I have some textured polycotton in black, three cotton wax prints and two mock Kente cloths. Either I use them as backings or I will be using this fabric in my quilts for a very long time to come!

Longarm v domestic machine

You may remember that a fortnight ago I went to use Chris Marriage's long arm machine. It turns out I was lucky because I am the very last 'lady' she is going to take on as someone who can rent her machine like that - and even then it is only if she has a space in her diary. She did it when she first got the machine to make some extra money but now, the good news is that she is busy enough with quilts coming in for her to quilt.

She did my maple leaf quilt and a very good job it was too - I will definately send stuff to her I don't want to quilt myself for time reasons. But do I now crave a long arm machine of my own?

As it happens I spent some of this week quilting a quilt I thought I had already quilted - this African Ladies 1 quilt. I had stitched in some of the ditches but it just wasn't enough and the lady blocks were puffing up. So I echo quilted them. Then the background seemed to want to be stippled. And of course you have to quilt with similar density all over so I decided to treat it as a free motion learning party, assigning certain patterns to certain blocks and changing the color of threads. Then I was left with the black borders which I had intended to bead. But that looked lame so I decided to just 'thread scribble' on them and see what I could come up with. The whole point of this quilt is that it was naive and imprecise so I just had fun.... see the photos throughout ths post. ( Sorry about the fuzzy ones but my battery has just gone!)

It gave me plenty of time to consider whether I preferred longarm or domestic quilting. Here are my thoughts:

Longarm advantages as they appeared to me:

1. No basting - it gets stretched taut on the frame

2. Using a pantogram ( which I did not do) seems to be the best way to get a regular overall pattern without tedious marking. ( I say tedious - I've never marked a whole quilt becuase the very thought of it makes me go to sleep but perhaps its restful and soothing rather than tedious?!)

3. The stitches are perfectly regular.

4. The quilt did not lose its shape in the quilting so there was no need for major blocking session.

Long arm disadvantages:

1. You stand up to do it - for six hours! Achey knees and feet.

2. I was suprised that it didn't go faster. I was only doing stippling and assumed I could wizz right along but I was told that the thread would break If I didn't keep it at slower speed.

3. I was also warned that it didn't like to quilt 'backwards' (by which she meant right to left) very well. In fact it was fine for me but I was told that on occasions it can be tempremental and break the thread.

4. The hardest thing you can do is straight lines which on a domestic is easy peasy. So stitch in the ditch is a major job by all accounts.

5. The machine cost £10,000 and needs a room all of its own.

6 (A minor one this). You don't touch the quilt as you do it so you lose the tactile quality of the quilting process.

All in all my longing for a longarm has waned. My longing for a stitch regulator has increased - for a novice I think my free motion is OK but its not perfect. Of course at present that means the Bernina Aurora 440QE. But for me the disadvantage of that is that it does not have the extra throat space of the Janome Memory craft which ( combined with a large table) has made quilting large quilts no problem at all. I hope to test the Aurora sometime - the School of Stitched Textiles has one on loan- but unless I find it worth its £1000 plus just for the stitch regulator I'm going to stick with practising even free motion and giving Chris business when I want to focus on piecing not quilting or when I want to say I have done the whole quilt myself but need perfectly regular stitches.

No blog tomorrow becuase I am off to Brixton in London to hunt out shops selling African and sari fabrcis. Some are on Electric Avenue as in the Eddie Grant song.

Alice Walker and her Color Purple quilt

This blog started off as a 'column' about writing and swiftly morphed into a quilting site as I found a new passion. I still write but for me quilting is a much less judgmental forum for my creativity. The writing groups I went to inevitabely focused on how to get published and what was wrong with what we had written. Whether your work was 'completed' really depended on its acceptance by an editor.

Of course, I am keen to improve my quilting skills, and will take any class I can get to. However I felt from the very beginning that my quilts were completed when I put the binding on and snuggled on down under them. They have all been admired as they are. I was particularly pleased that I have had nothing but positive comment on the improvsational quilt top I 'threw togther', which conformed to no accepted patterns or formulas ( 'genres' in the writing lexicon) at all. Few shows here are juried and the quilting community offers a supportive, sharing,excited - just- to -be -with -fabric atmosphere in which I feel enabled to produce what I feel beautiful without fear of censorship.

Even with a Masters Degree in Creative Writing, I could never really get a feel for whether my fiction'worked' or not and what that meant anyway. My quilts work if I can hold them up and go 'Look what I made!' and the three layers stay together.

So, the blog may have gone that way, but I am still interested in writing and writers. Which is why I was fascinated by an extract from a book I was reading while I was travelling this week called Communion of the Spirits by Roland Freeman. It was an interview with Alice Walker who, in part, said this about the time when she was writing The Colour Purple.

"... I knew that in order for me to have the kind of meditative depth to the book that I needed, I had to do work with my hands and I asked my mother to suggest a pattern that would be easy and she said that there was nothing easier than the Nine-Patch. You know, you just get some fabric and cut up the pieces into nine blocks and you sew them together and that's it. So I followed her advice and ... in the evenings I worked on the quilt. And as I worked on it the novel formed.

.....This kind of redish or fuscia...black, green and maroon stripes - these are colours that just struck me as colors I needed to give me strength to go on in the work I was doing, so that it felt cheerful and strong and interesting working with those colors. I couldn't have written the Colour Purple working on a brown quilt."

The interviewer told her that Maya Angelou had mentioned that when she was having difficulty writing a book her mother told her,'Take this quilt and go and sit on it and you won't have those problems, it will be all right'. He told Alice that in his family there was a lot of folklore about powers and quilts and asked her what she thought of that. She replied:

" Well... other than to say that I feel just really good and protected and blessed, especially when I am under quilts made by my mother. But my feeling of power... comes from the making. The making of myself. ... The powers partly about grounding yourself in somthing that's humble, something that is- that you can actually see take form through your own effort, and its like seeing that you can change things and create through your own effort and in a way that you can see. This makes you realise that you constantly do that in an unseen way.That is also the way that the world is created.....

.......I feel really connected through the work that I do. Its such a great experience to do this while writing a book, because you know on days when you cannot move in the narrative you can work on your quilt! There are days when the characters don't want to come anyway. They are off doing something else in another world. You have your quilt and you can keep going, and so one faith leads the other - the faith you can continue making this pattern in the quilt restores the faith that you may start moving, that you can continue in the uneseen -which is to draw these characters out of nothing and make them real for someone."

I read that and just had to go and get a copy of the Colour Purple to re-read! There is a picture of Alice with her quilts in the book and I will read imagining her making that quilt. I also cannot remember the significance of the title The Colour Purple but whatever it turns out to be in the text it will now have an added shade ( sorry!) of meaning for me - and now I hope you too.

Advice needed

One of the great things about blogging is the abilty to tap into worldwide knowledge. After reading the comments on my last post I now know how many days are in each month! So can I ask you all two specific questions this month?

First - specialist lighting

As part of my continuing room makeover I am thinking about lighting. My ironing space is in a room with no windows - there was originally one but it was on a wall which was knocked out to create the extension where I now quilt, so the remaining 'library' area is quite gloomy. My sewing space has patio doors behind me and a window to the right but of course at night (and at the moment depsite it being summer, because of rain clouds, frequently during the day) that doesn't help.

I am thinking about specialist lamps. In particular the one above from Ott light and maybe a portable one for hotel rooms. So my questions are:

Is there any difference in quality between The Daylight Company and Ott Lights.

Or indeed is there another company I have missed looking at?

In the case of Ott Lights their bulbs only fit into their lamps which are expensive. Are they worth it?

Does anyone have these long thin ones as shown above ( or similar) and do they shed light over a wider area than just the spotlight type desk lamps?

Which portable ones shed enough light to be worth toting around?

Do you have any other advice?

Secondly - quilt university

I have never done a course with them but I have noticed ( OK yeah, I was surfing when I should have been working again!) that they have a cousre on machine feet which would be very useful to me. However, it kicks off in August when I am barely here. I know some of you have used them - Erica, I know you in particular!

Would I get my monies worth if I downloaded the lessons then did them in my own time or do you really need to be following along at the speed of the lessons to benefit?

I am off now to Stafford and Lancaster for one night each - a trip which involves 4 hotels ( 2 to sleep in 2 to teach in!). So I look forward to your advice on my return.

8 random things

I have been tagged twice to tell you 8 random things about me so here goes:

1. My underwear has to match. I don't just mean colour. It has to be from the same lace.

2. I would like to be Jewish. (in theory at least). I love that it is such a thinking religion. Today I found a blog post that just summed up for me why I love Jewish people and thought so much. It is here at the post for 14th and is basically 36 people (last time I looked) seriously debating the religious and moral consequences of a 7/11 slurpee promotion. How wonderful to have such a structure to live live by... and what a challenge I suspect it would be.

3. I am very bad at wearing socks and shoes in the house, or even at work for that matter. they tend to get kicked off. At home if it is cold I favour the slippers you get at the souk in Marrakech because they don't make my feet all hot and constrained.

4. I have been known to hang around at stage doors waiting for a glimpse of Maureen Lipman. I think she is just wonderful.

5. I should never be left in a room with a bag of Thorntons Butter Tablet. ( A kind of fudge type concoction made of both sugar and condensed milk and not a lot else). I will eat the whole lot until I am sick. It is addictive and I cannot resist it. I come close to the same recation with yoghurt rasins and yoghurt pineapples. Once I had a bag in the car I knew that I shouldn't eat it so I tossed it on to the backseat out of reach. Then spent the whole journey home trying to judge my speed to hit red lights so I could twist round and grope for it.

6. I carry a photo of my maternal grandfather in my purse. He was a career officer in the army at World War Two and lost his leg in Italy when he stood on a land mine. He returned with no money and worked his way up to being Director of Social Services for Cumbria. He died when I was twelve.

7. I don't know how many days there are in every month (I know February but those 30 and 31 day months ... I have no idea.) I know that there is a little rhyme to help you remember but I never learned it and although I always mean to, I never have.

8. I hate to blow up balloons. I am afraid that they will burst in my face.


And as for books, to answer the question on my comments, I bought five all from the AQS series - the books of the winners of the annual competition to use a traditional block in an invovative design. I got a compliation of Ohio Star, Double Wedding Ring and Log cabin, then the single books of Seven Sisters, Bears Paw, Dresden Plate and Rose of Sharon. Five for £47.50 including postage. Not bad.

How to spend without guilt

Ok. Thanks for your comments about, my book buying dilemma. It does seem that some of you have sewn little perforation holes in the part of your brains that house good financial sense. But that's OK because I have found a similar solution.

When I was a kid (I'd guess about 10) my Aunty Andrea said that she had always wanted to give a kid a big box of presents for Christmas and my sister and I were the lucky recipients. Jen's box included a toy box made out of a dustbin covered with fur with a big teddy bear head on the lid. (This was the era of Dusty Bin If you recall that TV programme?) That bear is in my parents house, a bit lop headed and manky of fur, but so loved no-one will throw it out.

He is kept company by a blue and white pot bellied bear called Smug LLoyd ( after a physics teacher at our school also pot bellied and also called Smug Lloyd - at least behind his back). I saw Smug Lloyd ( the bear) in the window of the Sailors Home charity shop in Hull when I was a first year University student. It is a very large bear. I bought it for 50p, rode it home pillion on my bike and, because it was it was filthy, gave it a bath. Of course it soaked up all the water and had to sit on a washing up bowl 'potty' in the corner of my student room 'weeing' water for a fortnight before I could gift it to Jen who loved it becuase it was a bear and because it was the colours of Everton Football Club. Mum loves it because it proves that her 'girls' love each other. (Yes, go ahead and stick your fingers down your throat, if that is your instinct).

But I digress. Since I was older, I got more sophisticated gifts. The ones which lasted were both from a Norfolk Pottery - a cylindrical container I use to keep tubes of handcream and hair straightener in and a brown glazed money box in the shape of a half timbered house. Recently I have taken to putting loose change in the money box to lighten my purse..... you can see where this is going now can't you?!

I raided the piggy bank last night and piled up piles of up copper and silver. I filled money bags worth £45. Yeah!! Totally free, gratis, practically found-in-the-gutter, quilting books! And there is cash left in there for later sprees! Off I go to Amazon....

How to shop without spending...

... or ' How to waste an evening'.

The gift quilt was inspired by a design in a book called 'Feathered Stars: New Quilts from Old favorites' [sic] ( sorry - couldn't resist that dig!) which is a book of winners from the AQS competition. I bought the book very cheap at a closing down discount book store in Lancaster.

I have been thinking about buying the whole series as this is a yearly competition and I have still horded some money I was gifted for Christmas which I like to eke out year round so I get 'free' books!. So I look on AQS to see what they have and convert $ to £ then I have to work out if it is worth joining to get a members discount. But I can't find postage on ther site.

So I check on Amazon.com. They have a wider collection of the older books. So I compare the new price with the marketplace price and convert $ to £.

But why am I buying from the US? Yes sometimes you get a wider choice (and more have the search inside facility on Amazon) but many can be traced here. I look on Amazon.co.uk. Then abebooks.co.uk. Then abebooks.com

I now have far too many prices so I have to make a little chart and work out the cheapest source for each book available.

That done the total comes to £197. Even I know that is bad. I seek counsel from my husband. He says.' That's a lot of quilting money.' That confuses me further because I am spending the money on quilting things so what does that have to do with the price of fish?

Some of the books are very expensive because they are out of print. If I knock out those four, I can get seven for £69 which is £1 less than I have horded and in fact less than cover price. And if my mother-in-law is true to form there will be more book money coming soon. But then, do I need seven at once? I know that I ought to ask that question but in our house we refuse to look at books as something you need. It is a fundamental human right to own books. But it is my birthday on 3rd August which I know will bring books so perhaps I shouldn't get them now especially as I have unread quilting books stashed up.....

I seek further counsel. He says. ' When I want a big spend like that I buy them over a few months so it doesn't feel so bad. But then those ones on marketplace might not be available. And now is the time to buy from the US because of the exchange rate.' Helpful guy my husband.

I decide to sleep on it and consult my comments tomorrow.

Thank you for all your very kind comments about the gift quilt. ( I still need a name for it - suggestions please!) As requested in my comments - more close up pictures now showing the quilting. Chris took one look at my overambitious learn-to-longarm-quilt and sad 'Echo quilting and stippling?"! We graduated to using a ruler for straigh lines which counts as custom quiting if you pay her to do it and I mastered that reasonably well. I then got over confident and attempted feathers which was extremely stupid as I was struggling to draw them on paper never mind by the machine. They are adequate if I am being kind to myself and 'well ropey' if I am not. However, on that basis that it was not that long ago that Mum threw out the Christmas decorations I made at playschool with glitter and egg boxes, I think she will accept it in the spirit it is made without too much criticism. You and I could see all the errors and rough bits but the overall impression is good enough for someone who has been at this quilting lark for a year and a half!

This is Chris and unfortunately a bit of her gardening bag! It was quite windy and the quilt kept swaying about which given that it was cream and trailing on the wet lawn was a bit alarming so I didn't spend time composing the shot!

Here are some details. ( although I think it looks better from a distance!)

I am not sure if you can pick them out but there are some freemotion daisies hidden in this fabric And finally, I could not resist coming home from York today and finishing the 'sister' quilt top, which is going to be tied in due course as it is going to lie anything but flat! Oh, and has loads of shiny polyester in it for good measure. Dennis said he 'liked it, sort of'. Which turned out to mean he was not sure about the blue bars. Looking at the photo now he nmight have a point, but they are in and staying in!

And finallya photoof the two of them together for my records.